YMMV / Fire in the Sky

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• Adorkable: Travis Walton is an awkward, yet endearing young man, who dreams of running a motorcycle shop with his best friend, brings donuts to his girlfriend in bed, and only wants to have fun when the contract is complete.
• Cult Classic: The film failed at the box office, but it does have a fair amount of fans who consider it to be one of the most terrifying science fiction films ever made.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: James Garner's performance as Frank Watters is widely regarded as one of the highlights of the movie.
• Jerkass Woobie: Mike Rogers is kind of a hardass, but it's really hard to watch his life fall apart because of the public belief the loggers all killed Travis, especially since he was the only one to go back for him and how guiltridden he is about leaving him behind.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Try to find anyone that will actually stick around after the abduction scene. This extends into YouTube where said scene garners millions of views while anything outside of it barely passes the 200k threshold.
• One-Scene Wonder: The aliens are in approximately ten minutes out of this 109-minute movie. Discussion of this movie is often primarily devoted to talking all about the abduction flashback and how incredibly terrifying it is. The movie is now considered to be one of the scariest sci-fi flicks ever for the alien scenes alone.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kathleen Wilhoite- best known for voicing the title character on Pepper Ann, plays Mike's wife Katie.
• Signature Scene: The abduction flashback.
• Squick: The aliens shove some sort of tar-like substance into Walton's mouth to make him stop screaming.
• Vindicated by History: The film got horrible reviews and flopped at the box office when it was first released. Today, it is considered by many one of the scariest films ever made and has a strong following among sci-fi fans. The scene on the spacecraft is considered one of the best, if not the absolute best ever committed to film.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Most people agree that the movie would've been massively improved if more, if not all, of it took place on the alien's ship and they ditched the "based on a true story" angle in favor of a more straight-forward sci-fi horror. Considering the person whom the movie was based on would deride the movie for dramatically altering his version of the story (and that said story is of dubious authenticity in the first place...), keeping it faithful was a moot point.
• The Woobie: Walton from his alien experience to undergoing a horrifying ocular probe and getting PTSD upon returning to earth.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The flashback aboard the ship looks absolutely flawless, without a single instance of Special Effects Failure. It's astoundingly horrific as a result. Extra points go to to the absolutely seamless zero-G floating effects.

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