Movie 10 - Six Days in Roswell

Today's movie is a lot of fun. The documentary Six Days in Roswell (1998) was made by the people behind one of my all time favorite documentaries, Trekkies (1997) - and its sequel, Trekkies 2 (2004), was really good too! Timothy B. Johnson and Roger Nygard have an amazing ability to march into the belly of the beast and show just how absurd and hilarious humanity can be.

In this doc, we follow one of the people we met in Trekkies on his pilgrimage to Roswell, New Mexico. Last time we saw Rich Kronfeld he was traveling in his motorized recreation of Captian Pike's wheelchair/life support/Dalek thing from the original Star Trek. In this film we learn that Rich's life-long dream is to be abducted by aliens, so he treks to Roswell for their annual festival in honor of the crash site. We get to travel with him as he takes in the sites and meets many, many interesting people.

I love the filmmakers' style of guerilla documentary and simple storytelling. At times it feels like we are watching a school filmstrip about UFO kooks. The simple graphics and background music are perfect for this approach.

Since our host is just as quirky as many of the people he interacts with, there is a surreal element to the entire experience. I love when his questions go off topic because he just can't help himself when dealing with some of these characters. Like when he is interviewing a man from Montreal who has built a special metal detector to find leftovers from alien crashes and gets distracted by the fact that Canada has Radio Shack. These kinds of moments make the movie feel genuine and that much more enjoyable for the audience.

One thing I wasn't crazy about were the moments that were obviously staged and felt more like comedy skits than sections of a documentary. For example, at one point we see him getting lessons on self defense just in case he encounters a hostile alien, but it feels scripted and unnecessary. They seem to exist as visuals to accompany the narration of our host's journal entries, but take me a little out of the moment.

Otherwise I loved this film and was pretty upset that the Bonus Material section on my dvd did not want to work. I was dying to see the outtakes and deleted scenes because I couldn't get enough of these wacky, sun-baked, UFO aficionados! I recommend this film to fans of both science-fiction and documentaries, but you have to have a good sense of humor!

 

imdb listing for Six Days in Roswell