PREMISE
Best friends Becky and Hunter find themselves at the top of a 2,000-foot radio tower.
THE GOOD STUFF
CGI & CINEMATOGRAPHY- This movie does its absolute best to trigger and inspire acrophobia with CGI and IMAX shot camera effects, and I got to give it to him.. this film delivers on what it sells. Being an acrophobic myself, I at times literally had to turn away from the screen.
Grace Caroline Currey– I’m not the one to sit here and say it’s a great performance by Currey, but it is a very valiant one. It’s a performance combined with the aforementioned CGI and camera effects…. tries to make chicken salad out of chicken feathers.
But alas, there was indeed a great bulk of chicken feathers.
THE BAD STUFF
BAD LIFE CHOICES- The key element to the greatest survival flicks (all is lost, the martian, gravity, cast away) has a main character that is a victim of circumstance. To do the opposite of this is quite jarring.
Whenever things got really bad for the characters in this movie, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think that these characters CHOSE to put themselves here, in the middle of nowhere, 2,000 ft in the air, with an overwhelming number of red flags in front of their faces along the way warning them no to do silly s***.
FEATS OF ARM STRENGTH- I’m not a rock climber. Therefore, I have no idea how much arm strength one must have to participate in that sport. However, one can’t help but notice while watching this movie that there are multiple instances throughout the second and third acts of this film in which grown women are technically deadlifting the weight of other grown women while hunched up on a small platform at a high altitude.
You don’t want to be that guy who points out little things like this for lack of realism, but it’s impossible not to notice when it happens repeatedly.
THE UGLY STUFF
DIALOGUE- On-the-nose dialogue is defined by characters saying lines of dialogue that either state the obvious info that the viewer or the characters already know or communicates what the characters are thinking with little to no subtlety or subtext. With no hyperbole, I would say that this film uses on the nose dialogue more than any film I’ve seen in 2022.
A major twist happens in the first part of the third act of this film, and from there, ALL dialogue is 100% on the nose. ATROCIOUS.
MUSIC CUES- Sometimes, you just gotta let what’s on-screen provide the tension. Audiences can figure things out for themselves. They do not need lingering and obvious musical cues to indicate when something crazy is about to happen or if the scene is supposed to be dramatic or comedic. The musical cues jump ahead of the moments themselves, and the crowd I watched this with couldn’t help but laugh alongside me when it became egregious.
EDITING OF THE F-BOMBS- Fun fact: this was a rated R movie once upon a time.
However, In the effort to make it a more commercially viable PG-13 rating, the studio paid a company to deep fake the actual actors’ faces to say words that are not f-bombs, which is really odd. The s-bomb appears quite frequently, the GD bomb gets dropped once or twice, SOB is not only said several times (in full) but, in one instance, said multiple times in a row. But for some reason, when things get dangerous and life-threatening, these characters use every other verb starting with the letter f to convey frustration in situations that would cause elementary school students to consistently drop f-bombs with the utmost justification.
***************
Fall is a movie that nails its camera work and CGI so effectively that it would have been recommendable viewing had it simply been mediocre in every other aspect of its storytelling.
However, this film seems to go out of its way to be a spectacular failure on almost every single other level.
