Rating:
3.5 out of 5
Short Version: IF you let it draw you in with its factual approach, The Fourth Kind will creep you out more than Paranormal Activity.
Screen Rant reviews The Fourth Kind
After the extreme split in opinions on Paranormal Activity (I liked it), I was curious to see The Fourth Kind to see which side of the fence I fell on. I can understand how you can either love or hate the former, and I have a feeling something similar will happen with this film: Either you buy into the whole premise and let it suck you in, or you stand back and call B.S. on the whole thing.
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The Fourth Kind opens unexpectedly, with Milla Jovovich as herself talking plainly to the audience. She speaks matter of factly and seriously, telling us the details upon which the film we are about to see are based. In addition to actors portraying real people (most of whom will have their names changed in the film) there will be scenes of actual video shot during the events portrayed in the movie. It will be disturbing, she tells us.
What will be so disturbing? The account of Alaskan psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (played by Milla), taken from her notes, videotapes (and a personal interview by director Olatunde Osunsanmi) which tells the story of the strange nocturnal experiences of a number of residents of Nome Alaska in the Summer/Fall of 2000. A number of townsfolk have all been experiencing the same unique visions and sleeplessness at night – similar in details that could not be coincidental, and they’ve individually turned to her for help in determining what these things mean.
They all share visions of being watched by a strange white owl in the middle of the night. This sounds goofy, but when they intercut footage of the actual people in her office relating their story – each on their own and each story with the same details – the creepiness factor starts to escalate. And it only gets worse as Dr. Tyler delves deeper into their psyches to unearth buried details via hypnosis.
What starts her down the path of “something really weird is going on” is the fact that going back to the 1960s there have been (for a town of its size) an awful lot of unexplained missing people in Nome. The FBI has gone out multiple times to try and find answers and has always come up blank. One of her sessions leads to a very tragic event, putting her at odds with the town sheriff who believes she is stirring people up and causing harm. Eventually things come to a head, get really crazy and out of hand, and bring us to the present day interview that is threaded throughout the film.
The creep factor comes in from assuming that what you’re watching is, in fact, true and that the homemade videos are all in fact legitimate. However I will say that the farther you get into the film the more you have to suspend your disbelief – especially with some of what appears in the supposedly real camcorder footage. I won’t give anything away, but you’ll understand if you see the movie.
If you don’t buy into that concept at least a little bit, then The Fourth Kind will leave you as cold as Paranormal Activity did for people who didn’t go along for the ride with that film. However if you let it get in your head, I think you’ll find that The Fourth Kind is even more effective at freaking you out and causing you some nervousness after you turn off the last light at night and head off to bed.
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65 Comments
!!!!!Spoilers!!!!
Dave,
I’m not one to answer a question with a question, unless the questions will help me find an answer. At this point if you have to make me imagine, which I tried to do during this movie, your not answering my question.
But I will humor you. If I was the FBI looking at the situation I would think that she was crazy and needed physiatric help that does NOT involve hypnosis. And saving lives would have involved stopping her from practicing. There are a lot of other ways to figure out if aliens were messing with these people other than hypnosis which would have taken this movie to another level in my opinion.
After watching the film I left with these questions;
1.) If hypnosis works so well why was she not able to see that her husband committed suicide?
(Aliens implanting a false memory doesn’t work in this situation because they did the same thing when they abducted people and yet via hypnosis they saw what happened to them.)
2.) If her husband did commit suicide wouldn’t that discredit this whole movie based on hypnosis?
3.) What if aliens were truly messing with the hypnosis tapes, wouldn’t all of them have the same distortion?
4.) If the tapes had that level of distortion wouldn’t the audio have the same type of distortion, almost making none of the audio recognizable?
5.) Why did everyone involved in that ordeal give up on that “crazy” woman and want nothing to do with this film?
6.) Why would an alien say its god? (Felt that an extraterrestrial would more or less say that there is no god.)
Now these are some questions that were going through my head during the film. All of which lead me to think that nothing presented was believable, other than the history lesson, which almost every civilization has including ours. Also at the end I felt that it was a “supernatural power” and not an alien.
The only thing that helps this movie in supporting an alien abduction theory is the daughter going missing. But even then the film makers didn’t do their homework to find a city that actually has a missing child. If you try to do a search for missing children in Nome, Alaska within the last 20 years you will come up with no results.
But overall to me, this movie had lazy written all over it but had potential to be better. While somewhat entertaining I left the theater disappointed. Not that I thought via a movie I was going to be taught something but the fact that they screwed up their own story so badly. If your going to make a movie like this then you need to make sure your story supports itself instead of dismantling what you tried to create. I’ve seen a lot of extraterrestrial documentaries and movies that are better than this joke of one.
I’m not going to give a comment on the movie but instead tell you of an experience my mother had back in 1963. My mother had booked a room on a freighter,out of New Orleans,to go to the Worlds Fair in Brussels and visit family in Holland. While in route,somewhere at sea,a u.f.o. payed the ship a visit. My mother claimed that it hovered about fifty feet over the ship,silently,and all on board could feel the warmth of the thing.After a short while,it just took off. the captain of the ship commented “no country has anything that can fly like that.” She described it as moving very fast in a zig zag pattern.
Even if it wasn’t real it has real similarities to demonic possession.
2nd Thessalonians 2:9-12 9 “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, 10and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie 12and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”
I just seen this movie on http://www.doesthatwork.co.uk for free its awesome!
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