Holes in the Sky: The Sean Miller Story

This is one of those disposable films I put on just so I have something to watch, and not expect too much. Of course I'm always open to an unexpected gem, but this was not one of those.

It is just your basic generic disposable 'at least its not unwatchable'. Not really engaging, and some fairly problematic premises. I was hoping for more, I give it 5 stars because anything lower is reserved for films that make me mad for being so bad, waste of time, or films that prioritize commentary over artistry.

Better than a student film project, but nothing inspiring at all. There wasn't any point in the film, turn of events, or surprise or sequence that had any impact at all. Not necessarily a train wreck, but more of a quarterback fumble on the 50 yard line.

The worst most annoying part is some of the footage is supposedly shot by the film maker on his cell phone, and guess what? The filmaker is shooting cell video in portrait mode. I mean...

Not sure how to feel about this movie. So I went into it knowing only that it's a found footage mockumentary of an alien abduction story. Sounded right up my alley; I love that kinda crap.

Right off the bat you can tell it's trying to be super cheesey and fake, especially when it shows the filmmakers repertoire. He's done some pretty awful horror movies and not much else. At the same time, you can tell they just didn't really have any budget so they had to go this route and make it seem like it was done on purpose. I was wondering for awhile why it was focusing so much on the documentary filmmakers backstory, but it becomes clear that when they went to make the documentary they experienced some weirdness of their own and that's what the true story here is. It took a pretty long time to actually get to Sean Miller's Story, despite that being in the film's title. I think they should have put his story in sooner than they did because it ends up just kind of getting lost. I found it pretty hard to focus on this movie because most of it is dull B-roll. Because it was hard to pay attention to it I can't tell if it was actually hard to follow the story or if that was just because my attention kept wandering. It's very much a film where if you blink you'll miss the punchline of any given scene, but also, some scenes just don't have a point to them really, so you end up either missing the "good" parts, or having to endure a whole bunch of boring content to get to them. Most of the effects are really cheap and cheesey, which is expected for the most part with a movie like this. There were some actual cool and freaky bits in there, but not really enough.. they all happen very late in the game when you're already kinda over the movie and the characters. I'm not sure what else to say really. I didn't fully hate it and I didn't really enjoy it, so I gave it an average rating of 5, right smack dab in the middle. That might be pretty generous of me, honestly, but I've watched some terribly awful movies this past month, so I'm going easy on this one.

The biggest fault of this movie is that it focuses way too much on the filmmakers, which really skews the focus of this movie. The part where they talk about sad songs is super cringe, and it feels like a vanity project. They don't even describe what the original Sean Miller story was until like a third of the way in. It feels like a student film, not in a good way. The audio is not good. I feel like we saw way too much of the filmmakers for this to be a believable found footage "documentary" film. The video quality is also pretty poor. The acting is poor. The most common voice and face is Ash, who's supposed to be a professional filmmaker/documentarian, which goes against how you make a documentary. This definitely feels like the filmmakers had friends left positive reviews, so the IMBD score is egregiously skewed.

HOLES IN THE SKY: THE SEAN MILLER STORY is a mockumentary (fake documentary) which purports to tell the story of someone who has had highly unusual experiences which are traced back to possible encounters with extraterrestrial beings.

In order to increase the feeling of authenticity, the credited film crew members play semi-fictional versions of themselves, and one suspects that even the name of the actor who plays the eponymous character, credited as "Sean Ed", might just be his first and middle name.

An issue that becomes apparent right away is that, contrary to what the title indicates, the story is not (just) about Sean Miller but even more so about the documentary film crew that goes to his house to interview him and film the strange happenings there. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that approach, but given the title, it amounts to a bit of bait and switch.

Apart from the ambivalent focus of the story, what is presented here is not any different than what has been presented in numerous alien encounter/abduction movies before.

From the perspective of someone who really believes in these kinds of encounters, it could be argued that this is the very point, that people should be exposed to the "usual" or expected manifestations of possible aliens encounters to recognize them for what they "really are", in the same way that we do not want novelty and variation of content in any given set of public service messages, since that would only undermine them by causing confusion.

But the problem with that argument is that whereas public service messages of the usual kind (e.g. About buckling up, avoidance of drunk driving, vaccination etc.) have essentially conclusive evidence behind them that is denied only by hardcore conspiracy theorists, the evidence for alien counters still falls sufficiently short that it has so far only convinced hardcore conspiracy theorists. In short, the evidentiary status of this subject is exactly the opposite of what it needs to be in order for this argument to work.

Apart from that, one can imagine that even within the confines of an entirely standard presentation of alien encounters, it is possible to weave compelling and innovative human interest stories. The closest the film comes to that is with the story of Brett, who is already facing severe life challenges when he takes on the assignment, but somehow his story failed to touch me.

Although toward the end, we are treated to a few special effects, the overall low production values did not do the movie a service.

I think this is a film that only fans of the subgenre of alien encounter found footage movies will enjoy.

This mockumentary has a budget of a few thousand dollars and it looks like it. It's about the same as what you could do at home with your phone. After the first 15 minutes I had to recheck the IMDb rating which is above a 6 amazingly. I figured it must get better or something for the ratings to be that high. So I watched another 15 minutes before checking all the reviews and I see that mostly there are 1s and 2s and then incredibly a bunch of 9s and 10s. I kind of checked out when the crew had a long conversation in the car about sad love songs or something. I finally gave up when they spent several minutes spooking themselves out about "unexplained phenomena" which was a light turning on or off.