The Fourth Kind

The Fourth Kind has a promising idea. It also has an interesting storytelling concept. The film purports to have actual case-study footage regarding alien abductions which it interweaves with the dramatic “re-enactment” of the events - sounds good so far. However, in the end, the promise isn’t paid off and the concept doesn’t work.

The problem is that the credibility of the “case-study footage” gets undercut by the dramatic re-enactments. I’d imagine the idea is for the “case-study footage” to add credibility to the dramatic re-enactment. Your ability to believe this, since this is presented as a true story, is greatly diminished by the dramatic re-enactments because we are conditioned to treat them as fake. Even in movies which we know to be based on true stories, we know that the movie itself is, more often than not, not so much true.

The movie is also hurt by the fact that, unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting. It should be. It very well could be. This idea, this material, should be loaded. Instead, it’s dull – painfully so. The shocks that are supposed to be there do not come. We don’t see anything. We get distorted, unwatchable video when we should be seeing something to freak us out of our skin. That may be the greatest fear of filmmakers, but it doesn’t do anything for us, the audience.

These two problems are fatal to the film. And if the filmmakers were smart, they should’ve been able to see this coming. These could easily be taken care of early on in the process of making this. It’d be so very easy for the filmmakers to make this a better, more effective movie. So, they either couldn’t figure out that these would be problems or just didn’t care.

The fact that we don’t see any aliens is not a problem. That’s about the one thing the filmmakers do right with this movie. If they had shown the aliens, it’d likely just be a cheap gimmick. The film is merely supposed to be objectively portraying the “facts” of the case, if none of the characters see aliens (and they don’t) then we shouldn’t either. At least they get something right.

Some of these problems could be overlooked if the film were actually scary. There is nothing scary, nothing that freaks you out (except that the woman playing the ‘real’ Abigail Tyler looks, herself, an awful lot like an alien, but I doubt that’s the kind of freak out they intended). There’s very little tension. There’s certainly no real connection or empathy with these characters. There’s just nothing to make us care about anything here, unless they think that we will just because we’re supposed to.

I wish this movie were made by more capable filmmakers because it could’ve been very good. Or, at least, it could’ve been a decent enough scary flick. But it tried too hard to be something it isn’t (thought provoking, scary, serious, documentary, drama) that it failed massively to do any of it. And that’s too bad.

1 out of 5