Close Encounters of ‘The Fourth Kind’

Posted on November 16, 2009 - 9:02am by michael It is fast becoming the popular thing to do to make horror movies based on real events, and director Olatunde Osunsanmi wants so badly for his new horror/thriller The Fourth Kind to be one of those movies that he goes so far as to open the film by having the star, Milla Jovovich, look directly into the camera and introduce herself as actress Milla Jovovich, and then explain that in the movie she will be portraying real life psychiatrist Abigail Tyler in reference to events that took place in beautiful Nome, Alaska in the first week of October, 2000. It is hugely disappointing to discover that none of the events portrayed in the film are even remotely based on real events, but as a supernatural horror/thriller, the movie at least is presented in a clever and effective way. Oh, and it was cool having Jovovich introduce herself like that, too, because we get to hear the correct pronunciation of her name. I’m guessing most of you have it wrong. So, by clever and effective, I mean that the movie makes frequent use of split screens to show us actors portraying actual interviews conducted by Tyler, synching them up so that we can see that the recreations are done word for word. This seems to cancel out the need to re-shoot anything, since the “original” tapes are much more interesting and effective, but it does add another level of realism to the proceedings. So here’s the story. Abigail Tyler is a psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska, and several of her patients have been reporting the same strange dream involving an owl peering at them through their bedroom windows accompanied by a profound, almost paralyzing feeling of hopelessness. Under hypnosis, they seem to remember something terrifying that they couldn’t recall while fully conscious, and so Abigail sets out to find out what is really going on. Disturbing numbers of people disappear from the tiny town without a trace every year with talk of alien abduction (the “fourth kind” of alien encounter), and evidently there have been a disproportionate number of FBI visits there, but without the truth ever being discovered. Suspicions of a federal cover-up lead Abigail to conduct her own investigation. There is a nice sense of dread throughout the movie, as we watch Abigail, an educated, professional woman, conduct a series of interviews and hypnosis sessions, bringing her closer and closer to an impossible truth. The police don’t believe her because she starts to suggest alien abductions and cops tend to lose credibility when they agree with such things, and we know something is going to go wrong because throughout the movie we are watching interviews of her taken long after the events in the movie, and she appears to be in some kind of mental institution. Suicides soon begin to pile up, and the disappearance of her daughter leads to questions about her sanity. There are some technical problems with the movie, but my only real complaint about it is that they really hammer home the fictional idea that this is all based on real events. I don’t even want to try to remember how many times we were politely informed that we were listening to “actual audio” from the original interviews, which is completely obvious already, or when people performing in “re-enactments” are identified in on-screen titles as actors. Yeah, we get it. I don’t think we need to be hit over the head with it. Still the movie is an entertaining and clever take on an old idea, and contains a good performance from Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas as her colleague, and Will Patton as the incredulous sheriff. It’s not one of the best thrillers of the year (or even the best one in theaters at the moment), but it’s entertaining and has a couple good scares, and that’s really all we ask, isn’t it? The Bean Meter