It’s been written that cannibals refuse to eat divorced women because they are too bitter. They’d be wise to adopt the same attitude towards anyone who sat through “The Fourth Kind”, it’s hard to feel anything else when exiting this failed experiment in scifi cinema verite. What makes the film such a catastrophic failure is that is has so much potential, that writer/director Olantunde Osunsami never seems capable of coming close to fulfilling. “The Fourth Kind” could have been an amazing faux documentary on alien home invasions in the remotest part of America, but instead all we’re offered is a rather boring film that’s occasionally spiked with something mildly interesting.
If you’re inclined to believe the film, there were things more disturbing than Sarah Palin’s moose hunting going on in Alaska during the final months of 2000. Specifically in the city of Nome, where psychiatrist Dr. Abbey Tyler starts getting results she hadn’t bargained for from her hypnotherapy sessions. She’s been treating patients for sleep problems, but some bizarre correlations arise when different patients describe being watched by an owl–one that stays the entire night, can’t be chased away, and somehow always finds a way inside. Probing deeper, she discovers there is no owl; the frightening reality is her patients are being taken from their homes by creatures from another world who can do with them whatever they want, whenever they want to do it. Still grieving from the recent death of her husband, Dr. Tyler has to deal with an increasingly hostile sheriff who suspects her in the recent deaths of patients, as well as the growing reality that her husband’s death was caused by extraterrestrials trying to erase their tracks.
There’s really no way to sugarcoat the fact that “The Fourth Kind” is a terrible movie. It’s not so much that the film’s chemistry is off, rather the test tubes are boiling over and the whole place has gone toxic in record time. Osunsanmi’s direction is listless and dull; he never evokes even remotely any feelings of suspense or tension in any of the scenes. A hostage scene where a husband is holding a gun to the heads of his wife and children plays out in an underwhelming fashion, as if Osunsanmi decided to drain all the adrenaline out of the scene just in case he’d need it later.
The hypnotherapy sessions also are devoid of any tension, they’re allowed to play out predictably with any shocks telegraphed at least a minute or two in advance. Granted, he tries some cinematic parlor tricks to try to liven things up, but they wear out their welcome quickly as their lack of appeal gives way to a realization of how pointless they are. Why disguise the patient’s identity onscreen, but allow us to hear his voice and see his face? Why bother to show the “tapes” of Dr. Tyler’s sessions alongside the film’s “re-enactment”, when they show pretty much the same thing? Osunsanmi’s overkill doesn’t end there; in the aforementioned hostage scene, we’re treated up to four screens showing the scene from various angles. None of which really show anything, and when shots are fired the scene is digitally blurred to obscure any violence. Scenes where Osunsanmi supposedly interviews the real “Dr. Tyler” at a fictional university are also fairly repetitive and don’t really accomplish anything but pad the running time and drag the film out, which is the only thing he does incredibly well.
Despite all that, “The Fourth Kind” could have been rescued by a really great script. Considering the premise, all it would’ve taken was a little imagination and a halfway decent writer. Since Osunsanmi writes worse than he directs, you’d have a better chance of drinking Tang with ET while watching “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” than getting a somewhat watchable movie. Setting an alien abduction film in a place like Nome, Alaska opens up a great chance to explore humanity’s fears of isolation, not to mention the despair of being at the mercy of beings who can do to us at their whim. Creatures coming for us when we sleep is a universal childhood fear, and discovering the monsters our parents told us are not only very real, but coming from God could only guess where has the makings of a nail biter. Presenting it as a sort of “Blair Witch Project” meets Whitney Streiber book also has a ton of exciting potential. Apparently those ideas were whisked away by the mothership to a better place, because all that’s left is a paint-by-numbers efforts that borders on the ridiculous.
Expecting us to swallow the idea that aliens can master intergalactic travel but haven’t figured out the language they’re using to communicate with us is older than the pyramids, and thus a bit out of date, is absurd. Trying to pass off the idea that extraterrestrials would behave like mobsters, killing Tyler’s husband and crippling her patient in order to silence her is just too stupid for words. Even dumber is having the aliens abduct her as a warning–if she’s such a threat why bother returning her? If the aliens’ behavior is anything to go by, we can infer there is life in outer space and they all ride the short bus.
The cast all turn in excellent performances, more in a testament to their abilities than the material they’re given. But effective acting simply isn’t enough to save this lost cause, and Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton all deserve much better.
This weekend, the true humbug in theaters wasn’t “A Christmas Carol” after all, but a movie desperatly trying to ride the coattails of “Paranormal Activity”. Ironically, it’s been revealed that “The Fourth Kind” was shot in Bulgaria, with some parts filmed in California. Nor is there any Dr. Abbey Tyler and there has been no research published by her. Maybe if it was filmed as a straight science fiction film, this could have been a fairly interesting movie. But it wasn’t, so all we’re given is a sham–and a dull one at that.
Olatunde Osunsanmi (director) / Olatunde Osunsanmi, Terry Robbins (screenplay)
CAST: Milla Jovovich … Abbey Tyler
Will Patton … Sheriff August
Hakeem Kae-Kazim … Awolowa Odusami
Corey Johnson … Tommy Fisher
Enzo Cilenti … Scott Stracinsky
Elias Koteas … Abel Campos
Eric Loren … Deputy Ryan
Mia McKenna-Bruce … Ashley Tyler
Raphaël Coleman … Ronnie Tyler
