In remote Alaska, citizens have been mysteriously vanishing since the 1960s. Despite multiple FBI investigations, the truth behind the phenomena had never been discovered—until now. While videotaping therapy sessions with traumatized patients, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) unwittingly exposes terrifying revelations of multiple victims whose claims of being visited by alien figures all share disturbingly identical details. Based on actual case studies, The Fourth Kind uses Dr. Tyler’s never-before-seen archival footage alongside dramatic reenactments to present the most disturbing evidence ever documented in this provocative thriller critics are calling “terrifyingly real…The most shocking alien abduction movie to date.” –Tim Anderson, BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COMNome, Alaska: the edge of the world. What better place for the extraterrestrials to conduct their fiendish abduction experiments? Or so the makers of The Fourth Kind insist, in their grim attempt to reveal the truth about these mysterious disappearances. You know the movie means business when actress Milla Jovovich (as herself, without makeup, even) strides toward the camera in the opening moments and introduces things by warning us that we are about to see and hear actual tapes from psychotherapy sessions in which patients recover repressed memories. We might find it disturbing. Yes, but isn’t that why we’re watching the movie? Director Olatunde Osunsanmi soon appears onscreen himself, interviewing the real psychologist whom Jovovich plays, and throughout the film there are rough-looking videos of real people freaking out during hypnosis sessions–and even a bit of alien screeching caught on audio tape. Yep, it’s all real, except it’s all fake. The Fourth Kind has an ingenious marketing idea, which is to breathlessly convince the audience they are seeing actual footage of the supposed events, even to the point of playing the video excerpts next to the studio-shot scenes with actors. After a while, you realize that’s all the movie has: the audience’s willingness to believe there’s a ghost of a chance this might have happened. As a horror movie, the thing is clinical and detached, and when you’ve figured out the bogusness of the conceit, that doesn’t leave much. Elias Koteas and Will Patton join Jovovich in the heated story–or should we say, reconstructions of actual events. Aw, phooey. –Robert Horton
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March 5, 2010
#1
I absolutely loved this film. It also scared the daylights out of me at points. The fact that it isn’t a true story doesn’t take from the film at all in my opinion. I loved the way it was presented.
March 5, 2010
#2
Being stationed in Korea, there isn’t very much to do, especially if you’re under 21. Hell, over here you can’t even go off base unless your 21, so yeah, nothing to do but watch movies. Fortunately there is a theater on base, sure it shows movies that have been out forever (Avatar, 2012, etc) but occasionally it shows a movie that I haven’t seen, like The Fourth Kind. I remember when I went to see Paranormal Activities that I thought these two films were one and the same. They were marketed in much the same way and their plots seemed eerily similar, plus it didn’t help that I hadn’t done research on either films. When I realized my mistake I was a little embarrassed but not too much. After all, it allowed me to see PA when I probably would have skipped it, plus it put off seeing this God awful excuse for a film.
Set in Nome Alaska, The Fourth Kind is about “actual case studies” telling the story of actual people who were abducted by aliens. Yeah right. These people go all out trying to make us believe this nonsense, making spooky X-Files ish monologues with our main characters standing in the middle of a forest at night with a flood light shining behind them telling us about how everything in this film is real, that we can chose to believe it if we want or reject it completely, informing us about how the FBI seems oh SOOO interested in Name. Forget the fact that this is all complete bull, and anyone with an ounce of sense can see through this “scary” drivel. I mean really people, did ANYONE fall for this? Anyone? Here’s a hint. It is mentioned that the main character, the real one not the “dramatized”
Version, is still trying to convince people her story is true even appearing in an interview retelling it for everyone, and yet they would have us believe that she wants to use an alias instead of her real name. Right. Of COURSE that would be the case and the whole alias thing isn’t some cheap trick to keep people from googling the names and finding out the movie is complete BS. THAT couldn’t be the reason. I’ve seen movies “based on actual events” that try to make people think their real and do a good job at it (Paranormal Activities, Blare Witch Project) but this is some absurd. What this movie is, is just two films (one made in the same way PA was, one the Hollywood version) spliced together to give the appearance of realism, and its SOOOOO easy to tell. Not that PA or Blare Witch actually made me think those events were real, but good God they didn’t go to the absurd lengths this film did to make me believe. This movie just bashes you over the head over and over and over, trying to make you believe this nonsense, but it’s not. Give it a rest.
Other than that, this film is very gimmicky. I thought the split screens went out of style when the first Hulk movie tanked; I was under the impression that Hollywood realized that was a VERY bad idea. Nobody likes split screens, it’s confusing, it gets in the way of the action, and it gives me a headache. Apparently the makers of this movie didn’t get the hint. Remember how I said this is really just two movies with two different sets of actors spliced together? Guess how they do it? They play the same exact scene from both versions at the same time by splitting the screen between the two. So, you see a crummy home made version of the scene, and a glamorized Hollywood version, right next to each other, both doing the same exact thing. Apparently, this was done to make it seem more real. Please, don’t insult my intelligence. But the problem with the split screens doesn’t end there, oh no, it gets better than that. There was one specific scene I remember where not only did we get the two different versions of the movie placed side by side, both of those scenes were split as well leaving four, yes four, screens to follow. What’s more these four screens kept changing in size, pulsing as it were, while poor little ol me tried desperately to figure out what the hell as going on. Oh, and the audio kept switching from the “real” footage to the Hollywood footage, adding to the confusion.
Other gimmicks? Well, as I said before, there’s the X-Files ish “the movie is based on real events” monologues at the beginning and end of the film, there’s also the aliens speaking in a thousand year old dead language claiming that it (whatever it is) is God. Oh, THAT didn’t sound gimmicky at all. The alien talking to the screaming woman while she pleads for her child to be returned and then claiming that it is God. Hmm, yeah, and I’m supposed to think that if an alien spoke on tape before and claimed it was god that I wouldn’t have heard about it before now? That this wouldn’t be the most famous video clip ever? Didn’t they say this movie was based on real life? Yeah, I think they did, about a dozen times.
I won’t say that the movie didn’t frighten me on occasion. It did. There were some scares in it, and there were a few things that were well done, but the bad in this film FAR outweighs anything they did right. It had a good concept, there were some scares, and there was also some great imagery (the owls were great I thought) but boy oh boy, was this film gimmicky or what? I won’t tell you not to see it, this movie could be like PA, hit or miss depending on the viewers, but I didn’t like it, not in the least bit.
Replay value, low.
March 5, 2010
#3
This film was such a surprise to me. Well-acted, well-directed and spooky, it is such a shame that it was unfairly compared to the less remarkable (but still enjoyable) “Paranormal Activity.” This movie is head and shoulders better than that because it breaks new ground by actually making alien abduction seem scary and real, and by presenting it in such a terrific new and disturbing way. The fact that the footage and back story were made up doesn’t matter. This movie will stay with you, regardless. It surprises me just how many reviewers used this as an excuse to disregard the film. I never leave comments like this online, but I just had to let readers know that this film is definitely worth checking out. It was a surprise from beginning to end. And Milla is a revelation.
March 5, 2010
#4
THE FOURTH KIND
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Elias Koteas, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Corey Johnson, Enzo Cilenti, Eric Loren, Mia McKenna-Bruce and Raphael Coleman
WRITTEN BY: Olatunde Osunsanmi and Terry Robbins
DIRECTED BY: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Rated: PG-13
Genre: Science Fiction / Thriller
Release Date: 06 November 2009
Evidently the target audience for The Fourth Kind is aimed at gullible morons because that’s exactly what you would have to be to fall for what this film so desperately wants you to believe; that it’s real.
The Fourth Kind did exactly the opposite for me, of what it intended. Throughout the entire film we are constantly being reminded that it’s a movie. Every time an actor comes into frame, they announce it with subtitles: Will Patton – actor. As if that’s not bad enough, the first thing we see is Milla Jovovich standing in the woods somewhere. She proclaims loudly, “I’m actress, Milla Jovovich,” then she goes on to explain that we are going to watch a movie and we are going, `Yeah we got that lady, that’s why we are here’.
Then she tells us that some of the events that we will be viewing are true and that for dramatic purposes actors have been hired to act out those emotional scenes but that they will be played simultaneously along with the real footage. What? Why?
And just as she promised, the director uses a split-screen method with the supposed real footage being on the left and the footage with shiny big actors in it on the right. The actors on the right act out nearly everything verbatim that is happening at the exact same time on the left side of the screen. Who in their right mind in Hollywood thought this would be entertaining?
The biggest reason that this did not work for me aside from the fact that it was aggravating and beyond boring; was that the actors they hired to act on the right side of the screen, were way better actors than the ones they hired to play the real people who weren’t supposed to be acting, on the left side! How am I supposed to believe that the footage on the left is real when Milla Jovovich’s adaptation of it is astronomically more impressive and believable? They would have been better off saying that this all really happened to Milla Jovovich and shot it with a home video camera.
The film takes place in Nome Alaska. We are told that over the last several years, numerous people have vanished unexplainably. The point behind the film is that supposedly these people were abducted by aliens.
Milla Jovovich re-enacts the role of a psychiatrist by the name of Abbey Tyler. We see `real footage’ of the person her character is based on, interviewing patients. Her name has been changed of course but there she is right there in front of us on the screen, so what was the point of changing her name? Right.
And isn’t there some kind of psychiatrist / patient confidentiality clause that protects people from being humiliated? Apparently none of the people on the left side of the screen had a problem with Hollywood glamorizing their violent and no doubt traumatic abductions. Again, right.
Tyler’s research discloses that several of her patients have reported being awakened in the night at around the same time and having weird visits from spooky owls. What this has to do with the aliens is beyond me.
Despite how terribly lame the film is, you get outstanding performances out of Will Patton, Milla Jovovich and another actor that has been overlooked for far too long; Elias Koteas. I get the sense that none of these great actors knew just what the final product was going to look like.
I will admit that the director did do some amazing things cinema-graphically on the right side of the screen and the footage they show on the left is pretty creepy at times; but whenever there is an `alien incident’ let’s call it, the camera conveniently loses focus and is blurred out of our vision and we are left only with screams of horror and shaky camera movements.
Oh, and when their spaceship comes, yeah that makes the camera blurry as well. The aliens don’t mind that all of this is filmed, because it’s obviously fake…. I mean because the cameras get all fuzzy so there is no way they can get caught. That’s what I meant to say.
March 5, 2010
#5
Something strange is going on in Nome, Alaska. That’s what “The Fourth Kind” claims. According to the film written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, while treating her patients, Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist living in Nome, discovered horrible truths behind the unexplained missing person cases in the town – that is, sort of “A Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind.”
Milla Jovovich (Alice of the “Resident Evil” series) plays the role of Dr. Abigail Tyler. At the beginning of the film Ms Jovovich stands before the camera as herself, an actress, and then she appears as Dr. Abigail Tyler, psychiatrist and mother of two children. Dr. Tyler puts her insomniac patients under hypnosis – all of them say they have seen the same thing, an owl – but the doctor’s treatment results in disastrous consequences. There are more details to come in this thin story, which, told in a straightforward way, is in fact nothing but a weak episode in “The X-Files” series.
Osunsanmi’s “fact-based thriller” is in a way more ambitious than Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of The Third Kind.” I mean “The Fourth Kind” is so intent on being authentic that the film employs several narrative gimmicks such as the use of “actual audio” tapes and the “real” interview footage (where Osunsanmi himself appears as interviewer). At some points both “actual footage” and “re-enacted footage” even appear side by side, using the 1960-ish split screen technique.
Despite (or because of) the elaborated way in which the film’s story is presented, we soon realize that what “The Fourth Kind” is trying to do is nothing new, except its pseudo-documentary style, which itself is not enough to keep us interested. Actually the whole film is not interesting. It is not scary either, except, perhaps, the haggard face of the “real” Abigail Tyler. She scared me a lot.