Milla Jovovich Movie:

Editorial Review:
Nome, Alaska: the edge of the world. What better place for the extraterrestrials to conduct their fiendish abduction experiments? Or so the makers of The Fourth Kind insist, in their grim attempt to reveal the truth about these mysterious disappearances. You know the movie means business when actress Milla Jovovich (as herself, without makeup, even) strides toward the camera in the opening moments and introduces things by warning us that we are about to see and hear actual tapes from psychotherapy sessions in which patients recover repressed memories. We might find it disturbing. Yes, but isn't that why we're watching the movie? Director Olatunde Osunsanmi soon appears onscreen himself, interviewing the real psychologist whom Jovovich plays, and throughout the film there are rough-looking videos of real people freaking out during hypnosis sessions--and even a bit of alien screeching caught on audio tape. Yep, it's all real, except it's all fake. The Fourth Kind has an ingenious marketing idea, which is to breathlessly convince the audience they are seeing actual footage of the supposed events, even to the point of playing the video excerpts next to the studio-shot scenes with actors. After a while, you realize that's all the movie has: the audience's willingness to believe there's a ghost of a chance this might have happened. As a horror movie, the thing is clinical and detached, and when you've figured out the bogusness of the conceit, that doesn't leave much. Elias Koteas and Will Patton join Jovovich in the heated story--or should we say, reconstructions of actual events. Aw, phooey. --Robert Horton

The Fourth Kind [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Do you believe?
2009-12-26 - Not surprised, not amazed at all at the reviews on this film considering there's billions of people on this planet believing in gods they've never seen or heard but talking to them daily, none the less, as children do their invisible friends or santa claus. YOU come along reading their crap reviews then leave here dismissing this film as a hoax before seeing it all because some crackpot "critic" said so?

See the film.

Decide for yourself.

"A Close Encounter of ...": Only Narrative Gimmicks, No Substance
2009-12-25 - Something strange is going on in Nome, Alaska. That's what "The Fourth Kind" claims. According to the film written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, while treating her patients, Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist living in Nome, discovered horrible truths behind the unexplained missing person cases in the town - that is, sort of "A Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind."

Milla Jovovich (Alice of the "Resident Evil" series) plays the role of Dr. Abigail Tyler. At the beginning of the film Ms Jovovich stands before the camera as herself, an actress, and then she appears as Dr. Abigail Tyler, psychiatrist and mother of two children. Dr. Tyler puts her insomniac patients under hypnosis - all of them say they have seen the same thing, an owl - but the doctor's treatment results in disastrous consequences. There are more details to come in this thin story, which, told in a straightforward way, is in fact nothing but a weak episode in "The X-Files" series.

Osunsanmi's "fact-based thriller" is in a way more ambitious than Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of The Third Kind." I mean "The Fourth Kind" is so intent on being authentic that the film employs several narrative gimmicks such as the use of "actual audio" tapes and the "real" interview footage (where Osunsanmi himself appears as interviewer). At some points both "actual footage" and "re-enacted footage" even appear side by side, using the 1960-ish split screen technique.

Despite (or because of) the elaborated way in which the film's story is presented, we soon realize that what "The Fourth Kind" is trying to do is nothing new, except its pseudo-documentary style, which itself is not enough to keep us interested. Actually the whole film is not interesting. It is not scary either, except, perhaps, the haggard face of the "real" Abigail Tyler. She scared me a lot.

The Fourth Kind Review
2009-12-17 - THE FOURTH KIND

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Elias Koteas, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Corey Johnson, Enzo Cilenti, Eric Loren, Mia McKenna-Bruce and Raphael Coleman

WRITTEN BY: Olatunde Osunsanmi and Terry Robbins

DIRECTED BY: Olatunde Osunsanmi

Rated: PG-13
Genre: Science Fiction / Thriller
Release Date: 06 November 2009



Evidently the target audience for The Fourth Kind is aimed at gullible morons because that's exactly what you would have to be to fall for what this film so desperately wants you to believe; that it's real.

The Fourth Kind did exactly the opposite for me, of what it intended. Throughout the entire film we are constantly being reminded that it's a movie. Every time an actor comes into frame, they announce it with subtitles: Will Patton - actor. As if that's not bad enough, the first thing we see is Milla Jovovich standing in the woods somewhere. She proclaims loudly, "I'm actress, Milla Jovovich," then she goes on to explain that we are going to watch a movie and we are going, `Yeah we got that lady, that's why we are here'.

Then she tells us that some of the events that we will be viewing are true and that for dramatic purposes actors have been hired to act out those emotional scenes but that they will be played simultaneously along with the real footage. What? Why?

And just as she promised, the director uses a split-screen method with the supposed real footage being on the left and the footage with shiny big actors in it on the right. The actors on the right act out nearly everything verbatim that is happening at the exact same time on the left side of the screen. Who in their right mind in Hollywood thought this would be entertaining?

The biggest reason that this did not work for me aside from the fact that it was aggravating and beyond boring; was that the actors they hired to act on the right side of the screen, were way better actors than the ones they hired to play the real people who weren't supposed to be acting, on the left side! How am I supposed to believe that the footage on the left is real when Milla Jovovich's adaptation of it is astronomically more impressive and believable? They would have been better off saying that this all really happened to Milla Jovovich and shot it with a home video camera.

The film takes place in Nome Alaska. We are told that over the last several years, numerous people have vanished unexplainably. The point behind the film is that supposedly these people were abducted by aliens.

Milla Jovovich re-enacts the role of a psychiatrist by the name of Abbey Tyler. We see `real footage' of the person her character is based on, interviewing patients. Her name has been changed of course but there she is right there in front of us on the screen, so what was the point of changing her name? Right.

And isn't there some kind of psychiatrist / patient confidentiality clause that protects people from being humiliated? Apparently none of the people on the left side of the screen had a problem with Hollywood glamorizing their violent and no doubt traumatic abductions. Again, right.

Tyler's research discloses that several of her patients have reported being awakened in the night at around the same time and having weird visits from spooky owls. What this has to do with the aliens is beyond me.

Despite how terribly lame the film is, you get outstanding performances out of Will Patton, Milla Jovovich and another actor that has been overlooked for far too long; Elias Koteas. I get the sense that none of these great actors knew just what the final product was going to look like.

I will admit that the director did do some amazing things cinema-graphically on the right side of the screen and the footage they show on the left is pretty creepy at times; but whenever there is an `alien incident' let's call it, the camera conveniently loses focus and is blurred out of our vision and we are left only with screams of horror and shaky camera movements.

Oh, and when their spaceship comes, yeah that makes the camera blurry as well. The aliens don't mind that all of this is filmed, because it's obviously fake.... I mean because the cameras get all fuzzy so there is no way they can get caught. That's what I meant to say.

MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD
2009-12-12 - The trouble with "found footage" movies is that they're hard to pull off well. Most, if not all, are compared to the "Blair Witch Project" which was hyped up on the Internet and an almost guaranteed blockbuster beforehand.

That said, there has been the occasional success. I loved "Paranormal Activity", even though I knew it was staged. It was just real enough to do the intended job (ie scare the crap out of me). "The Fourth Kind" didn't have quite the web-hype that "Blair Witch" had, though a website or two was created beforehand to lend it legitimacy.

Basically, the "footage" is a series of videos taken by psychiatrist Abigail Tyler of patients in session. The video is inter cut with "re-enactments" of the supposedly real events by some very talented actors including Milla Jovovich, Will Patton and Elias Koteas. The patients all have something in common, a dream or possible hallucination, or real experience in which they all observed an owl looking at them during the night when they woke up. Under hypnosis, the patients all reveal that something very nasty and scary happened to them...this was no owl, it was abduction.

The movie's title plays on the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"'s, the "third" kind being contact and the "fourth" abduction.

The movie offers a slightly new take on the "found footage" premise. Whether you believe that the videos shot by Tyler are real or not, the cutting back and forth between the grainy "home movies" and decent-quality footage gives the eyes (and ears) a break.

Without wanting to give away too much, the film follows Tyler's investigation and tries to show evidence of alien abductions. When "aliens" are involved, the video shot by Tyler becomes very grainy, sufficiently to not reveal too much, but to show enough, in theory, to make us wonder. The story feels long and drawn-out. Director Olatunde Osunsanmi who also wrote the story which is loosely based on some disappearances in Nome, Alaska, tries too hard to convince us and tries a little too hard to put twists and turns in an attempt (in my humble opinion) to give us that feeling many of us got at the end of "The Sixth Sense" when all was revealed. The talent on display tries hard but the story lets them down. Perhaps cinema has evolved too much for this kind of story to work very well, but then I look at "Paranormal Activity" and think otherwise.

As with other "footage" movies, "The Fourth Kind" relies on a few good scares. There are a couple of very good scenes that made me jump in my seat, but I felt they were overdue but did not make up for the rest of the film.

If you're a UFO / abduction believer then you may quite like this one. For me, it was "okay". It wasn't brilliant. I'd certainly watch it on DVD if I picked it up cheaply, but it certainly isn't anywhere close to it's predecessors. I would add that some of the scenery is beautiful and there is some excellent camera work, especially on wide shots.

Let's face it - UFO's are real
2009-11-14 - Let's face it,

I LOVE THIS MOVIE. PLEASE MAKE MORE - AND THE MORE SINISTER , THE BETTER.

Man - made and 'alien made'UFO's have existed since time immorial.
But this film may not exist for time immorial , however. It will thrieve in our memories as one of the funnest to make films of 2009 , when people went into imaginary journeys to imaginary places to tell other people that they had had imaginary experiences , which would later be turned into advanced , highly skillful and creative film projects.
The Fourth Kind was really never about anybody or anything 'else'than the storyline and the characters OF THE FILM ITSELF.
That is what most people felt it so hard to believe. There is another , very little known film out there that is titled The Beings. I suggest amazon.com find somebody who can make it selleable here , because it's a very well done sci - fi film and can be compared to the Fourth Kind in many ways.
It is indeed true that the film models it's storyline after the content of alien abduction accounts , and there is nothing wrong with that.
The way I see it there was nothing wrong in the overall production or introduction of the movie. I have also read theories about that it was part of the ploy to stage a fake alien invasion in 2012 , which I think is very probably going to be cancelled now that we know all about it.
The aliens in the Fourth Kind are based on the classic gray archetype of alien , and the whole mockumentary cooperates much better with me as a film in my view than Paranormal Activity did , and also because the settings are so completely different. The Fourth Kind cannot be considered as sucessful or sinister as the Wicksboro Incident , and we need more movies like that , and maybe some of them could be over 2 or 3 hours long.
I am glad now that we don't have to say to each other that UFO's are real and that people realize that the planet is being visited each day. What saddens me however , is the extremes and the length to how people can go in order to marketize products such as this. They could have spared the efforts to make the film more convincing than it really is , and realize that there will always be a hardcore of fans of this type of film , and they will not care much if the producer states it's based on actual events or not. If the music works , if the script works , if the play works , that's what counts. If the project is based on actual events , that is always talked about after the film has been viewed. I never bought into most of the stories that the Fourth Kind material presented , and I loved how the film does not demand that you believe in anything that takes place within it's content. If you want to create a seriously sinister UFO abduction movie you have to put yourself into the shoes of the antagonists and the 'bad guys'of the film and not focus on the good guys solely. You also have to make sure the music works just like they did in this film - and then , everything comes out perfect! You've got a film that works and THAT'S WHAT COUNTS , not whether it's factual or not.
Too bad the 20000 USD had to be wasted into an effort which could have costed far , far less!!
If the directors or producers choose to wait for maybe a few months they could produce another similar film and also use guerilla marketing , and make far more people die in it and have seriously sinister scenes that won't rely that much on very expensive special effect. Now that we have seen the making of mockumentaries about crazy ghosts , dumbass aliens and moody demons that go bump in the night , it's about time that somebody did a mockumentary about zombies. THAT would be REALLY fun to watch , especially on a place like [...] or [...]. Way to go! Brilliant piece of work! Good music also.