The Fourth Kind

Given how many movies there are about aliens, it's surprising how few there are about alien abductions. The last major one I can remember is 1993's Fire in the Sky, which was a pretty mediocre film until the impressive and truly frightening climax that took place on the ship. Because of this, I was kind of hoping that The Fourth Kind would fill a void. I took my seat, ready to be intrigued. As the movie played on, intrigue was replaced by boredom. You know you're in trouble when you start checking your watch 15 minutes in.

Writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi has given the film an interesting hook, at least. The movie is a mixture of fictionalized recreation of a supposedly real incident concerning a series of mysterious disappearances that have happened in Nome, Alaska, combined with "real" documentary footage. The whole thing, in truth, is an elaborate fiction, much like the recent Paranormal Activity. You only need to look at the credits, and see that three different people are credited with coming up with the story to know that it's not as real as the movie would like you to believe. But, the movie keeps on trying to convince you what you're seeing actually happened. It's kind of annoying, actually. One of the reasons why Paranormal Activity worked so well is that it did not draw attention to itself. There were no credits, no studio logo, and no constant reminders that you were watching a movie. The Fourth Kind goes out of its way to the point of annoyance, giving us subtitles reminding us that we are looking at paid actors. Heck, the film's lead star, Milla Jovovich, even walks right up to the camera at the beginning of the movie, and tells us that what we're about to see is very real and very disturbing. She oversells it, as I doubt anyone but the most paranoid of alien conspiracy theorists could find what follows disturbing.

That's not to say there's a jump scare or two, but for the most part, the movie is a long and tedious slog where Jovovich's character, a psychologist named Abigail Tyler, pieces together information that the disappearances in her town may be the result of aliens. It all starts when she begins to interview a number of patients suffering from sleep disorders who all tell the same story. Around 3 in the morning or so, they wake up and see an owl staring at them through the window. They can't remember anything else, so she places her patients under hypnosis, where they relive a supposedly terrifying memory from the night before that's been locked away in their minds. The patients scream and thrash about madly under the hypnosis, and when Abigail brings them back, they can't even speak of the terrible things they've seen. One patient even goes so far as to murder his wife and kids, then kills himself, so he doesn't have to remember it anymore, or put his family through it. We witness this both through dramatizations, and "real" video footage of the supposed actual sessions. The movie uses a split screen effect, with the "real" footage on the left, and the recreation on the right. We also occasionally get to see some interviews with the real life Abigail Tyler, who is supposed to be traumatized by the events that followed, but comes across as more of an actress than Jovovich herself.

After the patient performs the murder-suicide, the town's local sheriff ("Will Patton - actor, as Sheriff August", the movie says when he walks on the screen the first time) becomes suspicious of Abigail. His suspicions are deepened by the fact that Abigail's husband was murdered a few months ago by an intruder they were never able to find. As if all this isn't enough, one of Abigail's kids went blind after her husband's murder (Mia McKenna-Bruce), and the other kid (Raphael Coleman, in a very over the top performance) hates her guts. Instead of helping her children get over the feelings of loss and resentment, Abigail instead becomes obsessed with the notion that aliens are responsible for all the recent strange activities going on around her, and drags fellow psychologist Abel Campos (Elias Koteas) into a hunt for the truth. They watch a lot of videotape, listen to a lot of garbled recordings that are supposed to be alien speech caught on tape, and interview an expert on dead languages, which may be a key to the aliens.

All of this sounds potentially exciting, but the script moves at a glacial pace. Instead of building suspense or intrigue, The Fourth Kind seems more interested in constantly breaking the fourth wall, and reminding us whether what we're watching is real or a dramatization. Of course, it's all a dramatization. It's been documented that there was never an Abigail Tyler working in the psychology field in Alaska, and any bit of evidence found on the Internet related to the film was planted by Universal Studios as a promotional gimmick a month or so in advance. I didn't know this in advance to watching the film, and I still had my serious doubts when I saw how broad some of the performances were in the "actual" footage. It didn't help that the video camera was constantly and conveniently blacking out or turning fuzzy whenever something important was supposed to be happening. The movie itself is well made at least, even if some of the performances are off. Jovovich's idea of a dramatic performance seems to consist of talking in a whispered monotone as often as possible.

When you stop and think about it, this movie amounts to really nothing more than an elaborate hoax that no one really bought into to begin with, anyway. I hate to bring up Paranormal Activity again, but at least the filmmakers had the sense to claim it was fiction from the start. It's not like the makers of Cloverfield tried to convince us a monster really did attack New York City. (Although I would have loved to see them try.) So, who are the makers of The Fourth Kind trying to kid? It's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors trying to cover up a movie that isn't all that interesting to start with.

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