At first it feels like a terrible movie... and then you're like, Hey, this is totally entertaining and well-edited! It goes back and forth for a while. Every time I'm super excited for the little sci-fi B-movie to be doing so well for itself, something terrible comes up. Essentially, it's the gold-star A+ paper result of a super-mean teacher's assignment.
It's like, Ok, class, time for the criteria for your final:
1) It has to be about alien abductions.
2) It has to try to invoke the audience's unconscious fear of owls.
3) It must include the foreboding line "Sometimes the things that shake us the most... are the things we seldom see coming."
4) Must have as its protagonist a braid-obsessed Doctor of Psychology paid by the government to root out insomnia in Nome, AK (where it is daylight for 16+ hours four months out of the year). This doctor must be seen flying a plane, owning a 19th century library, and understanding Latin and Greek. This doctor may not, however, believe in psychotropic medications or any kind of talking therapy or be answerable to any ethical board, but must rely exclusively on hypnosis, with absolutely no processing with the client afterward.
5) It has to include a child going spontaneously blind after a trauma s/he did not witness. This child must be played by a terrible child actor who is obviously not blind.
6) Must bring in at some point a wise African scholar who brings up that the ancient Sumerians definitely knew about oxygen masks (because of aliens), juxtaposed with museum images that definitely contradict that idea. Museum images must be obviously fake.
7) Must go further than any other film, ever, to impress explicitly upon its audience that it's non-fiction. Every single scene must include "real" footage as well as "dramatized" footage. In the "real" footage, the protagonist may not be shown wearing a braid.
8) Must show the Doctor of Psychology ("dramatized") arguing that "Eleven million people have seen or know someone who've seen a UFO. Eleven million witnesses - that'd win any court case in the world!"
9) In the climax, when the protagonist is herself hypnotized to help her remember when she'd been abducted by aliens three days prior, she must for no reason suddenly be able to talk to the aliens about things that happened just earlier that day.
10) There must be the suggestion of vaginal probing.
Extra credit: The aliens must turn out to be literally God, which fact cannot be dealt with whatsoever.
Keeping in mind these very tough constraints, "The Fourth Kind" did a great job! It was highly entertaining, with the right amount of plot twists, passable acting, great editing! It was FUN! The best thing about it, though, was the way it continuously (snarkily) undermined the idea that alien abductions are real, while also continuously remarking on how extremely non-fiction its story was.
For instance, it's bookended by footage of the film's actors reminding us, "The More You Know"-style, that the story here is real. Mila Jovonovich lets us know that the FBI have visited Nome 2000 times since the 1960s - more times than the FBI's visited any other town in Alaska! Why are the FBI so interested in Nome? ALIENS! Just after the actors' last appeal to our faith, a series of calls to the FBI UFO Sighting Hotline (which I hope is real) are played. Woman: "There were so many red lights!" Man: "There were no lights!" Woman: "It was shaped like a fedora!" Man: "It was shaped like a circle!" Girl: "My three-year-old brother thinks he saw one!" Just circles of ridiculousness.
Good job, movie!
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