By Simon Thompson
Writer/ director Doug Roos’s The Sky Has Fallen is an admirably passionate piece of low-budget filmmaking, that sadly doesn’t come together because of both budget constraints and a ropey script.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which a disease has wiped out most of humanity within a matter of hours, and the ones who have survived have been turned into gruesome zombie-like creatures, it’s up to two survivors Lance (Carey MacLaren) and Rachel (Laurel Kemper) to fight and endure in this harsh world.
The Left 4 Dead style intro sequence setting up this movie is fantastic, with the sombre music, and montage of news reports being a nice bit of world-building on Roos’s part. The creatures themselves are repugnant in just the right way, and the action sequences are solid, which, given the financial limitations that Roos had to work with are all the more impressive.
The problems with The Sky Has Fallen are to be found in both the script and characterisation. Roos’s script is a reheated ready meal of much better post-apocalyptic/zombie media such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, George A Romero’s Dead Trilogy, the Left 4 Dead games, and 28 Days Later, lacking the interesting world-building and storytelling choices of all of them.
The characters of Lance and Rachel are your boilerplate generic survivors in a post-apocalyptic drama, with MacLaren and Kemper’s complete lack of chemistry as actors making their scenes together about as pleasurable as pulling teeth. While MacLaren and Kemper aren’t especially compelling in their respective roles, they really aren’t helped by Roos’s script, with their characterisation having no depth or complexity whatsoever.
Overall, despite one or two flourishes The Sky Has Fallen is an overly soapy, yet strangely bland post-apocalyptic horror drama that runs out of steam after about the fifteen minute mark. The most frustrating thing of all about it however, is that there is the germ of a good movie trapped inside there, but the lack of budget and flimsy script put paid to it ever developing.
