The Fourth Kind (DVD)

The alien abduction drama The Fourth Kind is a fun idea buried underneath a hokey script and bad execution. The idea is that what you’re seeing is a true story (although of course it isn’t), mixing ‘archive videotaped footage’ and audio from the real events, with re-enacted bits featuring Milla Jovovich, but allegedly based on documented evidence.

Milla Jovovich opens the movie as herself, telling us that we will see real, disturbing footage during the film (which is often presented split-screen with the re-enactment on the other side), before she morphs into her character of Dr. Abigail Taylor, who lives in the isolated town of Nome, Alaska, which has been plagued by mysterious disappearances. With her husband recently murdered by an intruder, the psychologist starts to investigate, largely by interviewing a group of disturbed people, who all claim strange things have happened to them, which started with the appearance of an owl at their window. However when she hypnotises them, they begin to freak out, with one patient immediately going home and murdering his family. And wouldn’t you know it, but odd things start happening to Abigail, which suggest that supernatural alien visitors will be after her soon.

With its tricksy formal ‘is it real?’ device, which includes director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviewing the supposedly real Dr. Tyler, who looks nothing Jovovich and is now practically catatonic and prone to overacting, as well as milliseconds long ‘real’ footage of people levitating and being pulled by unseen forces, it could have been unnerving and a lot of fun. However it’s a trick that only works if it can successfully sell the contrivance as plausible, which it can’t. Much of ‘real’ footage is less believable than the stuff the movie admits is faked (or dramatised, at least).

The film seems to think it’s inventing a new genre and so rather than fitting into the conventions of the drama documentary, it completely overplays its hand in trying to convince us it’s all real. It becomes a case where it protests its truth so much, that not only does it quickly become apparent it’s a lie, but that it’s a pretty dumb lie at that. As The Fourth Kind goes along, it gets increasingly preposterous, with OTT plotting and nonsensical ideas. For example, why on Earth would aliens who come to Earth and seem keen to communicate their general evilness to the world, only speak in an ancient Sumerian dialect that sounds creepy on audio tapes? And why do they conveniently distort videotaped footage but not the sound, even though it’s all based on the same magnetic technology?

Perhaps most frustrating is that at the end the film, it tries to posit a possible different explanation to what happened. If the film had built up that idea further earlier on in the movie, it could have been really interesting and explored why people might believe in alien abduction. However instead it just seems chucked in to add to the ‘is it real?’ nonsense.

While the film is a failure, it’s an interesting idea and it’s a real shame it overdoes things so horribly and can’t pull it off. Director Osunsanmi must have felt embarrassed when he watched Paranormal Activity and saw how much better and more simply it sold its central ‘found footage’ conceit.

The distributors must have realised that there was little point going to town on this release, despite the scope for further faked featurettes and documentaries (some of which appeared online before the film’s cinema release in order to further the slightly cack-handed attempt to sell the idea it was all true), as the disc includes no special features at all.

The Fourth Kind is a fun idea with plenty of potential to be creepy, but it’s screwed up by a plot that gets ever more nonsensical and a desperation to sell the idea it’s all real that ends up convincing the audience of the reverse

Overall Verdict: If anything, The Fourth Kind is more likely to convince you all alien abductions are fake than that they’re real.

Special Features:
None

Reviewer: Tim Isaac