Holes in the Sky: The Sean Miller Story

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.

... Obviously inflated the user reviews.

Some films use found footage and documentary style shots as an artistic choice. From the very first frame, it's plain to see this was not made out of artistic choice but budget necessity.

Meandering, boring, full of clear self insert characters, wouldn't fool even the daftest human alive for a millisecond that it's real... Genuinely more of an endurance test than a movie.

Tries to keep building and building this sense of mystery and curiosity, but basically just stretches out it's very basic story of maybe, two or three sentences and stretches it out to movie length.

Utter waste of time.

I was about three quarters of the way through this before I Googled and found out the story of Sean is fake. Regardless, my opinion remains the same. I don't get why a UFO story turned into a story about a haunting. I don't know how else to explain it. The UFO incident is never touched upon. I could care less who is knocking on what door. The guy 'disappears' for 4 days and I get to hear a pot losing its handle. So much promise but it fell shorter than a pile of snail poo. At the 1 HOUR, 14 MINUTE MARK, the UFO incident is touched upon. By this time, I don't care anymore. I gotta go to the bank and cash a check anyway.

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.

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.