When Found Footage Finally Found Rock Bottom
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if The Blair Witch Project had a baby with a History Channel conspiracy show, then threw that baby into a UFO convention sponsored by Mountain Dew, congratulations — you’ve basically already seen The Phoenix Incident.
Released in 2016 and directed by first-timer Keith Arem (who clearly should’ve stayed in video game cutscenes where this kind of nonsense belongs), The Phoenix Incident bills itself as a terrifying “true story” behind the real-life 1997 Phoenix Lights UFO event. What it actually delivers is a 90-minute migraine that plays like a PowerPoint presentation assembled by someone who just discovered “found footage” is not an editing style but a cry for help.
The movie opens with a scorpion crawling across night vision — a poetic metaphor for the pacing. Then we’re treated to military firefights, grainy news clips, and enough static to make you wonder if your TV’s haunted or just begging you to stop. The expository text claims the U.S. has been waging a secret war against aliens since the ’90s. Which makes sense, because after watching this, I too believe we’re being punished by something from another world.
The “Plot” — A Word I Use Loosely
At its core, The Phoenix Incident pretends to be a documentary investigating the disappearance of four Arizona bros who went missing the night of the Phoenix Lights. These four men — Glenn, Mitch, Ryan, and Jacob — are the kind of characters who, if they existed in real life, would have “failed dirt bike stunt” trending on TikTok.
They’re out riding ATVs in the desert when they stumble across a survivalist weirdo named Walton S. Gayson (played by Michael Adamthwaite), who looks like if Ted Kaczynski ran an alien fan club. He tells them ominously to leave. Naturally, they ignore him — because horror movies have a strict “bad decisions only” clause — and ride straight into what turns out to be a CGI alien ambush.
These aliens, by the way, look like the result of someone asking, “What if Predator and a scorpion had a baby designed on an N64?” They click, screech, and attack at random, and the camera never sits still long enough to make sense of anything. You’ll spend most of the runtime trying to figure out if that blur on screen is an alien, a tree branch, or your own reflection in disappointment.
The Mockumentary Nobody Asked For
The movie constantly cuts between “recovered footage” from the doomed bros’ camcorders and talking-head interviews with military officers, newscasters, and alleged witnesses — including real-life Arizona figures like Senator John McCain, who probably didn’t realize he was starring in a sci-fi disaster when he signed the release form.
These faux-documentary interludes are supposed to make the film feel authentic, but they mostly make it feel like late-night cable programming on the “Conspiracy Network.” Every interview is shot like a recruitment video for a militia that believes the moon landing was faked. We get stock phrases like “classified documents” and “forces of unknown origin,” which sound ominous until you realize they’re being delivered with all the conviction of someone explaining printer errors.
The filmmakers clearly wanted to blur the line between fiction and reality, but instead, they blurred the line between storytelling and boredom.
The Aliens Have Landed — and They’re Boring
When the big extraterrestrial reveal finally happens, it’s not “Close Encounters” — it’s more like Close Disappointments of the Cheap Kind. The creature design looks like someone dumped a bucket of latex over a Halloween costume and called it a day. The aliens’ motivations are never explained; they just sort of show up, kill everyone, and leave — which, ironically, is the same thing most audience members did halfway through the movie.
Director Keith Arem, known for voice directing in video games, treats every scene like a cutscene from Call of Duty: Martian Warfare. There’s shaky handheld footage, green night vision, constant yelling, and no emotional connection to any of it. When one of the bros gets torn apart, you don’t feel fear — you feel relief that there’s one less guy left to shout “Dude, did you see that?!” into the camera.
The Characters: Bros vs. Blobs
The movie’s four main victims are about as distinguishable as four shades of beige. Glenn (Yuri Lowenthal) is the “leader” because he’s holding the camera. Mitch (Travis Willingham) is the “military one” because he mentions his brother was in the Marines. Ryan (Troy Baker) is “the jokester,” meaning he survives 10 minutes longer. Jacob (Liam O’Brien) is “the guy who fixes things,” which, in this movie, translates to “dies trying to fix a truck.”
These are all talented voice actors from the video game world, but here they’re reduced to yelling each other’s names while running through the desert like an REI commercial gone feral. By the time the aliens drag them off one by one, you’re not scared — you’re just grateful someone turned the camera away from their faces.
And then there’s Gayson, the cultist. He rants about ascension, turns off his electric fence to let the aliens in, and later self-immolates because apparently even he couldn’t stand the movie’s pacing anymore.
Found Footage: The Genre That Just Won’t Die
By 2016, found footage horror was already deader than the cast of this film, but The Phoenix Incident decided to exhume the corpse anyway. The shaky-cam aesthetic is supposed to immerse the viewer; instead, it feels like being beaten over the head with a GoPro. Every scene is a nauseating mess of overexposed light and frantic movement, which would be fine if it masked poor acting — but sadly, it does neither.
There’s also a baffling overuse of military stock footage, giving the impression the filmmakers downloaded every free clip labeled “combat” from Shutterstock and edited it into a pseudo-documentary. The result is a Frankenstein’s monster of tonal confusion: half fake news broadcast, half alien snuff film, and entirely unwatchable.
The “Based on Real Events” Lie
The movie constantly insists it’s inspired by real events — the famous 1997 Phoenix Lights UFO sighting. This is technically true in the same way Sharknado is inspired by weather. The real Phoenix Lights were a mysterious but peaceful event seen by thousands of people; The Phoenix Incident turns it into a secret alien war covered up by the government. That’s not creative license — that’s a full-blown hallucination.
To drive home the “authenticity,” the film ends with “classified documents” and ominous voiceovers that suggest the government is hiding something. What they’re actually hiding, I suspect, is a better version of this movie.
Production Values From Another Galaxy (And Not in a Good Way)
Everything about this film screams low-budget — not in a charming Evil Dead way, but in a “we ran out of funding halfway through the first act” way. The sound design is a mess of indistinct screaming and alien clicking. The editing is so chaotic that you half-expect subliminal messages telling you to buy more Red Bull. The lighting ranges from “too dark to see” to “blinding like a UFO abduction gone wrong.”
And then there’s the CGI — dear God, the CGI. The aliens and their ships look like rejected test renders from a PlayStation 2 cutscene. The moment one flies by, you expect to see the PlayStation logo fade in.
The Ending (or: Finally, Mercy)
In the end, everyone dies, the aliens win, and the movie cuts to fake news clips declaring a government cover-up. Then Gayson burns himself alive, perhaps to symbolize mankind’s spiritual awakening, or perhaps to symbolize how every viewer feels by this point: utterly charred inside.
A post-credit scene tries to tease a sequel through a viral marketing campaign, because apparently someone thought this cinematic dumpster fire was worth continuing. Thankfully, the only thing that truly disappeared after The Phoenix Incident was audience interest.
Conclusion: Close Encounters of the Stupid Kind
The Phoenix Incident wants to be District 9 meets The Fourth Kind. What it actually is, is a two-hour migraine meets a tinfoil hat. It’s an incoherent mess of faux-military jargon, found footage fatigue, and alien costumes that wouldn’t scare a toddler at Comic-Con.
If there’s a conspiracy here, it’s how this movie ever got distribution.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5 UFOs — one point for effort, none for execution. The real “incident” isn’t in Phoenix; it’s the fact that this movie exists at all.
