Customer Reviews

The Fourth Kind [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(44)

 

 

Nome, Alaska, October 2000: Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) is a psychologist ministering to the citizens of Nome, a secluded Alaskan town which is only accessible by air. Still mourning the recent death of her husband, Tyler spends her days dealing with an apparent epidemic of insomnia amongst the town's citizens - but as Tyler delves deeper into the nature of her patient's sleep-related maladies, she begins to notice a disturbing number of similarities and correlations between their stories. Why are they all waking at 3:33am? And why are they all seeing owls outside their windows? As time draws on, she enlists the aid of colleague Dr. Abel Compos (Elias Koteas) and slowly begins piecing together fragments of information which suggest a nightmarish truth.

I'll admit it, "The Fourth Kind" caught me completely off guard; I rented it expecting a mildly entertaining mid-budget thriller fashioned after the likes of The X-Files: The Complete Collector's Edition and Steven Spielberg Presents Taken and instead experienced one of the most profoundly scary films that I've seen in a long time. This is no small praise when you consider that I've read a fair number of books and seen a fair number of films and TV shows about UFOs, aliens and abduction phenomena and am completely skeptical about the whole thing (the hard cold figures of Drake's equation negates the possibility of alien contact as far as I'm concerned).

While it's true that this film works through every Whitley Strieberesque cliché in the abduction playbook (screen memories, subliminally buried recollections accessible only through hypnosis, white lights and, hell, even some allusions to the work of Erich Von Daniken), director Olatunde Osunsami innovatively uses a gamut of structural, editing, split-screen and soundtrack techniques in order to draw the viewer into a tapestry of "dramatically reconstructed events" which appear alongside "archival footage" on which the reconstruction is allegedly based; the net effect of this tinkering with 'levels of reality' is a palpably eerie sense of authenticity which pervades the film and only serves to reinforce the chills that materialise. Situations and clichés that you've seen a million times before in a million different movies and TV shows are suddenly thrown into stark relief and become deeply frightening again.

Originally, I was only intending to give this film four stars, but it really did get into my head (and impress me with it's innovative structuring) and, frankly, it takes a lot to unnerve and impress me these days, so it gets a round five stars. Seriously, this a film which is both vastly scarier than (and vastly superior too) the massively over-hyped and deeply pedestrian Paranormal Activity as well as virtually every other horror film in recent years.

...And if you consider yourself a jaded old cynic and think that this film can't get into your head, I issue you the following challenge - watch this alone, late at night, with the lights out and the sound way up...and then discover what an interesting prospect going to sleep on your own in the dark becomes.

I love scary movies but as I get older, I have a harder time with them. Aliens in general are really what freak me out. I can't watch scary movies after a certain time of day, because they give me nightmares. Unfortunately for me, I watched this movie too late because I had low expectations and didn't expect it to scare me. The good news: no nightmares. The bad news: I was awake staring at the door in fear until the sun came up.

While I was pretty sure from the start that the claims of real life footage being in the movie were bogus, it still scared the crap outta me. But the promise of "archival footage" even though it really wasn't annoyed me, so I deducted some points for that.

It starts a little slow but once it gets going it's definitely a good scary movie in my opinion. For me, horror movies aren't about cinematic integrity, but how much they entertain and horrify you. This one fit the bill. Worth a watch(not a purchase), but don't watch it at night. Just a tip.

I will not go into plot/ storyline, you can read the other reviews with the plot layed out.

This is just my own opinion/ thoughts and review of the film.

What do I believe? The ending left more questions than answers in my opinion. I believe this movie was a very clever rouse by the filmmakers, in the vain of Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, Exorcism of Emily Rose, Fire in the Sky, The Mothman Prophecies making something that is said to be based on true events be not true at all or taking slightly the most sliver of truths and building a fictitious story around it, seen it done hundreds of times in books and movies. We do get Milla Jovovich in the beginning of the film stating that what we are about to see are reenactments of events mixed with "real" archival footage of interviews/ hypnosis sessions/ of real people all experiencing some kind of UFO phenomena happening around Nome Alaska in Fall of 2000. Milla Jovovich portrays the Dr in the reenactments then through out we get interview snip- its of the real Dr. Tyler. A part of me wanted to believe this was real, but I would think if a noted Dr of Abigail Tyler's profession would have made this case go nationwide, and that Discovery or History Channel or Larry King would have aired some kind of special about UFO abductions and in particular about strange occurrences in and around Nome Alaska. And this definitely could have been an X Files episode, makes me wonder if the director's inspiration came from the X Files. And The supposedly real interviews and hypnosis sessions through out the movie do seem real and genuinely frightening/ disturbing.... and I don't want to forget the owls... never have owls seemed so other worldly spooky, and ghost like, some scenes the eyes seem to be piercing into your soul when it looks at you, in the movie there is a correlation with the owls and the conjectured other worldly Visitors, and the "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler looks ghostly, sickly, kinda creepy when she first shows up on the screen, we see her being interviewed by the director of this film to give it that realness. Some notable supporting roles: Will Patton, always a favorite of mine turns in a nice performance of the sheriff who doesn't believe in all this UFO mumbo jumbo crap, Elias Koteas as another Dr. friend of Dr. Tyler, gives a good steady performance as well, and Milla of course is great,a different role for her, more dramatic role, shows she's branching off.

I give credit to the over all tone of the movie and mood, and style, way it was filmed, mixing supposedly real footage and the reenactments with the actors, very good plot device. I just have to wonder how would said filmmakers get to clear all the red tape if in fact they were real footage of everything that Dr. Tyler did? But kudos to the filmmaker (Olatunde Osunsanmi)for giving us a genuinely frightening, astounding psychological thriller been awhile since I've had my nerves jangled like that. What bothers me is not knowing if any of this stuff is true??? Guess what I believe in the end is what I decide....

In a sea of garbage remakes.
A Nightmare on Elm St.
Friday the 13th. etc.....
If you are a part of American society that like the same old, recycled horror garbage spit out at you year after year than you will probably hate "The Fourth Kind".
If you're like me and you crave things that are new, original and don't rely on sound effects to scare the living daylights out of you than this movie is a gift from God (Aliens?).

The good?
Great acting.
Scared me more than any "slasher" movie has in years.
If you are a fan of the creepier aspects of The X Files then you'll love this movie.
Great pacing.
Great directing.
I cried at the end, and that's always a good thing for any movie to accomplish.
Rare, but good. :)

The bad?
It's hard to understand what is being said.
I know I have had a lot of problems with movies in the past.
Being unable to understand what is being said.
Can I provide you with a helpful hint that has helped me with many a movie where the dialog is spoken softly?
TURN ON THE SUBTITLES!!!
I know that this seems like a no brainer but I'm always surprised how few people realize how helpful a tool the subtitles are in a "softly spoken" movie.

Other than that, I have zero complaints about this film.
Genius from start to finish.
Original, scary and a great film.
Highly recommended!!!

Normally this style of docu-horror is not for me; but I liked the cast, photography and the alien angle. In addition; I found a surprise. I got scared me for the first time in years. No buckets of blood, gore nor injustice could shock me anymore! Yet I got big kicks out of this tricky movie.. A roller coaster is what comes to mind when this film shows its flips n dips n trips.
Moods are set with reference quality; A/V Great BD; Hope the neighbours don't call the cops!

Great movie. My time is money, so anytime i go to a movie not knowing what to expect and i get the crap scared out of me, it's a great movie. left a lasting impression, and i still talk about it with my friends. To me, that makes it worth the price of admission. Don't listen to all the TOOLS who tried to talk smack about it. They are typing reviews from thier parents basements, with way too much time on thier hands. Rent it, buy it, whatever. It's pretty cool, you won't regret it. Look at it this way, i'm buying the blu-ray the day it comes out, and i only buy blu-rays that i KNOW i'll watch over and over through the years.

Ever since I saw the trailer I really wanted to see this film.I have believed in beings from other planets for a long time, and this film is proof that they do exist.The story moves a little slow but it's definitely worth watching.After I saw this movie I could not sleep with the lights turned off for about two months. This movie really scares the crap out of you!I would definitely recommend watching this movie in daytime or if you really want to watch it alone watch it with a friend!!After you watch this film you will probably believe in aliens!!!

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi drops the ball occasionally with this film, there's no denying that--having Milla Jovovich (Dr. Abbey Tyler) approach the camera at the beginning, looking every inch a Hollywood actress, telling us that "what we are about to see are interviews with abductees" and the rest of it. He did not handle the premise nearly as well as the makers of "Paranormal Activity", "The Blair Witch", etc, and I suspect that otherwise this would be in the top ranks of a lot of the horror films made today.

If one can overlook that mole, this is a startling and at times really scary film which approaches "alien abduction" from a different vantage point: if an alien entity did indeed exist it would not necessarily be a benevolent force in the universe. Indeed, it may be the exact opposite: a malign and vicious phenomena which destroys the human psyche at random and reduces human beings to mere husks of what they were. It provides some real chills to see (Charlotte Milchard) the 'Real' Dr. Abbey Tyler being interviewed about her experiences, looking like a half alien and half annorexic who has had the life quite literally scared out of her.


The film's basic premise is the destruction of a small town, and Jovovich plays a shrink who is unfortunate enough to have most of her patients end up getting into contact with some kind of alien intelligence. "The White Owl" is a Lovecraftian image used regularly throughout the movie--all the abductees report witnessing an appalling, disgusting image of a white owl outside their windows. One commits suicide and takes his family with him, leading the town sherrif (Will Patton hamming it up again) to believe that Tyler is somehow responsible for these events. The mood of psychological disturbance is amped up to the max when she begins to videotape these interviews and the patients are sometimes literally "torn apart" by their psychic distress. The "archival footage" is what makes this film. I don't think there's much ambiguity here: Tyler was not crazy and whether her husband really did commit suicide or not, he was in all likelihood a victim of the same presence. This movie is thoroughly frightening, and not to be taken lightly because of the slightly goofy way the filmmaker decided to handle the "real interview" concept.

This is one of the creepiest films I've seen in some time. As others have noted, it follows the convention that the producers have filmed a documentary & are fictionalizing it. At the beginning, lead actress Milla Jovovich walks out of a fog with an "explanation" of what is to come. Several times the film employs a split-screen device to show equivalent sequences from the supposed documentary. The effect is unnerving.

Background: Nome, Alaska has experienced a number of cases of persons gone missing (this appears to be true). Dr. Abigail Tyler (played by Jovovich), a psychologist getting over what she maintains was the murder of her husband, has devoted herself to continuing the project he was working on related to these disappearances. Through a number of interviews and hypnotic regression sequences she stumbles on the truth: aliens are abducting people from Nome; some are returned, some not. The visible manifestation of the aliens is a white owl outside one's bedroom window that stares in at you, unmoving, unafraid of you, sometimes remaining in one place for hours.

Dr. Tyler's hypnotic regressions get out of control as her subjects relive their harrowing experiences, sometimes severely injured as *something* seems to possess them. One of her subjects murders his family and then kills himself to escape the horror. Sheriff August (Will Patton) doesn't believe her talk of aliens and thinks something she is doing is causing these breakdowns and injuries. He believes she's delusional, having gone over the edge following what happened to her husband (turns out he wasn't murdered but committed suicide in front of her). But the aliens have turned their attention to Dr. Tyler herself. They "take" her daughter Ashley, already traumatized from losing her father...

A number of others writers have panned this movie. I thought its main devices worked remarkably well; I found myself wanting to hit the pause button and go into my office to "google" Abigail Tyler to find out if this was a real documentary. One of the purposes of sci-fi / horror is to get you, the viewer, to suspend your disbelief at least for the duration. This film does that. It is effective enough to have generated online discussions explaining how it worked, and that the "documentary" is part of an elaborate fictional device, and that the "real" Dr. Tyler was a different actress named Charlotte Milchard.

Overall, I found The Fourth Kind to be inferior to Fire in the Sky which has the weirdest and most disturbing sequence I ever saw in a UFO movie. There are a few faux pas IMHO. The film's events are set in October 2000, it says; yet the Nome of this film is awfully lush for that late in the year. Nome, Alaska has a hostile, Arctic climate; and I've never had the impression the surrounding area is as mountainous as it is portrayed here. (I've not been there; others can inform me if this is wrong; I won't mind.) Moreover, apparently the creators of the film went a bit overboard using made-up obits and invented news items that prompted legal action from the Alaska Press Club.

Be all this as it may, the film raises some interesting questions. What *did* happen to those people who vanished (ten just since 1990, according to Wikipedia)? While there is nothing to suggest the involvement of aliens, if they simply wandered off drunk and froze to death in the below-zero weather, their bodies would have been found eventually. As for UFOs and abductions: thousands of reliable witnesses have seen things in the sky no one can explain including trained observers: airline pilots, police officers, even astronauts. There are a handful of well documented cases of "missing time," as the literature calls gaps in people's memories ranging from hours to days. The above-mentioned Fire in the Sky dramatizes one such case. What happened? A Christian friend of mine says that UFOs and alien manifestations are the work of demonic forces, not alien intelligences. Whatever they may be, apparently they have been around for quite a while. Members of our culture with its fascination with technology and space travel see spaceships and aliens. Back in the 1800s it was airships. Centuries ago, people saw burning chariots in the sky. You can find them in the Old Testament (see Jeremiah 1). I didn't yet mention: the Fourth Kind beings, whatever they are supposed to be, spoke Sumerian and surely sounded demonic. The voices supposedly recorded by Dr. Tyler on tape make this not a film to watch before you go to bed at night! At least not before checking outside your bedroom window for unmoving white owls with large, staring eyes!

Maybe we don't want to know what's really up there. Maybe we just think we do.

Every time something paranormal happens the footage that is supposed to be real seems to get a bit blurry. Nice footage of Alaska. Milla Jovovich as as Dr. Abigail Tyler was great. The film is supposed to be based on a true story but there is some question as to weather or not the events are a hoax. The use Sumerian language and UFOs and most paranormal occurrences are often attended with a strong smell of sulfur. Will Patton is good in this film as well. It was at times scary and disturbing yet a bit tedious as well.



See also
Paranormal Activity