Fall

Fall is the story of Becky with the black hair and Hunter Blondie, two friends and daredevil extreme climbers who do dumb shit on Youtube for clicks, dumb shit like climbing a 2,000 foot tall remote, abandoned radio tower, only to then find themselves stranded at the top with no way down. Will they survive, or will they win the Darwin Award that year?

One year ago, Becky’s life was interrupted when her husband fell off a mountain. Splat. She’s still a little down in the dumps about it, so Hunter cajoles her into joining in on climbing a rusty and rickety old tv antenna that towers so high over the desert, you can see the curvature of the Earth. Hunter plans to post it to her YouTube channel once she gets to the top.

Obviously… bad idea.

The ladder collapses, and the duo is suddenly filled with a whole bunch of regret as they stand on a very tiny platform 2000 feet in the sky. Guess what? They didn’t tell anyone where they were going, and they didn't bring a spotter to stay on the ground in case of trouble either, because fuck you. Also, there’s no cell reception, because it was either that, or the film would’ve had to figure out some way to have both of them drop their phones, and that would’ve been silly, right? They aren’t wearing any parachutes either, because what kind of extreme climber would want to climb 2000 feet in the air and do a base jump off the top? Fuck that.

Everyone knows… climbing down is the best part.

But let’s set the sheer contrived idiocy of the plot aside and just accept it. This is the story of two stupid people whose pursuit of stupid shit bites them in the ass. Fine. I’ll accept that. It’s not like this type of shit doesn’t happen every day, so whatever.

This is what we’re doing.

So, with that established, and with the full acknowledgement that normally I’m not a fan of this particular kind of critique, my main feeling here is the whole dead fiancé drama at the beginning of the film just wasn’t needed. The whole storyline should’ve been cut. I’m saying this not just because the film wasn’t capable of bringing to bear the kind of emotion that storyline needed, I’m also saying it because it added nothing, and only weighed things down. I feel like the film should’ve started at the tower, with the characters there for no other reason then they wanted to climb the thing. That’s all you need. They’re there because they’re dumb YouTubers, and this is what they do. Drag-assing through 15 minutes of Claire Danes Cry-face and heavy-handed “this is a bad idea, you guys” foreshadowing, as if the audience wasn’t aware, is just a waste of time. It’s like spoonfeeding spoons. Let’s just get fucking to it.

Start late, leave early, my friends. Start late, leave early.

Anyway, I was hoping that once we got past the rather tedious opening, the film would really kick off, as it’s a concept that certainly comes loaded with tension, but while there were a few vertigo-inducing moments along the way, it just didn’t come together for me. There were too many times where the film wanted to shock you, only to have that moment then be revealed to be a nightmare, and it would’ve been better if the film had just played it all straight. But it didn’t. This movie tried too hard to be too clever for too long, it tried to stretch itself too far. Like Icarus, Fall flew too high, too close to the sun… and fell.

Meh.

If you’re interested in this kind of Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life type stories, then I highly recommend The Shallows with Blake Lively. It is a much, much better version of this type of movie. Much better.