Metacritic reviews

The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven't seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator's daydreams. Science-fiction and special effects fans may find these scenes worth the ticket price. But the movie's flaw is that there's not enough detail about the aliens, and the movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.

Never scratching below the surface "facts" of the story, this is too thin and unsophisticated to truly compel.

A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.

Essentially, this is a film about humans as victims of alien abuse, a mediocre look at helplessness.

As Walton, D.B. Sweeney recalls Richard Dreyfuss's UFO-obsessed family man in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's a sweet, semi-looney dreamer who all but invites the aliens to take him, and his performance is the most appealing thing about the picture. [12 Mar 1993, p.3]

Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness.

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

Fire in the Sky is grim. I'm not sure why director Robert Lieberman chose to fashion his movie like this, but the result is distinctly unpleasant -- dark, gloomy settings with harshly disagreeable characters and no sign of anything remotely resembling comic relief.

Even if you do believe the story, Fire in the Sky will bore you silly. [17 Mar 1993, p.E2]

It sounds like great fodder for sensationalism and special effects, but Fire in the Sky is disappointedly earthbound.