Terror in the Skies

I fell asleep after 10 minutes. If your looking for a good horror movie, as the title suggest, keep looking.

This documentary explores huge birds, pterodactyls, thunderbirds and Mothman-like (but not Mothman itself) creatures seen by witnesses since the late Nineteenth Century. Almost all of the sightings come from Illinois. The cinematography of the film is just gorgeous. The interviews with witnesses and experts are well conducted. Though it's mostly free of the didactic flamboyance that mars other Fortean documentaries, it's clear that the witnesses desperately want to be believed and that the experts are, for the most part, true believers. The animated recreations used throughout the film, though well crafted, are more distracting to the skeptical than helpful. Overall, a very well made and thoroughly engrossing documentary.

I came across this by accident on Am Prime. I would not normally even glance at something with a title like this thanks to all the nonsensical and stupid Aliens Among Us type stuff on cable channels.

But, out of boredom (thanks Covid-19) I watched it for two minutes and I was hooked, not by the subject matter but by the cinematography and the audio production. The camera work is flawless and backed by some subtle editing. I appreciate the slightly desaturated look of the images which seemed to add a visual quality that was simply outstanding.

The idea of the documentary is that there might be giant birds or flying things all over Illinois, including Chicago. This doc does not go into whether these things are real and draws no conclusions. What it does do is delve into the psychology of our culture and our belief systems; why we believe, what we believe.

Apart from the cinematography, the other standout for me was the quality of the audio. Several people are interviewed throughout and lot of work has evidently gone into matching the audio quality of each interview segment. The quality is exemplary.

This allowed the director to pull off some impressive edits involving two or more speakers. More than once a person will start speaking about some aspect of the giant birds thing but never get to finish the sentence because another person has picked up the thought and carried on. It is a sophisticated technique that really does a good job of strengthening the narrative flow.

This is an outstanding piece of work, and while I have zero interest in crypto/alien/conspiracy stuff I'll watch anything else by this director and crew whether flying saucers or not.