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‘The Fourth Kind’—Believe it or not!
Neil Pond
American Profile
November 17, 2009
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The Fourth Kind / PG-13
Something weird is going on in Nome, Alaska. Unsolved murders… suicidal freak-outs… a bunch of people having eerie, similar nightmares… and a spooky white owl.
Ukranian-born former supermodel Mila Jovovich plays psychotherapist Abbey Tyler, who’s got a personal stake in getting to the bottom of the mystery.
The title, like the doctor’s conclusion, refers to the “fourth kind” of encounter with alien life forms. The first kind is a sighting. The second is evidence. The third is an actual alien meet-and-greet, as in “E.T.” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The fourth is abduction---you go bye-bye into the sky, against your will.
Sometimes, as Abbey discovers, abductees get to come back. But they’re damaged goods, both mentally and physically, with their memories erased about the horrors they experienced.
In an unorthodox opening, Jovovich, as herself instead of the character she’s about to portray, approaches the camera, much like the star of a play greeting the audience before curtain rises. She explains that what you’re about to see is “based on actual events” that occurred in Nome several years ago.
What’s more, she says, the movie incorporates “real footage”---sessions Dr. Tyler videotaped with her patients, police dashboard cams, cable-TV interviews. Some of the footage, Jovovich warns, is disturbing.
But is it real? As the movie unfolds, it often runs a split screen with “actual” footage on one side and the reenacted scene on the other. Though we never see any aliens, we hear chilling recordings and see people supposedly under their control, contorting, levitating, making strange noises and looking like they’re about to pop out of their skins.
Most viewers are going to have a hard time believing their chain isn’t being yanked. Internet debunkers offer compelling evidence that “The Fourth Kind” is one big hoax, one loosely based on a factual missing-person investigation in Nome a few years ago that actually had nothing to do with close encounters of any kind.
The truth, as they used to say on “The X Files,” is out there. But don’t go looking for it in “The Fourth Kind.” Craftily blurring the lines between fact and fiction, it leaves you with more questions than answers---and a couple of genuinely creepy scenes that, even if you dismiss them as so much Hollywood hoo-hah, may very well show up again in your nightmares. |
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