Rating:
★★½
USA. 1994.
Crew
Director – Robert Iscove, Teleplay – Peter Lance, Story – Walon Green, Peter Lance & Jeremy Thorn, Producers – Robert Iscove & Nancy Platt Jacoby, Photography – John Beymer, Music – Craig Safan, Production Design – Richard B. Lewis. Production Company – Mountain View Productions.
Cast
Sander Vanocur (Himself), Jane Kaczmarek (Dr. Caroline Jaffe), Dwier Brown (Matthew Jensen), Bree Walker Lampley (Herself), James Morrison (Paul Whitaker), Philip Baker Hall (Dr. Kurt Lowden), James Handy (Dr Norbert Hazelton), Kario Salem (Dr. Avram Mandel), Dennis Lipscomb (Dr. Richard Pearson), Alan Scarfe (General Lucian Alexander), Brian McNamara (Mike Curtis), Spencer Garrett (Paul Collingwood), John De Lancie (Barry Steinbrenner), Arthur C. Clarke (Himself), Patty Toy (Denise Wong), Gina Hecht (Barbara Shiller), Ron Canada (Terence Freeman), Diana Frank (Sylvia Chounard)
Plot
TV schedules are interrupted by a special live news broadcast. Three meteorites have come down along the 45th Parallel – in Thunder Basin, Wyoming, the Gobi Desert and Lourdes, France. Rescue services are at the scenes as workers and government agencies try to determine the extent of the damage. There is much question as to whether there are going to be other meteorites. When it is discovered that the meteorites all came on a directed course, there is wild speculation as to whether this means there is an intelligence behind it and the possibility of alien life. When another meteor approaches, the US military scramble to shoot it down.
Without Warning – no relation to the earlier alien invader film Without Warning (1980) – was a tv movie that aired on the CBS network. Crucially, the film was aired live on Oct 30th, 1994, the 56th anniversary of Orson Welles’ famous The War of the Worlds (1938) live radio broadcast, which caused panic in some areas when listeners took it to be a real news report.
In the same way that Welles made The War of the Worlds as though it was a live newscast, Without Warning was made as though it was a live tv broadcast. There are no opening credits – just the apparent interruption of a film that is supposedly being broadcast. To this extent, the film even winds in a number of actual tv broadcasters of the day – Sander Vanocur, Bree Walker Lampley and others. Although this effect is somewhat watered down watching the show in the 2022 where it is recorded and not interrupted by commercial breaks rather than viewed live. Not to mention some of the actors playing the parts of reporters and interviewees – James Morrison, Philip Baker Hall – have since become better known, breaking the illusion, although others such as Jane Kaczmarek, Dwier Brown and John de Lancie would have been sufficiently known back in the day.
This makes Without Warning surely an early variant on what would be referred to as the Found Footage film a decade later. The idea of the fake broadcast was done earlier by the NBC tv movie Special Bulletin (1983) about a nuclear detonation, while just a couple of years earlier there had been the high-profile Ghostwatch (1992) program that aired live on the BBC.
This has the initial appearance of being a Disaster Movie. I initially thought it was a unique and interesting way of presenting a meteor collision film a la Meteor (1979) and the subsequent likes of Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and Greenland (2020). However, about thirty minutes in this goes off at a left field tangent amid speculation that the meteorites seem to have been guided and about the source being alien.
This the film presents with some reasonable scientific conviction, although its’ credibility plummets when we get the inclusion of Ron Canada as an Erich Von Daniken-modelled expert going on about Ancient Astronauts. Not to mention, a scene where Dennis Lipscomb talks about the significance of the meteorites landing in an isosceles triangle resembling one of the triangles on the Voyager craft, which is a spurious apophenic connection akin to seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. That said, the film does boost its credibility with an interview with Arthur C. Clarke talking about the improbability of alien visitors.
The film builds what is going on with a reasonable tension. This works particularly well during the scenes near the end where the three objects appear over Washington D.C., Moscow and Beijing and there is a tension-filled wait as the on-the-site reporters expect to be obliterated if the missiles do not strike the oncoming objects. The film goes out with the invasion proper beginning. Unlike H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), everything here seems no more than the preamble scenes that take place on Horsfall Common, before an ending where the actual invasion begins as an ominous slingshot to a much bigger story to be told.
Canadian director Robert Iscove has been at work since the 1970s, mostly in tv and the odd theatrical film such as She’s All That (1999) and From Justin to Kelly (2003). He has made occasional other genre works for tv such as Dark Angel (1996), Cinderella (1997) and Firestarter Rekindled (2002).
Trailer here
