Film Review: The Fourth Kind (Spoilers)

I was looking forward to this film. After all its premise was a dramatisation of actual documentary video footage of alien abductees, with that footage cut into the film itself. But the entire film is a fraud – the ‘actual footage’ is as much a fiction as the dramatisation, making the entire experience a waste of effort. And it’s a shame, because writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi had a great opportunity to make Blair Witch meets X-Files  instead – and it might have carried more weight. But having fake footage reenacted by Hollywood stars (ok Milla Jovovitch is the only real star) only comes across as pretentious; it’s also quite dull, which makes perfect sense – who are you supposed to be empathising with, and how?

It probably made sense to cast ‘Resident Evil’ veteran Jovovitch in another spooky/supernatural setting, and she does hold your attention on screen, but her section of the film is far and away the weakest. Osunsanmi never gives us enough Blair Witch, and overeggs the X-Files, but Chris Carter gave us much better alien abduction material for nearly a decade. If the ‘reenacted’ footage is supposed to be real, why is it so overly dramatic? Surely this storytelling device should simply be used to fill in the narrative gaps between ‘real’ videos? But it doesn’t even deliver there – why is the police chief (Will Patton) so suspicious and angry at Jovovitch? Why does her son hate her when he had to have seen his sister’s abduction if she did? We don’t even end up seeing any aliens, but that’s not the fundamental problem. The characters’ motivations are never really clear – did Jovovitch (and her ‘character’) imagine the whole thing? Is she mad? In which case why toy with the subplot of alien races as the basis of all religions? The one time the possible implications of that being true are explored, is when the film finally comes alive. But it’s far too little, far too late;  Osunsanmi seems to want it both ways from start to finish throughout this muddle of a film, and ends up never really pleasing anyone.

6/10