all (2022) was on cable this week. I'm a sucker for movies about
microwave antennas, but I have to say this was the most horrible
thing I ever watched. What a disappointment. There's almost nothing
about microwave antennas in the entire movie.
Two young women decide to climb up a 2000-foot microwave relay tower in the middle of a desert. The road is barricaded and the sign in front says DANGER: RISK OF DEATH, but nothing ever happens in a disaster movie without somebody doing something stupid. Besides, they want to drop the ashes of one of the girl's husbands off the top in a sentimental gesture. The adventurous one keeps saying things like “Life is short and you have to grab all the experiences you can,” which reminds us old folks about that beer commercial about “grabbing gusto.” (I am not watching this awful movie again to see if that's the correct quote, but it was something like that). If those two girls had only known all they needed to do was grab a couple cans of tasteless carbonated piss they might have had a fun day.
Scene from Fall where Becky climbs up a twenty-foot mast to charge her drone from the aircraft obstruction warning light while her friend watches
But nuuuuuu. They had to climb up the tower. Sure enough, a sequence of improbable events puts them in mortal peril. Passing through the cage ladder that goes only as high as the microwave dishes, they climb up past it on a rusty ladder to a sort of crow's nest. The bolts somehow come loose and the ladder collapses into the dust 2000 feet below.
Now, anyone who's ever tried to loosen a rusted steel bolt knows that's just not going to happen. You'd need an axle grinder to get those suckers loose. But never mind, they're now trapped 60 feet above the dishes with only a 50 foot rope, two cell phones, and a flare gun with a single flare. Their drone, their water, and their all-important selfie stick have fallen and landed out of reach on one of the dishes.
They can't get a cell signal for some reason. They think the reason is they're too high, so they put one of the girls' phones in a sneaker and toss it to the ground, hoping it will get a connection on the way down and transmit their SOS text message to the girl's 60,000 followers. It seems not to work, and now we have to watch these two kids suffering about as horribly as you can imagine.
It never occurs to either of them to use their drone to lower the cell phone to the ground, which would have saved them. And of course they don't have a GMRS emergency transceiver on them, which also would have saved them. As would holding their cell phone near the focal point of one of the dishes: microwaves are much shorter than cell phone wavelengths, so they wouldn't interfere even if the repeater was working. Or any of a half dozen other things, like rewiring the repeater circuit to send an SOS, splitting their 50-foot rope in half to make a 100-foot rope, or remembering Bear Grylls's advice to bring a few hundred feet of paracord with you wherever you go.
They've run out of water and the drone is way down there in their backpack, so one girl rappels down the 60 foot pole with their 50-foot rope and uses the selfie stick to hook the backpack to a loop in the rope. She leaps toward the rope—still 2000 feet up—sweaty palm time—telling the other girl (Becky) to pull her back up. Unfortunately the drone's battery is now dead. But they notice a blinking red aviation obstruction warning light at the top of a 20-foot mast above the crow's nest, so Becky, calling on her vast experience with climbing up poles, climbs up the mast, pulls off the red glass filter, unscrews the incandescent light bulb, and holds her 120 volt charger, which she thoughtfully brought with her, in the light socket for what must be at least two hours in the howling wind, all the while being viciously attacked by vultures. Lucky for her the aircraft obstruction light isn't one of the new 270,000-candela (roughly 400 watt) strobe types. Also, luckily, she doesn't need a screwdriver to get the red lens off. And luckily the bulb takes a standard E26 socket instead of something else.
The drone now fully charged, she climbs back down, then gets struck by lightning and knocked unconscious. When she awakes, a vulture is biting her, so she kills and eats it. She scribbles a message on a piece of paper, sends the drone on its way, and—bam—it smashes into a passing truck and is destroyed.
By now nearly a week has passed. Becky is delirious from thirst. She's having horrific nightmares about her friend being dead. Suddenly she realizes the nightmares are real and she's been hallucinating for days. So she's forced to do something unimaginably awful to survive. Read some other site if you must know what it is, but be prepared to shed tears. The voice-over repeats what her friend told her: life is short, you need to experience as much as you can. Surely by now that would be a painfully ironic message at best.
I found myself wondering why anyone would think it's entertaining to watch two kids being tortured to the brink of insanity like this. It is a very disturbing movie. Okay, we're all going to die horribly, so . . . what? Life sucks, the end. At least it wasn't in 3D.
Rating: 0 out of 100.
nov 06 2024
