Review - The Fourth Kind (SPOILERS) | ryuuzaki's Blog

Wow, I'm getting out a lot of reviews at the moment!  I will post about my first week of work later, but I figured that I should just crank out this review while it is still fresh in my mind.  As always, there are SPOILERS:

You may have seen the terrifying trailer for The Fourth Kind already, and thus be aware that this film is supposedly based on factual accounts - even going so far as to tell you that sounds and footage that are included in the film are real.  A quick google-search will reveal to you that it's as seated in reality as The Blair Witch Project is.  Disappointing, but inevitable.

Anyway, The Fourth Kind is presented by way of a documentary.  The fore-mentioned "authentic archive footage" is interspersed with a reenactment of the events where Milla Jojovich plays the main character, Dr. Abigail Tyler.

Abby is a psychiatrist and the movie begins with her being a hypnotized to help her come to terms with her husband's death.  It's quickly revealed that her husband was brutally stabbed by an unseen assailant.  Terrified, she breaks out of the hypnosis.  Against her friend's advice, she decides to return to Nome to complete her husband's work.

It turns out that her husband was investigating a number of very similar cases in Nome - a place where there were countless suicides and unexplained disappearances.  In each of these cases, the person was finding themselves waking in the middle of the night to see a white owl staring in at them through the window.  The fact that all these people described the exact same thing causes Abby to become suspicious and she decides to use hypnotherapy to discover more.

Although her attempt to hypnotize one of the sufferers (Tommy) goes badly, it reveals more about the visitation.  Tommy has repressed the fact that the being has entered his room and also that it's "not an owl".  Breaking the hypnosis, he leaves but is obviously shaken by the ordeal.  Later that night, Tommy murders his family before killing himself - implying to Abby that she would understand if she had seen what he had seen.

It's not long before Abby discovers that she is repressing similar memories, and finds evidence that she has been forcibly dragged from her house.  Realizing that her husband had been experiencing similar things prior to his death, she becomes determined to discover what the "owl" really is and in doing so make sense of what happened to her husband.

I realize in reading through my brief synopsis that this movie sounds kind of cool.  It is very much in the same vein as The Mothman Prophecies.  I'll say it now, The Mothman Prophecies is a guilty pleasure of mine.  I know that it's not a great film, but I love it.  It creeped the Hell out of me the first time I saw it, and I could watch it every day without getting bored.

The Fourth Kind, simply, was inferior.  In the first act of the film, it had some great creepy bits.  Although anyone with half a brain can look at the title and figure out what the "owls" really are, watching the hypnosis tapes is very unsettling and it is very tense in places.  However, it doesn't last.  The film gets sillier and sillier, as we begin to hear recorded messages of ancient Sumerian and see scenes that have been over-used since The Exorcist.

I also did not think that the documentary footage was a very good idea.  The movie liked using split screen to show the "archive" and "reenactment" footage side by side in the bits that should have been scary.  It just detracted away from the scary!  I would have much rather just had one screen to focus on, with no subtitles or jiggly frequencies.  I appreciate that this movie was trying to be a different kind of documentary film than the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and [Rec] but, dammit, it just was annoying and made me dislike this film.

It also suffered from having too many characters that did not have screen time that they required.  Abby's children barely appeared in the film and I half-expected there to be some more development to their story.  I mean, her son hates her and her daughter has gone blind from the shock of her father's death.  There's great scope for some development there that would make the characters of all of them more moving and interesting.  But, no, we get nothing and thus this movie ends leaving the audience feeling deeply unsatisfied.

So, yeah, The Fourth Kind was pretty sucky and a waste of life to see.  Save yourself money by simply watching two TVs at the same time, comparing any documentary on UFOs to The Mothman Prophecies, while jumping on the spot and you should achieve the same kind of effect.