Without Warning (1994)

directed by Robert Iscove

USA

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I started to watch a video review of this the night before and found the concept of it so interesting that I actually paused it and decided to come back to it after I'd had time to watch the movie. It sounded familiar and I thought I'd probably seen it already way back in the shadowy recesses of time (2015 or '16, maybe) but it turns out I had not. While I did enjoy this movie, I had the opposite opinion of the reviewer (it was ZaGorudan, shoutout to ZaGorudan) in almost every respect.

So this was a CBS made-for-TV movie intended to pay homage to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds incident, in which a broadcast of a story about alien invasion caused real panic among listeners who didn't realize that it was fiction. The version I watched had the warnings cut off, but during its original broadcast, there were a multitude of bumpers and onscreen text crawls telling you in no uncertain terms that WHAT YOU ARE SEEING IS FICTION. Despite this, there were still, apparently, people who bought into it. This was probably due in large part to the fact that some real newscasters were part of the film: this is a tad before my time, but Sander Vanocur, Bree Walker, and the majority of the correspondents were played by actual reporters, working or retired. However, the rest of the cast is made up of (at times fairly recognizable) actors, which can take you out of the immersion if that's important to you when going into this film. (Or maybe you prefer to headcanon that everything is Q's fault.)

This works far better as a movie than as a movie that is asking you to pretend it's real. One of the ways in which the film gently reminders its viewers that it is fictional is with its pacing: events take place over the span of several hours, and this is mentioned within the dialogue, and yet the film is presented to us uncut save for commercial breaks, leading to a disparity between the stated time elapsed during the broadcast and the running time of the actual movie. This, while present for good reason, was something I didn't like about the movie. Things like Ghostwatch (which is much better) or even just other random found-footage movies done in a news broadcast/livestream format achieve a much higher level of immersion when they're presenting events to us in real-time, and it's always impressive to see a good "long take" that is in actuality the product of deft editing.

That being said, though, I actually did like the way the movie was paced - but only if I thought of it as a movie, not a plausible record of a real string of events. It knows when to pull out the really shocking things and exactly how long to wait between them. The naturally flat affect of the reporters adds a lot to the tension, because when it breaks, we know things are really starting to get serious; Vanocur, however, stays absolutely stoic up until the very end, which provides a very striking contrast with the other, more emotional players in the story.

Since everyone involved in this is supposed to be a real person, there are no "characters" per se, but the various job titles and political offices that make up the roster all play off of each other well. I did think the acting from some of the reporters was a bit stilted and even hammy (another point where I don't quite agree with ZaGorudan) but most of the interviewees were very convincing. One of the most important characters is a scientist who spends much of the movie understandably flipping shit: points like the conversation he has with the press after resigning from his job and thus no longer having to report to anyone reveal that this movie is indeed very good at knowing when to reveal major pieces of the narrative, but not in a way that feels at all like it reflects reality. I also really enjoyed the parts of this that were left unexplained and I wish there had been more of that. There are hints that perhaps there had been some kind of abduction component to the ongoing alien invasion: two people, one having shown up out of the blue and the other disappearing and reappearing later with burns and frostbite, live long enough to start mumbling mysterious gibberish before succumbing to their injuries - the gibberish is, of course, decoded at just the right moment within the narrative. 

It's interesting to me that this director has one of the most wildly unexpected filmographies of anybody who's ever made a horror film (this is the guy who did She's All That, for one) because it makes me wonder what this would have been like in the hands of people who were experienced with genre films. Would it have had the impact and spook factor of Ghostwatch, but at the price of losing the feeling of authenticity that comes from having no genre trappings whatsoever?

(If you want to hear someone with an actual brain talk about this, read Sally Jane Black's review on Letterboxd.)