The Fourth Kind | Thriller | rated PG-13 (A,V) | starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton | 1:38 mins
The patients of Dr. Abbey Tyler (Milla Jovovich) all report experiencing the same phenomena. Under hypnosis they react violently as if being attacked. Soon she finds the phenomena on her doorstep, and races to find out what it is, compiling recorded and video evidence as the local sheriff (Will Patton) suspects that she is responsible for the injuries sustained by all of the patients in her care.
The phrase “unwatchable” is more often used when referring to a movie that is such inept trash that it is too repulsive or embarrassing to bear another second of. The Fourth Kind has some style, a decent performance in Milla Jovovich (love her) and a few genuinely creepy moments. Even one good jump-out-of-my-seat jump, which isn’t easy to pull off. It is also, very often, unwatchable.
It’s not inept, it’s just a bad idea leading to bad filmmaking. As the advertising gives away, Fourth Kind becomes an alien abduction movie. And it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a good, scary alien abduction movie. Fourth Kind doesn’t shift out of first gear because it is more concerned with it’s own cinematic tricks. It’s an experiment. Like 3 directors directing 3 acts in The Signal. Except this cinematic experiment fails. It is so distracting that it draws you out of the movie time and again making it difficult to watch and impossible to get into. The film is a hoax. That’s the experiment. It’s goal seems to be, not to tell us a story, but to get us to believe the story they are telling us is true – when it isn’t.
Even stranger is director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s (seen onscreen interviewing “the real Abbey Tyler”) vision of his experiment. He doesn’t want to make a stylish Hollywood alien abduction movie or a faux documentary alien abduction movie so he shoots both and he just puts them side by side in a split screen. As if this will further convince us it is real. One in glossy Hollywood technicolor with a recognizable star, the other an indie flickk in grainy hand-held camera footage. He does this in the hypnosis sequences, what would have been the movie’s creepiest moments now fallen victim to Osunsanmi’s cruel experiment to zap the thrills and chills from the picture. On one side of the screen we get a fairly realistic scene, at least real enough for me to buy in a movie, and on the other we have the same thing played by an “actor”, the phoniness of which is exacerbated by the “reality” footage next to it. The two sides work against each other. Then when the movie focuses on one of it’s realities, most often the Jovovich movie reality style, we feel we are missing the other movie. I’m sorry, but any director with the most basic knowledge of the language of film should have recognized at some point during the planning stage that this wouldn’t work. What we end up with is not a film that breaks convention as Osunsanmi probably intends, but one that is just broken.
And if you’re ready for one more level of weird, it would have to be the way that Jovovich (this is one game girl) and Osunsanmi appear as themselves at the beginning and end of the film and address the camera, treating The Fourth Kind as a Public Service Announcement about alien abductions. It’s ludicrous. Owls or Aliens: The More You Know. It is absolutely tragic in this case too, because there are some genuinely creepy nuggets in here too. Had the movie picked either of these styles and stuck with it – it could have been a pretty solid chiller. The movie completely goes to pieces at the hand of a director’s self indulgent, masturbatory, completely misguided attempt to manipulate the audience instead of thrill or engage it.