Whenever a film starts with B-movie linchpin Milla Jovovich (A Perfect Getaway) saying, “I’m actress Milla Jovovich,” warning bells — if not monstrous, blaring bomb sirens — are triggered in the mind of the viewer. It’s one thing to be subjected to a poorly done sci-fi thriller for 98 minutes, but a meta-fictional version with Jovovich might just prove fatal.
Fortunately, The Fourth Kind does have a smattering of tricks other than simply bursting through the fourth wall. Jovovich goes on to explain she is portraying a real person named Dr. Abigail Tyler who investigated a mysterious string of disappearances and reports by patients of alien abductions in Nome, Alaska, since the 1960s following the random death of her husband.
We do see who the ostensibly real Dr. Tyler is as she is interviewed by director Olatunde Osunsanmi (WithIN), and the sight of her might truly be one of the more frightening images in recent memory. Although it could be attributed to a poor digital camcorder offering that vérité look, Tyler’s skin tone is an inhuman shade of white, her body looks ready to be embalmed and she speaks in a voice that never ceases to sound dying and tear-choked.
Clips that Tyler purportedly filmed of herself and her patients undergoing hypnosis are held in a wavering split screen with Osunsanmi’s lurid recreations of them. At one point, Jovovich and Tyler vocalize in harmony, saying the exact same words — the former into an expensive, widescreen film camera and the latter into a cheap, low resolution digital camcorder and voice recorder.
The story itself is more bizarre than Osunsanmi’s mix of documentary format and an awful Hollywood scream fest. The FBI classifies alien abductions as the highest level of contact with extraterrestrials, hence they are encounters of the fourth kind, one-upping Steven Spielberg. Tyler’s patients all report seeing an owl and then experiencing something they are immediately forced to forget.
If the archival footage were extricated from the film, then there really wouldn’t be much to look at. There is a clichéd, grieving-widow current beneath all the talk of contact with beings of higher intelligences as Tyler attempts to hang on to her possibly blinded-by-aliens daughter Ashley (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Doctors) and her bratty, Levi Johnston-esque rebellious teenage son, who is fed one of the worst, tired lines of dialogue in the film about his deceased father: “Dad never forgot.”
Maybe it’s due to the combined numbing effects of the marketing campaigns for The Blair Witch Project and the recent, awful Paranormal Activity, but audiences are not willing anymore to believe everything poorly shot on a handheld camcorder. Nevertheless, The Fourth Kind is surprisingly convincing at times. Although the film has to ham-fistedly inform the viewer of “Actual Audio” or “Actual Footage” each time it plays one of Tyler’s tapes, there is still quite an impact when her patients undergo various convulsions and psychiatric breakdowns upon confronting what the aliens implanted in their subconscious.
Still, with every plausible recording (apparently the aliens spoke in Sumerian), there is an accompanying special effects-overdosed theatrical equivalent. Despite Osunsanmi’s best efforts, blurry visuals of an owl (which appears to be a cousin of Harry Potter’s Hedwig), will never, ever be frightening.
Director of photography Lorenzo Senatore is allowed to run amok with sweeping aerials of Alaskan vistas (actually filmed in Bulgaria). One has to wonder if the money could have been spent on a forensic expert to investigate why all of Tyler’s tapes mysteriously do not record the alien encounters themselves. The only real person we see is Tyler, and she looks far too much like an alien herself to be of any help. Why aren’t there any talking heads? If this is true, couldn’t it be a documentary?
Questions such as these are a natural reflex for anyone who has his or her rationality challenged by a film and a quick Google search bears them out. Upon discovering that an Anchorage Daily News investigation never found records of Dr. Abigail Tyler ever existing in Nome and that websites attesting to her credibility were registered in 2009, viewers might demand their money back. Legal action could even be taken since there is no accompanying disclaimer to the film, except to say that the names of the principal characters have been changed.
It’s a shame really. It would have been nice to believe, to claim The Fourth Kind as this generation’s X-Files. Instead, we are left wondering who in their right mind allowed Osunsanmi, a little-known director listed under miscellaneous crew for Smoking Aces on IMDB.com, to perpetuate this hoax on such a mass scale. Maybe the most damning blow is that there is a Dr. Abigail Tyler on Twitter. The sequel seems ready-made — Tweets of the Fourth Kind.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars
