Another Kind of Boring

According to the ranking system created by scientist J. Allen Hynek, there are four levels of alien encounters and the last is an encounter of the ‘fourth kind.’ This is when a person is abducted by aliens. Unfortunately for the film “The Fourth Kind,” the title is the creepiest thing about it. The film opens with the star Milla Jovovich rather awkwardly telling us that she will be playing Dr. Abigail Tyler and that the film is a dramatization of true events which will be disturbing to viewers. What’s disturbing right off the bat is that the film looks like an opener to a History Channel special on alien abductions, complete with an attempt to elicit a creepy feeling by filming the host in the woods with cheap smoke machine effects blowing in the background.

The phrase that comes to mind and sticks through the rest of the film is “not so convincing.”

This film is a game of show and tell, with all tell and no-show, that leaves you disappointed because you came to get scared and instead leave with a feeling of disappointment with a movie that relies on devices that simply do not work (like split-screen – did that ever work in any film?)

The film begins with supposed archival footage of an interview with the purported Dr. Tyler, which we will see a few times in the film as she discusses her close encounters. Jovovich plays Tyler, who whispers her way through the entire film. Jovovich has never had much of a presence on-screen, but in this film she plays the washed out version of a widowed Alaskan resident who is trying to unravel the mystery of her husband’s death along with the deaths and disappearances of dozens of residents since the 1960s. What she finds is that while putting the residents under hypnosis they scream and act horrified but can’t actually recount what happened to them except that the incident starts with an owl watching them through a window.

And so we wait, and watch like the owl.

And it doesn’t amount to much- but boredom.

Throughout the film, we see this archival footage of Dr. Tyler and her interviews with the residents of Nome, Alaska split-screen with the film “re-enactment” of these events. The effect of seeing two exact same scenes has very little impact, and is in fact distracting because you end up trying to watch both scenes which are exactly the same. As Dr. Tyler tries to figure out what the residents really went through, if anything, she listens to a recording of herself being abducted which she has no recollection of. In the recording there is a strange language which she tries to decode with the help of an author played by Hakeem Kae-Kazim. He determines it is an ancient language. The explanation never goes further than that, and is literally meaningless in the scheme of the film. So the aliens speak an ancient language and turn into owls for some reason? Thanks for the enlightenment.

The rest of the cast’s performances and character types are formulaic. There is the cynical doctor who is an associate of Dr. Tyler’s and does not add anything interesting to the movement of the story as his character undergoes no development at all. Another pivotal character is the sheriff of the town played by Will Patton (“Armageddon,” “Gone in Sixty Seconds”) who doesn’t believe anything anyone says either and just storms through every scene with no rhyme or reason for his actions. The two children of Dr. Tyler are not memorable because they do not have a lot of lines to speak, and do not play much of a role until the conclusion of the film.

The technical aspects of the film leave something to be desired as well. For some reason there is handheld camera work in a lot of the scenes, possibly to give the audience a sensation of being in the film to make in scarier, but it is just irritating and bouncy. There is a lack of music through much of the film and it detracts more than it adds to the creepy effect. Overall, the action of the film is not strong and needs something to carry it from scene to scene.

When a film claims to be based on true events it tends to make it just a bit scarier, more fun, or more dramatic. The problem with “The Fourth Kind” is that whether what we are shown is ‘actual footage’ or not, doesn’t matter at all because we don’t see anything especially scary so it doesn’t add to the creepiness or validity of the film. There are entirely too many scenes which are soft-spoken by the actors and are put in place to build tension, but fail to deliver because nothing scary really happens, and the power of insinuation of what is happening isn’t all that scary either.

By the end of this film you’ll be wishing that your movie ticket had an encounter of the ‘fourth kind.’ It is that memorable.