The survival-thriller Fall has earned the sequel treatment. The follow-up focuses on the sister of a character from the first film.
Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater) is grieving after her sister’s (Virginia Gardner) death at the B-67 TV Tower. One of Shiloh’s old friends, Luce (Arsema Thomas), encourages Jax to complete Shiloh’s “Fuck It List” and face her fears. They travel to Thailand to climb the notoriously dangerous Mount Kwan, but get stuck after a rock slide.
Fall was a surprise hit. It earned $21.8 million on a $3 million budget and was well received by critics. But the sequel was made because of the financial success, not for artistic reasons. Fall 2: Deadpoint repeated a lot of the same plot points and developments from the first film, which led to the question of why bother. There was a prologue showing a disaster, a character grieving after a tragedy, characters stopping off at a refreshment establishment before the climb and the main two characters ending up getting stuck in one location after a disaster. Fall 2 had scenes that were too similar to its predecessor, like the characters closing a gate with lots of warnings and seeing a vulture eating. The writers copied too much from the original film.
Jax was like Becky in the first film, a young woman suffering from grief who was encouraged to do a dangerous climb as an act of remembrance. Fall 2 pushes credulity because Jax was a scaredy-cat who was expected to do not just a notoriously difficult climb, but one that was illegal. There was footage of Jax as a child swinging from some monkey bars, and I was thinking that’s going to be a skill that will come in handy. Jax’s character arc was needing to overcome her fears, but was forced to do it in the most extreme way imaginable.
The sequel attempted to be a more expansive film. Jax and Luce weren’t trapped in one location for as long as Becky and Shiloh in the previous film. Flashbacks and video footage showed Jax’s troubled relationship with her old sister, which made the film feel a little like The Dive. There was also a crime element to the film sequel. Fall 2 opened with a man being forced at gunpoint to climb the mountain, and Jax watched a news report about drug smuggling on the Thai-Myanmar border. This crime element brought back memories of Cliffhanger. However, the crime storyline was ignored for the most part; when it appeared again, it came across as Chekhov’s Plotpoint.
On a thrill level, Fall 2 did succeed. For someone with a fear of heights, i.e. me, the film was scary and disorienting, especially when there were first-person shots. If I were in that situation, I would have been excreting every bodily fluid possible. The Spierg Brothers took over the directing duties, so there was an improvement in the visual effects due to the Aussie twins coming from a visual effects background.
Fall 2: Deadpoint managed to have thrills and intensity, which it needed because of the holes and flaws in the script.
Summary
Fall 2 attempted to be a bigger-is-better sequel, but came across as sillier.
