The Fourth Kind

The Fourth Kind (2009)

19% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 111 reviews)

Runtime: 98 minutes

Directed by: Olatunde Osunsanmi

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Elias Koteas, Corey Johnson, Enzo Cilenti

From: Universal

I don't have too much to say here except that this was even worse than I expected. Read why below:

I'll be real here and tell you that I only watched this because it was in the recommendations section of Netflix Instant, due to what I have been watching as of late. As you can see with my one star rating, if I “thanked” Instant for this, then it'd only be in a sarcastic sense.

Since the movie came out and it got a lot of bad publicity due to the strong attempts from the filmmakers and the studios involved to make this hokum appear to be legit (to the point of creating fake headlines from real newspaper and producing other bogus evidence), I have avoided watching it as the general buzz was bad. Yet I still took a chance, and oh what a mistake that was! The story-completely fake despite all their attempts otherwise-revolves around a psychologist in Nome, Alaska, where she does a mysterious study and also notices similar odd experiences among several of her patients. Considering that the title refers to the “close encounter” scale created by UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek (which is of course where the title Close Encounters of the Third Kind came from) and while not part of that scale, others later included a fourth kind to represent alien abductions. Sorry for the spoiler but when it's right in the title...

I had a feeling this would be bad... it exceeded my expectations into being quite bad. For me, the biggest reason is that this is just not scary at all. When the most frightening moments include an owl naturally turning its head almost 180 degrees or a character barfing... that is a problem. They went so far as to create faux footage that was allegedly “real” and that was incorporated into the film often under the usage of split screens but I would have figured out without being told that it was all flim-flam and poppycock. It is just painfully and howlingly bad and a gigantic waste of time you couldn't possibly believe was real.

Not to mention, Nome is like 51 percent Native American, as in non-white people, and yet because it's Hollywood you have a cast that except for the one black man was as white as all the snow on the ground in Alaska. That's one thing, but the movie seems to think that Anchorage is close by Nome (incorrect) or that Nome has mountains and trees all around it, which is the complete opposite of how it actually looks. It's just insulting.

The movie made the residents of that town upset as they felt this trivialized the actual missing people in Nome; I mean, they vanished due to natural reasons, not due to aliens, I am pretty sure of that. My opinion of aliens... the universe is so vast there has to be life elsewhere besides Earth, and unexplained things have happened, but I've never seen any definitive proof. That doesn't really matter when it comes to this film, though, as no matter your opinion of such things this is just not an effective film at all.