The Fourth Kind: Movie Review (2009)

Movie Review

"The Fourth Kind"


Written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, rated PG-13, 98 minutes.

By our guest blogger, Gavin Stone.

I am not an easy scare.

I laughed at "The Ring." I thought "The Exorcist" was a riot. "The Blair Witch Project" was a fun exercise in spooky fun. Horror movies come and go in my book. I love them, but they just don’t scare me. Not even "Paranormal Activity."

However it’s not the movies themselves that lack in the scares for me, it is their subject matter. Let’s face it --ghosts are just a thing. They can be real or not depending on how you feel. There is another subject matter that is entirely feasible and easy to believe in.

Aliens.
Alien movies scare the crap out of me.  James Cameron's sequel to "Alien," "Aliens," is the king high movie that keeps me on edge. I know the aliens aren't real, but my mind is full of thoughts that aliens in some form or fashion are real. There is 100% no way we are alone in this universe. To top it off, we have no idea how aliens will be when we come across them. If they are anything like us then when they come across something they don’t understand, they will destroy it. So, it is with this mindset that I went into "The Fourth Kind," a mindset of high hopes to feel just a little scared.

The movie follows a recently widowed psychiatrist named Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) as she takes up her late husband’s research into sleeping disorders in the town of Nome, Alaska. She is seeing a therapist herself as she cannot accept the death of her murdered husband and her kids are not right since his death. Her daughter is now blind and her son is rebelling against her. As she takes up the reigns of her husband’s work, she begins to piece together that all of these sleep disorders are linked by a mysterious white owl. None of the patients remembers anything past that, so she decides to use hypnotism. The results are catastrophic and the reality is that aliens are abducting people.

One of the problems this movie has is that despite all of the "evidence" presented with archived video footage of the actual occurrences, no one believes anything is happening. Instead, in spite of this evidence, they all think Dr. Tyler is crazy.  It makes me wonder what the people who were involved were thinking. For those who have seen the movie, take, for instance, the officer set to guard the doctor’s house when the UFO appears. I guess he just wasn’t credible enough to believe. It is just hard to believe that all of these people would still not listen despite the evidence.  As a result, it makes the movie feel silly.

"The Fourth Kind" does not deliver any scares or creepiness. The so-called shocking parts you have seen in the trailer (if you haven't seen the trailer, check it out below). The rest of the movie feels as if those moments have been stitched together to make a whole. The worst part is that this movie cannot figure out what it wants to be--a Hollywood movie or a documentary. In my opinion this would have been better served as a documentary.  Instead, it's a weird hybrid of the both--and it doesn't work.

Riding on the coat tails of "Paranormal Activity" will not keep it afloat. It is a shame because there is a real gem of a movie inside “The Fourth Kind’ if it just had a competent director who did not feel the need to fall back on gimmicks. The attempt to play the “Is it real or not?” game can only go so far. There are better "edge-of-your-seat" abduction movies out there such as “Fire in The Sky” or the low-budget but awesome “Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County,” which you can watch on Google Videos. Check those out, instead.

View the trailer for "The Fourth Kind" below: