“The Fourth Kind” is a mess of a film that is so absurd, if it had a less oppressively gloomy atmosphere and maybe a song or two it could have crossed the line into the so-bad-that-it’s-good camp.
Paramount seems to be trying to market the alien abduction movie in the same non-traditional manner that has worked for other recent horror flicks. “The Fourth Kind” is, we are informed, based on “real case studies.” The movie tells the “true” story of Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich), a psychologist in Nome, Ala., which is purportedly a hotbed of bizarre and unexplained activity.
Some silly figures regarding the number of times the FBI has been there are thrown around, as are numbers of disappearances and other such occurrences.
All of this supposedly true information is meant to prepare us for Dr. Tyler’s discovery: Nome is the site of widespread and constant alien abductions.
The film’s formatting is strange. Unique and daring is what the filmmakers were going for, one might suppose. The first scene of the movie finds actress Milla Jovovich stating that she is actress Milla Jovovich, and that she will be playing Dr. Tyler.
From here on the film proceeds to show scenes via a split-screen presentation with the “real” footage of Dr. Tyler and her patients on one side, and the acted version of the scene on the right, usually simultaneously. It is a neat idea and it works, but it ultimately becomes distracting as is sags under the leaden weight of the inflated, melodramatic and paranoid script. What we are left with is style over substance and a fundamental sleight felt when it slowly becomes clearer and clearer that there is no way in hell that any of this footage is real.
As it stands, the film’s most successful moments are the fleeting truths that Jovovich is, incredibly, able to access.
These truths are strictly dramatic, however, as the detailing of the plot becomes more and more ludicrous. There are moments of genuine surprise and successful jump scenes, but these seem to be simply frightening images used as an excuse to build an entire movie.
For instance, a person screaming and speaking in an ancient and dead Sumerian language is scary. So what does “The Fourth Kind” do? Run a super-click flash-cut reel of Sumerian tablets with a voiceover explaining how the tablets depict alien encounters that these ancestral humans had. The voice-over ends with, to paraphrase, “you can find all of this in museums.”
After this we are soon given a scene in which hypnotized patients of Dr. Tyler levitate off of their beds, speak ancient Sumerian (“I am… God!”), break their backs, and do other such things. This film does not seem to know whether it wants to be an alien abduction story, a demonic possession story, or a “Chariot of The Gods” style D-grade History Channel production about extra-terrestrials building the pyramids.
Supporting performers also hold their own. Let us face it, it is hard to make Elias Koteas look bad.
Will Patton as the Sheriff gets extra points for delivering some of the film’s most laughably absurd lines with utter jaw-clenched conviction. After all, in a film willing to sacrifice basic logic for the sake of drama and thrills, someone needs to throw in a little pizazz.
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