In a unique presentation, “The Fourth Kind” starts out with
a documentary-style opening, with actress Milla Jovovich introducing herself
and addressing the audience directly. She shares that the film is a
“dramatization” that centers on the story of Dr. Abigail Emily “Abby” Tyler
(the hauntingly beautiful Jovovich plays the worn, beat-down Abby in a stark
contrast), a psychologist who experiences “extremely disturbing events” in the
course of her work in Nome, Alaska. The idea behind the movie was to mirror
actual footage with dramatic re-enactments in some areas to heighten the
realism needed to lend credence to the story.
Abby and her husband and fellow psychologist, Will, were
partnering to research the coincidences and similarities shared by some 300
people in Nome, who were experiencing sleep deprivation caused by the
appearance of a white owl waking them up at 3 in the morning, just like staring
at them and hovering over them sometimes. [SPOILER ALERT: Hey, what if the owl
is actually dozens of shadowy aliens doing abductions and then erasing the
memories? J/k, wtf, lol, AYFKM]
One night, Will’s post-coital naptime is interrupted by the
small matter of being stabbed and murdered by an intruder. And despite her
being right next to her husband, Abby is unable to recollect the man’s face,
even under hypnosis.
Speaking of hypnosis, the eerie factor kicks into overdrive
when two of Abby’s patients endure full-body freakouts when placed in a
hypnotic state, to the point of sustaining severe bodily injury and nausea. When
one of Abby’s patients, Tommy, takes his family hostage, begins spouting a
strange language and then murders all of them before offing them himself, the
local sheriff (played by the underrated Will Patton) says, “Hey, maybe it’s
time I have a spot of tea with this creep-show doctor whose husband just died
under, shall we say, unusual circumstances.”
The tea party ends amiably enough, with the sheriff saying,
“Hey, you know, the next time it looks like someone is going to start
channeling defunct languages and pot-shotting his family, give me a bell, eh?”
But the sheriff gets super-pissed (“You’re not gonna use the people of Nome for
a goddam rat study”) when another hypnotic session that begins with some
relatively harmless levitation and demonic possession ends with a few crushed
vertebrae and a paralyzed patient—all while Abby supervised.
Late on evening, as Abby tries to piece together the day’s
events, she falls asleep while dictating some notes about how dangerous the
research is getting and how caution is the key. The next day, her psychologist
colleague, Abel Campos (played by Elias Koteas) is waiting for her at her
office, having flown up from Anchorage to check on her, you know, platonically
and all. Well, her secretary found some rather disturbing audio on the tape,
complete with distortion and sounds of a struggle and an undeterminable
language. That’s when Abby suspects she has been abducted as well, and a
suspicious scratch on her arm and nail marks found on her floor backed up this
theory.
Along the way, the sheriff pays Abby another visit, and he’s
on the verge of locking her up when Campos intervenes, asking for more time to
determine what is actually happening here. A cop is posted outside of the Tyler
house, and in the wee hours, the police car video seems to indicate that a
flying saucer had a stopover, and when Abby’s daughter Ashley (who, by the way,
has gone blind after her father’s murder) is missing, Abby tells the livid
sheriff that a “beam of light” stole her daughter. Both the sheriff and Abby’s
son, Ronnie, are, well, unconvinced, and Ronnie is happy to enter protective
police custody, as even he is creeped the fuck out by his mom at this point.
Reaching the point of no return, Abby find the number to a
mysterious doctor in one of Will’s books, and she rings him up. It turns out
that he is Dr. Odusami, a language specialist who eventually identifies the
language on the recordings as Sumerian. He then launches into a quick Rosetta
Stone seminar on how the Sumerians date back to 4th century B.C.E.
and talked a lot about spaceships and suits and oxygen masks and other
freak-ass stuff.
What to do now? Well, hell, let’s throw Abby under hypnosis
as Campos supervises and Odusami films. That can’t go wrong, right? Well, if by
wrong you mean that Abby is attacked by an unidentified Sumerian quasi-god and
reduced to the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” and that they then all
are abducted by once, then, yes. Things can go wrong.
Abby awakes in the hospital, apparently paralyzed now. The
sheriff is there, and he welcomes her to the conscious state by showing her
pictures that indicate that Will committed suicide. Right next to her. With a
gun. Which, in some people’s view, may severely call into question Abby’s
credibility. When Campos refuses to back up her assertions of the abduction,
Abby is visibly crushed, and she is unable to offer any insights into where
Ashley is when the sheriff presses her.
The flick ends with a continuation of Abby’s interview at
Chapman University, where she is now reduced to a wheelchair. She reiterates
her theory that millions of people are abducted, but that the aliens are able
to erase their memories so that they are completely unaware of these
abductions. Then the credits roll, with numerous 911 calls to report UFOs
serving as the soundtrack to the fade to black, plus text that says that Ashley
has never been found and no one besides Abby was willing to participate in the
film’s making.
Curiously, at least to me, the DVD contained no “bonus” area
with newspaper articles or background of the story, just a few lame extended
scenes. But hell, we’d just experienced a thoroughly gripping, jarring,
frightening movie, one that leaves you with a tinge of “what if” and a minor
case of the willies. Not bad for a sci-fi flick, right?
Well, only if you’re willing to also suspend disbelief over
some minor problems. Such as the fact that all assertions that this flick is
based on real evidence or case studies is, well, not real. Such as the fact
that even the nominal originator of these studies, Dr. Tyler, is played by an
actress, Charlotte Milchard (to her credit, Milchard achieves maximum
creepiness, making her a tremendous fit for the role). Such as the fact that it
was filmed in Bulgaria and Canada, robbing realism from even the beautiful
scenery of Alaska. Such as all of the questions and confusion dissipates
quickly when the entire movie falls apart under even the slightest, most
cursory examination.
So at the end of the day, writer and director Olatunde
Osunsanmi has created a mockumentary, complete with fabricated newspaper
archives (which led to the film being sued successfully by the Alaska Press
Club). His film continuously took the lazy way out, asking the viewer to
believe what they want, but then leaving out key facts needed to make such a
determination. Pretending to have one foot in the documentary world and another
in the feature-film world is problematic even if that was honest; the
documentary aspect demands further explanation, more concrete evidence, but the
feature film aspect makes that unnecessary and extraneous.
So was there any basis at all for the premise of this film?
Well, yes … sort of. The FBI did investigate a string of disappearances in
Nome, but they eventually chalked it up to a combination of “alcohol and frigid
temperatures,” according to CNN (*insert conspiracy theories here*). Hell, at
least the sublime “Blair Witch Project” had a sound backstory to fall back on;
even the realm of hoaxes has a level of self-respect that “The Fourth Kind” is
missing.
Disappointingly, Osunsanmi seemed to ignore the fact that
the Internet era does not allow for the hiding of the truth for very long, and
he elected not to try very hard to drum up a backstory in the DVD or elsewhere.
There are some intriguing stats shared in the context of the film, such as 11
million UFOs have been reported since the 1930s, and many fall in the camp
represented by the famous “X-Files” poster that declares, “I Want to Believe.”
Unfortunately, “The Fourth Kind” left the audience not only
still wanting—but feeling lied to and even more skeptical.
