johnlink ranks THE FOURTH KIND (2009)
I’m a bit of a sucker for creepy alien movies. It is a genre which fails more than it delivers, and I went into this hoping it would fall into the latter category. I knew very little about it, save for the fact that it dealt with aliens abducting people in Nome, Alaska.
I watched THE FOURTH KIND (2009) on 12.27.10. It was my first viewing of the film. TRAILER HERE
This film, like the trailer above, begins with Milla Jovovich introducing herself as an actor portraying a real person in a dramatization. The idea is to set up that you will see actors you marginally recognize, like herself, Will Patton, and Elias Koteas doing the dramatizations, as we see ‘real people’ in documentary footage. Several things don’t work about this. For one, the ‘real people’ don’t read that way. The makeup, for example, is a give away. Two, the acting isn’t particularly effective. Three, the footage is pretty obvious.
In a film like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, the filmmakers try to play it off as real, but they don’t expect you to REALLY believe it. The idea is to get you to forget you are watching a movie, if even for a short time. But in THE FOURTH KIND, the dramatizations just make it painfully obvious how contrived it all is. I looked up the story to see if it was based on truth, and it’s not. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse. I just wish they had concentrated on telling a good story, because the film comes across as too clever for its own good.
I just didn’t respond to it. I’d like to hear from someone who did. I think it had a few moments of creepiness, but the insistence on adding the ‘real’ footage, which never for a moment convinces you it is real, just takes away the power. Instead, you have a marginally famous actor playing a less famous and unrecognizable actor pretending to be ‘real’.
It just doesn’t work, on any level, for me.
SCORES
FILM: 2; MOVIE: 4; ACTING: 5; WRITING: 3
2+4+5+3+0=14
FINAL SCORE: 3.5
johnlinkmovies 