Movie Review - The Fourth Kind

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The Fourth Kind claims to be “based on actual case studies” of psychologist Abbey Tyler. The film begins with Milla Jovovich telling us that she’ll be playing the role of Tyler while the film will also show us “actual” footage of the “real” Tyler and her patients. Tyler is practicing in Nome, Alaska when she begins to notice a common theme among her patients: they’re all being awoken at 3:30am to the site of an owl, an overwhelming since of dread and gaps in their memories. Using hypnosis she attempts to fill in those gaps. But problems arise when her methods result in depression and extreme panic, culminating with one of her patients killing his family before turning the gun on himself. The film views this as tragic but since they won’t have to watch the rest of this movie, I prefer to think of them as lucky. But I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.

As Tyler investigates further, she begins to believe (with the help of her murdered husband’s research) that aliens are afoot. (Spacemen not foreigners.) Nome, after all, has the highest per capita rate of disappearances and unsolved deaths according to the film. Let’s see…people are routinely going missing in a desolate frozen-tundra with a population of less than 10,000 and one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the United States…I think everyone’s first thought is alien abduction, really. As if aliens are smart enough to master interstellar travel but dumb enough to continually abduct subjects from a town with a population smaller than the average Nickelback concert.

Of course, none of this be would so frustrating if the film weren’t so adamant about all of this being true. The film desperately wants to be The Blair Witch Project of alien movies. It’s full of twisty/bendy head fakes - actors breaking the fourth wall, video that is alleged to be true, the director (Olatunde Osunsanmi) playing himself on screen - each element carefully chosen to heighten the realism and ratchet up the tension. But instead of immersing you in the story, it pulls you out. It wants you to believe, if only for a second, that this is all happened. But none of it rings true. Many characters are given aliases in order to protect their true “identities” (and, one would presume, to prevent debunking the entire film with a simple Google search). But the film reveals so much ancillary information about its characters that a mere name change would do little good in obfuscating their real names. The video footage all comes emblazoned with a time/date stamp and the movie takes great pains to let us know that we’re in Nome, Alaska. So if we know the year and the location, does changing the name of the town’s sheriff really protect his privacy? And how many Black Sumerian language professors (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) working at a “prestigious Canadian university” could there be? No, aliases aren’t provided to protect identities, they’re provided to create the appearance of protecting identities. This way it all looks more “real.”

In the end, all we’re left with is grainy, pixilated (you know…to protect their identities) camcorder footage and a few cheap scares on par with your kid brother jumping out from behind a door. It quickly becomes evident that this “archival footage” serves two purposes: to create the illusion of authenticity and, more importantly, to save the filmmakers the cost and trouble of creating believable special effects. The Fourth Kind is lazy, derivative and disingenuous.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1 being Erotic Encounters of the Fourth Kind, The Fourth Kind gets a 3.

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