The Fourth Kind…Better After A Fifth
November 18th, 2009 4:51 pm by Jonathan
Last night, I had a chance to watch The Fourth Kind. Growing up in the Hudson Valley (a hotbed for UFO activity); moving to New Hampshire and constantly visiting Exeter and driving the same route Betty and Barney Hill were on when they had their first experience; to moving to Arizona and reading up on their fair share of extraterrestrial phenomenon, it's safe to say I have a great deal of interest in UFOs, aliens, and other related incidents, including my own experiences.
The owl is a lie.
The Fourth Kind starts off as a really good movie. There are people coming to the realization that they've had experiences that undeniably smack of alien abduction. The owl they keep remembering outside of their bedroom windows is a safety device their minds conjure to keep them from having to deal with the unfathomable experiences that they had, which were so traumatic, that when they go under hypnosis, they are shaken into hysterics by the realization of what truly happened to them, driving some to be unable to cope, and committing suicide. This is all understandable, as the human mind can only take so much revelation, especially when it's personal.
The psychiatrist in this movie, Dr. Abigail (Jovovich), soon realizes she may also have had strange experiences, as evidenced on a recording on her dictation device. She calls in an expert in the field of ancient civilizations and alien contact (a very specific area of expertise), and finds out that the voice that is not her screaming is speaking Sumerian. This (and we are asked to make this leap, as viewers) tries very blatantly to not-so-subtly hint that these aliens have been in contact with our species since the dawn of civilization, and that we may be their experiment.
This theory is nothing new, and certainly the movie should have balanced that out more with the experiences people were having in this small Alaskan town. However, the movie then scatters too much in too short of a period of time to resolve anything or see it through in any way.
This is the problem I have with this movie, and almost any movie like it. To expose certain topics in a movie, the world in which the movie exists presupposes that the subject matter has either never been thought of in the first place, or that so few know about it that the idea is almost preposterous. Some examples include:
Paranormal: People refuse to believe that there's anything wrong happening and that there is nothing that can't be explained away or destroyed
Transformers: That, even in a world where the Transformers franchise doesn't exist, that no one has thought of vehicles that could change into robots, even as toys. (This also presumes that the country of Japan does not exist, by logical extension.)
The upcoming remake of The Third Man: This presupposes that anyone could reinvent gold and turn it into something that isn't going to be an utter insult to movie history.
Anyway, to get back to the film, Dr. Abigail's patients are dropping after hypnotherapy causes them to go over the edge, either because they can't cope with what's happened to them, or because the aliens have set up certain psychological triggers so that the bigger picture is never discovered.
The small town sheriff in this movie thinks that hypnotherapy is utter bunk and wants to arrest Dr. Abigail on charges that what occurred after putting her patients under makes her an accessory. Her house is put under 24 hour police surveillance, and this is where the movie goes all to hell, in my opinion.
During the first night of the police watching the house, one of the officers sees “something” happening. Something entering the house or hovering above the house. He is so aware of this, mind you, that he calls for backup (while the video surveillance in the police car records the event and is horribly distorted, there's no denying that something caused the officer to radio for help). The police arrive, only to find that Dr. Abigail's daughter is missing. The sheriff thinks the doctor hid her own daughter. The doctor says she saw a light and then her daughter was gone. No one bothers to review the tape or ask the officer who reported the incident what he saw. Ever. Not even once for the rest of the whole movie.
After this incident, Dr. Abigail decides to be hypnotized as a means of contacting or understanding the aliens and where her daughter might be. She has a friend and colleague put her under, while the expert in ancient civilizations holds a camera to record the event. Everything goes haywire. The recording is distorted, there is the doctor's voice and some entity speaking ominously in Sumerian. Then the recording ends.
What we are left with is Dr. Abigail, talking to someone on a show about her experiences, her colleague who put her under who isn't saying anything, and the expert in ancient civilization being nowhere to be found.
Maybe that's what the film intended – to have everything be as much an unknown to the audience as it is for the people who experienced the abductions. However, I doubt this movie will become a series, and it was (unfortunately) portrayed in a fashion no better than a dramatization on the Discovery Channel or old episodes of “In Search Of...” The Fourth Kind leaves no resolution whatsoever, and doesn't even bother to explore any of the mysteries it created. It would have been great as a late night movie in the 1960s or even 1970s, but right now, its portrayal just left me cold and unable to relate to a subject I know is much different (or rather, the film exaggerated the subject matter in the wrong areas) in my world, and in the experiences of others.
