Heavy Hokum
Written: Nov 04 '09
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: good documentary footage
Cons: just wallows in supposition
The Bottom Line: Basically an episode of Unsolved Mysteries and not enough material to fill a feature film, nor is it worth the theater ticket price
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| spelvini's Full Review: The Fourth Kind |
By casting Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, and Will Patton, director Olatunde Osunsanmi hopes to secure a mainstream distribution for his movie The Fourth Kind but has managed to waste the talents of his actors and filmmakers, and cheap his audience, on a movie that is a poorly supported documentary grafted onto a mundane domestic tale of a single mother who is going quietly crazy.
Director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviews Dr. Abigail Tyler for a television presentation about her activities when she was consulting with patients in Nome Alaska. Touted as a story based on true events the film introduces a number of professional actors who portray real people who came in contact with the doctor and led her to certain discoveries. The film introduces Milla Jovovich as Dr. Abigail Tyler who we learn has a young blind daughter and an older son and a husband who she believes was murdered. She videotapes sessions with patients, all of whom have reported problems sleeping and in particular each has said that an owl at their window has kept them awake during the night. Tyler calls in her own analyst and colleague Abel Campos (Elias Koteas) to observe and during the sessions Tyler records multiple accounts of psychosis and realizes that a full investigation is necessary. When one of her patients kills himself and his family and another exhibits convulsive behavior the local Sheriff accuses Tyler of possibly causing the problem, but during a recorded session of her own thoughts Tyler discovers unusual similarities to her patients, and when her daughter disappears she believes that some alien force is responsible.
The film points to its own artifice by using documentary footage of psychoanalytic sessions in combination with the actors' reenactment of the story. In this way the filmmakers intention is to validate the truthful base of the movie. The videotaped sessions are interesting in that when they contain real-life patients who are under hypnosis and exhibit odd behavior, but the problem is that when the videos contain some real evidence the picture becomes conveniently distorted and visuals unclear. This makes it very easy fro the filmmakers to suggest some outside force like alien abduction is at work when it is apparent that it is actually faulty recording equipment that fails to collect the necessary evidence. There are also inserts of an Owl that all the patients say has possessed their consciousness, and there are recurrent close ups of a digital clock reading "3:33", a time in the wee hours of the morning when characters feel that have been abducted by aliens who may be speaking through them in an ancient language like what happened in the film The Exorcist.
What all this adds up to is a grand summation that maybe the psychotic people in Nome Alaska were actually abducted by aliens and this is what has caused all the problems. The problem is that the film is one big question mark neither laying out enough evidence to make a good case nor humanizing the mystery of murder and missing people. With the videotaped materials present the director could have made a great documentary, adding interviews with the real people involved, many of whom already appear in the film. A well-researched documentary would carry more significance than what the film is now. At this stage The Fourth Kind is a movie playing games with the audience, promising them some great truth about the possibility of aliens and their place on this planet, but instead wallowing in supposition, rumor, hearsay, and unsubstantiated facts.
At one point in the film the director has the real Dr. Tyler tell the camera that scientist J. Allen Hynek was the originator of the category "the fourth kind", referring to the level of alien contact that is defined by abduction. Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a reference to the third level or the mere contact of aliens, but in that film one of the things that occurs is that the hero enters an alien craft voluntarily. Dr. Tyler holds today that she believes her daughter was abducted by aliens who came to her house and took her away thus initiating the FBI to investigate up to 2000 times in Nome for the possibility of alien presence.
Director Olatunde Osunsanmi's last movie job was Assistant to director Joe Carnahan in 2006 on the overblown Smokin' Aces, a film which manages to irrevocably bend the laws of physics to entertain. Considering the pastiche of The Fourth Kind, mixing fact with fictive elements, it must have been much easier to bend reality with the documentary footage that was available on alien abduction so that with a cinematic sleight of hand the director suggests that what we see is alien involvement when actually it is fuzzy story-telling with heavy innuendo which can neither be validated nor refuted. The Forth Kind is a movie about itself and as an exercise in high-cinematic hokum superseding anything Barnum and Bailey has ever presented.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Die-hard Fans Only
Viewing Method: Press Screening
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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Epinions.com ID:
spelvini
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Member: Georgio Spelvini
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 369
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
20+ years Actor & script doctor for new material.
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