“The Blair Witch Project” is one of the most successful horror films of all time thanks to the fact that it marketed its premise as real events. “The Fourth Kind” aims to follow in its footsteps, but its poor execution ultimately has more in common with a particularly hokey episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.”
“The Fourth Kind” claims to be based on the true story of Dr. Abigail Tyler (portrayed by both Milla Jovovich and “herself”), a psychologist in Nome, Alaska, who found an extraterrestrial explanation for the high number of disappearances in the area.
Despite the ostensibly fact-based premise, apparently a Dr. Tyler never actually existed, and the Anchorage Daily News found that the missing people in the area were more likely a result of chronic alcoholism and heavy snowfall.
Nonetheless, the film presents its story as the truth, along with purportedly authentic interview tapes from Tyler. One of the movie’s biggest weaknesses is the overreliance on “actual footage,” from Tyler’s patient interviews to police dash-cam video.
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Even the most mundane scene is interspersed with a mix of dramatized events and “real recordings,” bogging down the film and adding very little to the overall sense of terror. The technique is excessively blunt and smacks of desperation, as if director Olatunde Osunsanmi is shouting, “See?! Real footage! 100 percent true events!”
To be fair, “The Fourth Kind” has a handful of legitimate scares, but they take far too long to get to. The bulk of the movie would really only be scary to skittish 10-year-olds and the particularly gullible.
At the end of the film, the cast asserts that the viewer can interpret the events in Nome however he wants. That’s a strange claim for a movie that’s been clumsily hammering its own theory into our heads for 90 minutes.
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