The Fourth Kind (2009)

For those that care, I’m sorry that it has been a while since I have a movie review up. After October finished up, I decided to take a little break from watch movies. That was pretty much all I did that month. What was intended to be a short break ended up being longer than that. During my break, I was hired into a new job. This has kept me a little busy, and kept me out of the theater this last weekend. I was given the day off today though, so I made sure that I would go see The Fourth Kind. It was the movie I wanted to see over the weekend, and hopefully get me back into doing reviews again. The Fourth Kind is a movie claiming to be based on true events, but I had a feeling that was all a lie to get people to see it. I would have even if they had not put this claim on it.

In Nome, Alaska, Abbey Taylor (Milla Jovovich) is doing a case study on people with sleep problems. It is something that her husband was doing just before his death. Abbey begins to discover that many of the people she has been talking to often describe a white owl that has been watching them. She decides to try hypnosis with one of her patients, and discovers that he freaks out when he begins to remember what happened to him after seeing the white owl. The guy goes home, claiming that he is fine. That night though, Abbey gets a call saying that the guy is holding his family at gun point. The only person he will talk to is Abbey. Has Abbey stumbled into why people in this town are disappearing, or is it her own troubled mind creating things that aren’t there?

I’m sure The Fourth Kind was looking to draw people in from Paranormal Activity. The two films are vastly different in style, but I can see fans of one possibly liking the other. I liked the story line that they gave us, even if it wasn’t based on fact. The disappearance rate in Nome is higher than it is in cities that are bigger. The FBI has been there a lot to investigate this. The locals claim that there is a serial killer in the town, while the FBI blames it on too much drinking. Neither believes it is the explanation given in The Fourth Kind. This movie was filmed in a way I don’t recall seeing before. We have Milla Jovovich telling us right away that she is playing the part of Abbey Taylor. From there we get a mix of recreated and actual footage. I understood the need for having actors recreating scenes. Unlike Paranormal Activity, where everything we see is filmed by the two people we follow, the only “real” footage we see in The Fourth Kind is what Abbey films with her patients, and footage from the video cameras on the dash boards of police cars. That leaves a big gap in the story, so I can see why a lot was supposed to have been recreated. What I didn’t get is showing the recreated side by side with the actual footage. In some cases it made a little sense, because it showed a different angle in the recreated scenes. This would sometimes reveal something that we can’t see in the actual footage. I felt like they should have stuck to one or the other. Either show us all of the actual footage, when it applied, or leave it out. Having it side by side made it a little distracting, and hard to hear at times.

Not much going for effects in this movie. There are a couple of scenes that are helped out with CGI effects. I have to admit that they looked pretty good this time around. The acting was also pretty good. I’m not a big fan of Milla Jovovich, but I have never been disappointed in her performances either. Will Patton was a disappointment for some, but I didn’t have any problems with him. He is the Sheriff for the town. The “real” people in the “actual” footage are not listed on the IMDb page. Some people liked the recreated scenes better than the actual footage as far as the acting went. I actually liked the acting in the actual footage more. I think this is because it did feel more real. The reactions felt more exaggerated in the recreated footage. At least they did to me.

Another thing that I liked about The Fourth Kind is the ending. They leave the ending open for us to decide what was really going on. I like movies that I can make a case for one of two ways to view the ending of a film. The way things are left in the end, a person could believe a couple of different things, and could be correct in thinking that way. I never felt that The Fourth Kind was a bad movie. I liked it well enough, but I never felt it was a great film. A big part of this was because of the split screen. I would have liked it better if for example they had shown us Abbey’s, as Milla Jovovich, reactions while we are seeing the actual footage of the person on the couch. With this being the second week this movie has been out, if you haven’t watched it by now then I would suggest just waiting for the DVD.

3 out of 5 I hope I remember my camera when abducted by aliens