Eye Candy #7 - "The Fourth Kind"

The Fourth Kind: Based on supposedly “real” interview footage involving alien abductions that took place in 2000 in Nome, Alaska, this does a side-by-side of the “real” interview footage and dialogue juxtaposed to “dramatic reenactment” footage featuring the main cast of Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, and Will Patton. The whole set up is fake, so don’t worry (the director plays the interviewer in the framing sequence; there‘s even a goofy disclaimer by Jovovich to start things off, because lord knows, if an actor tells you something is true, it must be). Jovovich is Dr. Abigail Tyler who, in an effort to continue the work of her recently deceased husband, interviews several patients under hypnosis that all experience roughly the same nightmarish alien encounter. The patients experience psychosis, inexplicable phenomena like levitation and speak in Sumerian. Abigail determines that she too may be having these same encounters as well, which are close encounters of the fourth kind (hence the title) - the encounters where the aliens abduct you. And these are not benevolent little gray men. They are malevolent. A science fiction thriller with thrills few and far between (the creepiest footage is actually the lo-fi, faked interview footage; if the film stayed exclusively at that quality it would have been a much better film). The ’dramatic re-enactments’ are anemic for the most part, and the director robs them of any dramatic potential by showcasing them against the lo-fi footage, which is actually staged better. The message of “in the end, what you believe is yours to decide” (with the director breaking the fourth wall to lend credence to his fairy tale) is complete crap. Here’s an idea - if you make it believable…you won’t need to appeal to people to do so. I choose to believe this is hooey. Woodchuck sez, “On pretension alone, skip it.”