Fall
starring Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan
written by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank
directed by Scott Mann
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
Fall is a 2022 survival thriller about two women friends, Caroline and Virginia, who decided to climb a dangerous and abandoned communication tower for thrills and as therapy, to help Caroline recover from the death of her husband, Dan, who perished in a fall from El Capitan in the film’s first scene. At first, Caroline resists, but eventually is won over because of her friendship with Virginia, who spouts predictable and trashy, ill-conceived, and Gung Ho American cultural platitudes like,
“If you don’t confront your fears, you’re always going to be afraid.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
The plan is to scatter Dan’s ashes from atop the B67 TV Tower. According to the director, the story is based on the real KXTV/KOVR Tower, a.k.a. the Sacramento Joint Venture Tower, a 625-meter tall communication tower in Walnut Grove, California. It’s the seventh tallest man-made structure ever to have existed.
Of course, the ascent of the abandoned tower goes horribly wrong. That’s why the movie was made. The ascent is white-knuckle, nail-biting stuff even for the audience. Once the girls are up there, the ladder they climbed crumbles with age and rust, and they are stuck, with no phone reception, no way to safely descend, and no back-up plan.
I felt uncomfortable watching it because I have no regard for the kinds of adventure-seeking recklessness it portrays, or for casually dumb American platitudes about facing your fears, growing through adversity, or cultivating the human spirit of exploration and stretching one’s potential.
I watched this film the same day it was announced that the deep sea OceanGate Titan submersible had imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic Ocean, killing five occupants. All week it was the story that gripped the world (contrasting with the story of 82 migrants who drowned in the Aegean Sea near Greece just one week earlier).
I admire intelligence, and I dislike stupidity. That means I’m prejudiced. I don’t like deliberately stupid people, and I enjoy stories of Darwin Award stupidity in which people remove themselves from the human genome. Stories like that are sadly entertaining, but also annoying. Take, for example, the 1992 case of Chris McCandless who left his family and his life in California to live off the land in Alaska in pursuit of some moronic-idealistic dream, only to die of starvation. The incident is portrayed in the 2007 movie Into the Wild. What an idiot!
Then, there is the 2009 case of cave diver John Jones who became fatally stuck in the infamous Nutty Putty cave in Utah. His story is told in the 2016 movie The Last Descent. A guy with a really stupid appetite for risk. What an idiot!
Real life stories of these kinds give you an idea of what things look like from the top of Mt. Stupid!