Fourth Kind, The (3/16/2010)

Rated PG-13 for violent/disturbing images, some terror, thematic elements and brief sexuality.

Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi (First American film)

Starring Milla Jovovich and Will Patton

If any of this were true, it would definitely be creepy.

The Fourth Kind has an incredibly terrifying premise. Hundreds of people have gone missing from the small, isolated town of Nome, Alaska since the 1960s. These missing persons' cases have never been solved. But when a psychiatrist named Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) starts investigating a rash of sleep disorders in Nome, she discovers that her patients are all having the same visions of white owls who interrupt their dreams. And when she hypnotizes one of her patients to find out more about this “owl,” he is reduced to abject terror and then flees her office to kill his family and himself. Another patient, when hypnotized, starts screaming in ancient Sumerian and starts levitating.

Eventually Tyler realizes the people of Nome are being abducted by aliens – herself included. All of this is set against the tragic backdrop of her husband's recent and violent death (by aliens?). Plus, there is “actual documentary footage” from her “real life” sessions with these patients. And she even manages to record herself being abducted by aliens who scream at her in Sumerian.

This film bills itself as containing “actual footage” from case histories. But this footage is so poorly faked that it really insults the audience's intelligence. So why are so many people still calling this movie scary? Spoilers ahead.

First the film tells us that in 1972, a scale of measurement was established for alien encounters. When a UFO is sighted, it is called an encounter of the “first kind.” When evidence is collected, it is known as an encounter of the “second kind.” When contact is made with extraterrestrials, it is the “third kind.” The next level, abduction, is the “fourth kind.” However, Paul Halpern, a physics professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who has studied the possibility of extraterrestrial life says, “Honestly, I've only ever heard of it through fiction, not as an actual scientific scale of measurement.”

Unfortunately there is no “archival footage” or “actual case studies.” Instead, we get badly-acted, obviously fake documentary footage which goes fuzzy every stinkin’ time anything alien happens.

There is some interesting editing, where filmmaker Olatunde Osunsanmi shows the fake footage split-screened alongside a reenactment of the fake footage and you feel like you're watching a cross of 24 and some History Channel documentary.

I'm not against fake documentaries. I loved Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, which were effective because the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie's “documentary” evidence. What pushes Fourth Kind from the merely bad into the actually insulting was the filmmakers' insistence that the documentary evidence was real. Actors from the “documentary” portions of the movie are un-credited, and many media outlets are still reporting that the footage is real. There was even an ill-fated Web campaign to create false professional credentials and publications for Abigail Tyler, but after an investigative reporter revealed them as fakes they were taken down.

Despite having a great concept, it fails at every turn to make that concept convincing or menacing. First, there's the alien abduction story, and the mystery around what the aliens are doing, which is never solved. All we know is that the aliens are scary, and that they steal people out of their beds. But the biggest question is “Why anybody would want to be hypnotized by Tyler after the first few people she hypnotizes kill themselves or get their backs broken when aliens possess them and distort their bodies?” Even though Tyler has two credible witnesses to every single hypnosis session, including one that involves alien possession and levitation, those credible witnesses mysteriously never corroborate her story. So we see her screaming and crying when police arrive to arrest her for breaking her patient's back, and neither of her credible friends comes forward to say, “Hey I was there and this guy broke his own back while having some kind of alien-induced seizure.” Then again maybe I wouldn’t say anything either.

Second, there is the mystery of how Tyler's husband died. She remembers him being murdered by an intruder, and for most of the movie her psychiatrist friend is trying to hypnotize her so she can remember the intruder's face. As it turns out, her husband actually shot himself, and she hallucinated the murder. What gets me the most is that everybody, including her friend, knew this all along – and nobody tries to tell her. So we've got this crazy hallucinating lady who is being allowed to hypnotize people! Not to mention she still has custody of her kids, even though her son is clearly scared of her. By the time the aliens “abduct” her daughter during a fuzzed-out documentary moment, you are starting to think that maybe the daughter is better off out of that house.

Finally, there's a whole “taking over the world” idea that's sort of thrown out there – as if we weren't already up to our eyeballs in disbelief! The aliens speak in ancient Sumerian (the oldest known language), and although no one knows how the language would have been pronounced a professor is able to figure out that the aliens are yelling things like “I am god,” and using the word “destroyed” a lot. Another question that arises is, “Why are they still speaking an ancient language?” They can fly around almost undetected and abduct people but they can’t lean English?

So we're left with a complete mess of lame documentary footage, inexplicable aliens who act more like demons than scifi creatures, and a main character (Tyler) who seems to be completely insane. Although Milla Jovovich gives it her all, it’s almost impossible to take her serious with lines like, “My baby! They stole my baby!”

By the end of The Fourth Kind, you'll feel swindled – and not in the happy, they-fooled-me way (i.e. The Sixth Sense). I can only assume that people who were scared by this movie, or even vaguely intrigued by it, were responding more to the movie's concept rather than its execution. It’s a Coaster!

SHOULD KIDS SEE IT?
Although it’s all fake, there are some pretty disturbing images and it’s probably best to keep younger viewers away.

Conversation Starter
Three Simple Questions (with Answers You May Be Looking for):

1. What are some of the messages or themes you observed in this movie?
2. How do you suppose we—as serious Christ-followers—should react to this movie?
3. How can we move from healthy, Bible-based opinions about this movie to actually living out those opinions?