Believe it or not, the cheesy "testimonial" that Milla Jovovich delivers in the trailer for the alien-abduction fake-doc The Fourth Kind is how the movie actually begins.
To wit: "I am actress Milla Jovovich. I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred in October 2000. Every scene in this movie is supported by archive footage. Some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing."
Just as a point of comparison, here is how the "psychic" Criswell narrated the opening of what is widely considered the worst film of all time, Ed Wood Jr.'s Plan 9 From Outer Space: "And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened ... all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal."
I'm just saying a talking head telling you what you're seeing is real doesn't make it so -- especially when the movie is definitely NOT a documentary.
The trouble is, The Fourth Kind, a movie that purportedly blows the lid off Nome, Alaska as ground zero for alien activity (which might explain Sarah Palin at least), stakes its scariness entirely on your credulity.
The minute you suspect it may be pure BS, the air is let out of the film.
Half the movie is ostensibly actual footage of a clinical psychologist named Abigail Tyler using hypnosis to uncover the repressed memories of alien abductees, memories so disturbing that some of the subjects severely injure themselves.
The other half is Jovovich playing Tyler, and actors playing the "real-life" people in the grainy clinical videos (who, as I say, may be actors themselves -- call it a hunch, based partly on the fact that the "real people" are in some cases better looking than the "actors" portraying them. Debunking reports are also already starting to dribble in from Alaska).
Okay, you're saying, so what if a movie "lies" by saying it's real?
What about Orson Welles' radioplay War of the Worlds?
Or the '80s TV movie Special Bulletin, which presented a news broadcast version of an atomic terrorist standoff in Charleston, S.C.?
I guess that's a whole other issue (although it's worth noting that NBC made the Special Bulletin producers run disclaimers at every commercial break).
So let's treat The Fourth Kind as fiction. If belief is not part of the equation, the conceit of running "real" and "dramatized" footage right into each other tends to draw the viewer out of the movie.
There is a lot of half-baked soap opera wrapped around the hypnosis scenes.
Seems Abigail's husband, also a sleep researcher, died in bed months earlier, apparently murdered, and left his wife to carry on his work. Their daughter (Alisha Seaton) suffers from hysterical blindness and their son (Enzo Cilenti) is angry at his mom in general.
At wit's end, Abbie starts seeing a psychiatrist herself (Elias Koteas), who takes forever to believe his lyin' eyes when hypnotized people seem to start rising off the bed.
In the end, unless the "real" footage of alien abductions really is real (and the military is going to want to confiscate it ASAP), The Fourth Kind rides entirely on a hack gimmick.
It's a third-rate Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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