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Sure, Fourth Kind is scary—but it's also laughable
Oh how we want to believe—we ache to believe.
It's one thing to have one of our favorite SF hotties, Milla Jovovich, walking through a forest with a camera spinning around her as she explains, even warns, that the information in this movie is all documented and based on fact. (And she's downright scary when she says, "What you are about to see is intensely disturbing.")
It's quite another thing entirely to sprinkle the movie's re-enactments with grainy video that purports to be the never-before-seen footage of a psychiatrist's patients who claim to be alien abductees.
Frankly, this movie is quite scary when it's viewed with the idea that this is the film version of creepy disappearances that are really happening in Nome, Alaska. When it's not that, it's almost laughable.
Unfortunately, Jovovich isn't running away from zombies in scanty outfits, as in the Resident Evil series. In this film she's playing a psychiatrist named Dr. Abigail Tyler, who is tenaciously fighting the idea that her husband was killed and her daughter was taken by creatures from another planet.
It's not until well into the movie that she actually discusses contact of the "fourth kind." Of course, we all know the stages: the first kind is a sighting of a UFO, the second kind is evidence on the ground or something left behind, the third kind is actually contact, and the fourth kind is abduction. These are events that supposedly all happened during a week in October 2000.
When you do a little bit of research on the Internet and Google "Dr. Abigail Tyler" or even Nome's UFO sightings, not much comes up. You find out that this is not a celebrated case by ufologists, and it isn't big in the lore of abduction theorists, and so the movie loses its frightening aspect and becomes an oddly irritating series of re-enacted scenes with lame dialogue by characters who are afraid of an owl outside their windows.
The once-realistic bio page that was put up on GoDaddy not long ago has since been taken down, perhaps because it's not really legal to pretend like you're a doctor.
Offering the audience the chance to "make the decision yourself about what really happened," this pseudo-documentary style of presenting information shows a very skinny Dr. Tyler with a pale face, dark circles under her eyes and straggly hair. That woman is shown in supposedly real interviews and hypnotic sessions that are then re-created by Jovovich and the more recognizable cast members such as Elias Koteas and Will Patton. Sometimes the bad video, or the police car footage, or the audio tapes are shown in split screen (or even four-screen) shots that have the incidents being shown in the real situation and in the re-enactment.
The movie begins with Dr. Tyler (both the "real" and the Jovovich kind) shown under hypnosis as she recalls an attack on her husband one night after they make love, but she can't see the face of the culprit. Then she discovers that her husband has been researching an ancient language, and they have been interviewing patients in Nome who all talk about an owl that is keeping them awake at night.
Suddenly, one of the patients has a breakthrough and breaks a lamp in the process, when under hypnosis he realizes that the owl is not really an owl but a visitor who is at the front door, but oh no, it's horrible, it's terrible, it's too scary, he can't see it, he can't describe it. He'll wait until the next session.
Instead, he goes home that night and kills his family. That sequence is perhaps the most disturbing, because there is pretty realistic blurred footage of the cops' arrival at the scene and a guy boarded up inside a house with his family at gunpoint, shouting and shooting at the police. It's intense as the actors do their own version of the grainy cop footage on the screen and he calls for his psychiatrist.
Another one of the scariest moments is when Dr. Tyler's secretary is unnerved about transcribing an audio version of her notes and there's a scuffle and voices that the doctor doesn't remember. There's a chilling wail on the tape and unearthly voices in what turns out to be an ancient language.
This seems to be a trend in movies these days to blur "real stories" with fiction, much as in The Blair Witch Project and The Strangers. This movie takes an extra step into outright fraud, however, by even constantly reminding us (in scrolls) that this is the real recording, and this is the actor playing the real person, etc.
Yet, it's scary, not because things jump out at you or there's a chase, but in that bone-chillingly haunting way.
The unsung hero in all this is the uncredited actress who is the "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler in the interview footage. She's the one who deserves an Oscar.
By REDante at 7:43 PM ON 11/05/09
Meh, I really go crazy when a movie depicts based on a true story/actual events kind of deal. Cause you find out just exaggerated it really is.
By Red Mask at 10:19 PM ON 11/05/09
If little green men do exist I hope they can take a joke.
By Gilveron at 10:58 PM ON 11/05/09
It's like "Fire in the Sky," another allegedly real case of alien abduction. The last ten or fifteen minutes of the film, which depict the actual abduction of Travis Walton, are terrifying. But if you read, "The Walton Experience," Travis Walton's actual book on his experience (and the supposed basis of the film), you find out the aliens might have looked scary to him, but they were actually kind of nice, or at least, not all that threatening. In fact, the studio requested the re-written ending because they felt Walton's actual experience was too boring to be filmed!
By outraged at 12:01 PM ON 11/06/09
I big have a problem with fiction masquirading as fact. There is little difference betweem this use of the media compared to the propaganda designed to 'shape public opinion' in one direction or another. We are seeing much of the latter from all sides in the current health care debate. I wonder if the writer/producer/director of the 'FourthKind' ever studied the disruptive aftermath of the infamous 1938 'War of the Worlds' radio program. I believe that such programs as the 'Fourt Kind' should be required to have announcements at the beginning and end of the movie stating that it is a work of fiction.
My two cents.
Outraged
By Leto_II at 5:45 PM ON 11/06/09
1) It's established that the aliens severely disrupt video tape before they get anywhere near it. Isn't it interesting that Abby's audio-tape player functions just perfectly even though it's based on an almost identical principle?2) Did NO ONE in the story EVER think to show the EXISTING "archive footage" to Sheriff Tantrum? How convenient. Everyone else got to see it except the one guy who needed it most. As soon as he's in the room, we forget it exists. 3) All the developments ramp up the narrative in a style too conspicuously Hollywood to be believable relation of events. 4)I have never heard of Exorcist level events happening through hypnosis before, anywhere, at any point in time, whatever the subject matter. Bad episodes, but not full on Linda Blair.
Consequently, I don't believe one word, not one vowel, of this staged, sloppy, poorly executed garbage.
By doktork at 10:30 AM ON 11/07/09
Uhm, Travis Walton's aliens were kind of nice? I suppose Jaycee Dugard's abductors were kind of nice too, eh?
By Gilveron at 3:23 PM ON 11/07/09
@doktork: Read, if you haven't, "The Walton Experience," or google Travis Walton and read the excerpted version he has on his site. Allegedly, he woke up while the aliens were doing some kind of medical procedure. He got scared and leaped off the table, and grabbed some kind of glass-looking wand to use as a weapon. The aliens left the room, and let him wander around the ship unattended, then three humanoids came in, escorted him to another exam room, and put him under anesthesia. Then he woke up back in town. That's it. In a related TV interview with a reporter from Seattle's KIRO News done back in the late 70s/early 80s, a relative or friend of Travis (I don't remember which offhand) said Travis had said the aliens were, "as friendly as they could be, but made no attempt to communicate."
Personally, I think Travis ran into some sort of ball lightning or natural plasma, and was zapped by it, which freaked the hell out of his cohorts, and they took off. I think Travis' mind concocted the alien abduction story out of flashes of consciousness during the time he was in the hospital. But then, I'm inclined to believe that "alien abductions" in general are the constructs of vivid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations.
By Gilveron at 3:28 PM ON 11/07/09
Not to mention false memories implanted either deliberately or inadvertantly by hypnotherapists.
By Leto_II at 8:04 PM ON 11/07/09
Hey guys, check this out:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/trivia
Those changes to the trivia section for the movie appeared today. It's been outed as a complete hoax from start to finish. What a disgusting attempt to manipulate the viewing public. This movie should be burned.
By Gilveron at 3:37 AM ON 11/08/09
While I wasn't aware of this before I plunked down the $8.50 to watch this movie tonight (ok, to be fair, my brother paid), it comes as no surprise. Many of the elements of Abby's so-called "abduction" experiences were lifted straight from Whitley Strieber's books "Communion," and "Transformation," also another hoax. Two elements were almost verbatim from Strieber's books, first, the patients' assertions of subconsciously replacing the image of the aliens with that of an owl, and secondly that the aliens were speaking an ancient language (although, in Strieber's book, the language was that of the ancient Celts).
And I'm sure that conspiracy theorists will say, "but the movie said she's real and that the names have been changed! It's elements of the Government-UN-Cheetos conspiracy that have taken the names out of the APA and ASA registries! The forces of Goldstein are at work!" But ok, let's for a moment say she is a real person. She's clearly unstable, she has at least one documented case of delusional behavior (her husband's suicide). Both her kid and another trained psychologist think she killed her daughter and made up this story to cover it. Not to mention that the only one of the three to corroborate her story, the african doctor, also had reason to gain from the perpetration of the hoax in the form of a higher profile, at least in the alien conspiracy world, which loves to buy books that validate their beliefs, and thus make him quite rich. In the end, all these two would have would be some fuzzy videotape and some easily debunked cooked-up audio. The real tragedy if this were a "true" story is that a little girl is dead, and a professional trained to help people cope with loss is probably responsible for not only that murder, but the murder of the family as well; she most likely purposefully implanted the false memories of abduction experiences during the hypnosis sessions.
By Gilveron at 3:56 PM ON 11/08/09
Forgot one more Strieberism; In the film, the first patient (the one that kills his family) says that the aliens had a particular smell of "pungent cinnamon." While not an exact match, Strieber mentions that his aliens smelled like, "burnt cardboard."
By Angry Robot at 9:27 AM ON 11/09/09
@ Leto_II
Never quote IMDb as fact...
The movie entertained me very much. It expertly suspends any disbelief that you may have regarding the story and subject matter.
Now, does that mean that I actually think that the events depicted in the movie really happened? Not at all. But for two, wonderfully terrifying hours, I believed.
By Leto_II at 12:01 PM ON 11/09/09
Not a bad piece of advice, Angry Robot, but I think this time they're on the mark!
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Leto_II:
Not a bad piece of advice, Angry Robot, but I think this time they're on the mark!...More »