It is up to you to decide.
That’s about as far as the creators of The Fourth Kind are really willing to go in confirming the ‘truth’ behind their new film. Ultimately, that’s probably as far as they should go considering all of the events and ‘footage’ presented in this 90-minute treatise on alien abduction and extraterrestrial paranoia. Despite assertions from star Milla Jovovich and director Olatunde Osunsanmi that the film includes actual footage, there’s a surprising lack of supportive evidence found anywhere outside of The Fourth Kind. I personally couldn’t uncover anything that substantiates that there is an actual Abigail Tyler or even any significant reports of UFO phenomena in the area.
Still, The Fourth Kind sets it all up in the same fashion that a TV documentary might; introducing the real Abigail Tyler, a haunted and frail looking woman, and then switching over to Jovovich as the hottie shrink version of Tyler who is trying to uncover the truth behind her husband’s death. In a move that flies in the face of most paranormal docu-dramas, the film switches to split screen and shows the video footage for the most harrowing and disturbing moments. Faces contort, people levitate, several end up speaking in ancient Sumerian, and all describe visitations by a grey owl. Some of it is creepy and effective, some of it is tedious, but almost all of it suffers from the burden of ‘based on a true story’.
What Osunsanmi conjures by adding the layer of potential truth to the movie is a glimpse into the mindset and philosophy of those who do believe they have been abducted or have experienced significant paranormal phenomenon. The film makes it easy to sympathize with Jovovich’s performance and be chilled by the Tyler we see the in the footage, but we are taken out of the film every time we glimpse a clearly fx-enhanced sequence that purports to be real. The continued insistence that what we are seeing is something beyond cinematic fantasy is hard to take.
Benefiting the film is the lead performance by Milla Jovovich who is surprisingly resilient to the haphazard plot twists and one-note ‘woman in peril’ construction of the character. She’s come a long way since The Fifth Element’s Leeloo and this role marks her graduation from one-note action warrior to a stronger dramatic actress. Everyone else, from the perfectly calibrated Elias Koteas (once notorious for playing nutjobs) to the caffeine-fueled Will Patton (he’s never looked more unstable) give the dramatization portions of the movie some credibility.
And what of the ‘real people’ in the footage? I have no doubt personally that they are actors and they do what they have been assigned to do: stretch that perception of the world in the film as reality. Particularly, I must give credit to the casting choice for Dr. Tyler. She looks like a woman who has faced the dark under the bed and come out worse for the wear. The Fourth Kind is very canny and wise when it comes to understanding our expectations of Hollywood and its presentation of real-world events. By casting the quite pretty Jovovich, and then giving us a disheveled and disoriented ‘real’ Tyler, it challenges the audience’s skepticism. She and the other victims aren’t pretty or glamorous. This means they have to be genuine, right?
For an evening of cheap and cheeky thrills, The Fourth Kind will do the trick. But like Paranormal Activity, it doesn’t offer anything, true or otherwise, that can satiate our imagination for more than a single sitting.
