In ""The Fourth Kind,"" Olatunde Osunsanmi actively attempts to destroy the mystery behind alien encounters with facts. The problem is that mystery is a key ingredient to any film about aliens—that's what keeps us checking over our shoulders as we exit the theater and see weird lights in the sky over the parking lot.
Sure, Osunsanmi collected moments of genuinely unsettling footage (supposedly collected during a sleep study of insomniacs in Nome, Alaska)–most of you have seen all of it in the trailer and TV spots–but the film on the whole is poorly acted and produced, the cinematic equivalent of seeing the string holding up a pie tin in a home video of a ""flying saucer.""
Osunsanmi's obsession with convincing the audience that this film is ""a fact—based thriller"" disrupts everything that could possibly make this film compelling. It starts off with Milla Jovovich breaking the fourth wall to tell us that she'll be playing Dr. Abigail Taylor in a film that follows the real—life experiences of the psychologist as she attempted to find a pattern in the experiences of several of her insomniac patients.
""You can believe what you choose to believe,"" Jovovich cautions as she destroys our ability to immerse ourselves in the narrative.
We then cut to an interview with the actual Dr. Abigail Taylor, who is easily the scariest thing in the entire movie. Pale and gaunt, her enormous eyes and whining speech offer two possibilities—either she herself is an alien and will probe the audience in the big finish of the film, or something truly frightening happened to her that will in turn happen to her doppelgänger-Milla, something terrifying that we get to see.
Naturally, we don't get to see anything. The movie instead moves to painfully recreating the progress of Taylor's research, with a small amount of character sprinkled in–something about her kids or dead husband. It seemed like a big part of the story, but apparently it was more important to recreate the footage Dr. Taylor captured than to give her on—screen counterpart some believable characterization.
The actual footage is then shown side-by-side with the dramatization, often with a reaction shot from both the real and Milla versions of Dr. Taylor. The resulting four-pane shot with huge ""actual footage"" labels everywhere completely destroys the tension you could feel seeing people float in mid-air. It looks more like a poorly shot pilot for ""24: Alaska"" than the tense, unearthly moments they should be.
Speaking of Alaska, Osunsanmi must have gotten a great deal on helicopter fuel in Nome, because ""The Fourth Kind"" has shots from flyovers set to scary music nearly every ten minutes, like clockwork.
The encounters get a little closer toward the end of the movie, but not much–the documentary footage seems to get more and more distorted as the film goes on, making the skeptic in me suspect there may be a reason no one can find a record of a Dr. Abigail Taylor ever practicing in Nome, Alaska.
We end up with a film containing very little action and very little suspense—just ""factual events"" that may not be factual. Watching the trailer is more exciting than watching the actual film, which is pretty sad.
Grade: D
