The Fourth Kind- review

The closest thing to an alien in this movie.

This movie is so stupid.  Why for the love of crap would you have a movie about alien abductions where you do not show an alien?  Hell, I would have even taken a cheap ploy like in the film “Contact” where the alien turned out to be the woman’s father.  It’s lame but it works.  The closest thing you get is an owl with coloration that gives it a slight alien appearance.  Ooh scary.

As if that wasn’t bad enough the film makers work their hardest to make this movie out to be some sort of authentic movie by having the actress Milla Jovovich come in the beginning and break the fourth wall telling the audience how frightening and real the events are.  Intertwined between this is “Real” footage, audio and video clips which are supposed to give the film authenticity.

There is a huge flaw to this and that is that it’s all BULLSHIT! The people in the “Real” footage are actors. Universal Studios had to settle out of court for making fake articles and obituaries to promote this movie.  Anchorage Daily News writer Kyle Hopkins even investigated some of the validity this movie and found nothing to be accurate. 

The only thing slightly true is this: There was a string of disappearance in Nome.  Around 20 folks disappeared so the F.B.I got involved and determined that alcohol and cold temperatures caused their deaths.  This happens more often than you think in cold, isolated areas.  9 of the bodies were never recovered.  That is a big stretch to jump to the conclusion of U.F.O. abduction. 

Now I have no problem with Hollywood bullshit.  But when a movie tells you its true because the movie relies on it being true so heavily for its shock value then it really is a cheap thing to pull.   Now apart from that it still has a lot of problems.  The movie is terribly slow and the writing is so poor it comes off as filler.

I wet the bed!

There are a few jump scares and they are so-so.  Milla gives a performance that is too good for the material that she is dealing with.  Honestly this movie could have been so much better if it had gone two other ways.  If it abandoned the PG-13 idea and went full on R mode and made the alien appear and made it sadistic, cold, and terrifying in its abductions.  That would have been worked.  The other way would have been to make it a documentary style where it was told interview style as if they were discovering footage as it was happening that way they wouldn’t have to get rid of a lot of the original script but they could at least tighten it up with interviews and more information and U.F.O. footage.

All in all it is a lame attempt to cash in on an unexpected fear and the ignorance of the location by folks who don’t want to look up the facts.  Its probably will get the same draw to people who enjoy silliness like “30 Days of Night”.  Except where that movie has some fun to it now and again this one is a stone cold snooze fest in the guise of a horror movie.