MOVIE REVIEW : Close Encounter of the Ersatz Kind

“Fire in the Sky,” a UFO movie, doesn’t fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill.

The opening, at least, is peppy. A clearing in a nighttime forest slowly brightens as the credits roll. Then the scene shifts abruptly to a pick-up truck charging wildly along the dirt roads before screeching to a halt in front of the local saloon. Its occupants--four loggers--straggle zombie-like inside. They’ve just witnessed a spectacularly horrific event: One of their mates has been zapped by a flying saucer.

It’s a motley bunch. Mike (Robert Patrick) is a good ol’ boy with problems supporting his wife and two snugly daughters. Bobby (Bradley Gregg) wears a cowboy hat most of the time and has a Cantinflas mustache. David (Peter Berg) has wire-rims and goes to church. Allan (Craig Sheffer) is a bully with a headband and a police rap sheet. Greg (Henry Thomas) is callow and fearful. (Thomas, the child star of “E.T.,” has seen better days with aliens.) The missing abductee, Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney)--who claimed this experience in 1975 and subsequently wrote a book about it--is Mike’s best friend and his sister’s boyfriend.

Travis is portrayed as a Huck Finn-type sport. In his pre-abduction mode, he scoots through his hometown of Snowflake, Ariz., on his motorbike without a care in the world. He scampers up the side of Mike’s house to regale his paramour at her window with a package of doughnuts before proposing marriage. He’s such a rambunctious all-American kid that it’s clear something bad is in store for him. The aliens, you see, aren’t abducting just anybody . They’re airlifting America’s finest.

Director Robert Lieberman and screenwriter Tracy Torme lay out the long, dull, predictable scenario. The loggers are widely ridiculed as liars. The grandfatherly local sheriff (Noble Willingham, out Brimley-ing Wilford Brimley) and a skeptical police investigator (James Garner, hyper-relaxed) pursue clues and order up lie-detector tests. Clean-cut UFO-ologists show up and hand out their calling cards. Media hordes descend. (Why, we are made to feel, can’t the aliens abduct a few of these pesky camera-toting jerks?) When Travis, naked and traumatized, turns up after five unaccounted-for days, the focus of the investigation switches from murder to hoax.

Since we see the initial UFO contact through the eyes of all five loggers, there doesn’t seem to be much room in this movie for the possibility that these guys made it all up, or that the whole thing is one big mass hallucination. When, after what seems like an eternity, the big moment comes and we relive Travis’ experiences aboard the mother ship, the results are disappointingly goopy. He awakens in a bed of membranous glop and then works his way through the fuselage, which looks like a gigantic elevator shaft, into the operating room. There, the aliens--who look like snoutless, bug-eyed pencil erasers--are waiting for him with their probes and sensors. It’s an icky outing.

There isn’t much in the way of hard evidence in this movie (rated R for sci-fi violence). Travis doesn’t swipe the captain’s log or come back spouting Martian Urdu. Once he unloads his phenomenological baggage it’s not long before he’s his old sporty self again and then the movie ends. We never get inside Travis’ terror--the aliens do a much better job of probing him than the filmmakers do. And there’s a sneaky condescension at work in “Fire in the Sky.” Even though the film takes the side of the loggers, the implication is unavoidable: These guys are such rubes that they must be telling the truth.

‘Fire in the Sky’

D.B. Sweeney: Travis Walton

Robert Patrick: Mike Rogers

James Garner: Frank Watters

Peter Berg: David Whitlock

A Paramount Pictures presentation of a Joe Wizan/Todd Black production. Director Robert Lieberman. Producers Wizan and Black. Executive producer Wolfgang Glattes. Screenplay Tracy Torme, based on the book “The Walton Experience” by Travis Walton. Cinematographer Bill Pope. Editor Steve Mirkovich. Costumes Joe I. Tompkins. Music Mark Isham. Production design Laurence Bennett. Art director Mark W. Mansbridge. Set decorator Daniel L. May. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (violence).