Review of The Fourth Kind (2009) by Chads. — 06 Nov 2009

An owl is "the most imaginable evil on Earth" and smells like "putrid cinnamon", according to one of Dr. Abigail Tyler's patients, whose description of an alien lifeform sounds so absurd, you start to half-believe that the sleep hypnosis videotapes are indeed real.

Truth must be stranger than fiction, the moviegoer thinks, because what screenwriter in his right mind would use an animal so utterly unscary, so closely related to the Harry Potter movies(and books), unless he was forced to, due to the historical record which precludes his own extra-terrestrial inventions.

A feral flamingo, perhaps? A penguin, even. Accepting the documentary footage as a non-fiction element, a starting point for Milla Jonovich(as the real-life Dr. Abigail Tyler) and her co-stars to recreate the events seen on video and heard on audio, makes or breaks "The Fourth Kind"(a bastardization of the narrative/doc hybrid form used in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's "American Splendor"), since the moviegoer is made self-aware that his/her suspension of disbelief is a decision that the filmmaker has already predetermined for the audience.

Non-compliance with the alien abduction storyline as fact might be beside the point anyway, since the duped and unduped should be equally bored by the sheer hokiness of the archival segments interspersed throughout this relatively glossy docu-drama.

Admittedly, the application of an existing academic institution's name in the graphics during a sit-down interview conducted by a writer with the "real-life" Dr. Tyler, gives the first-hand account an outward aspect of authenticity, as does the "name omitted" device "The Fourth Kind" uses during the doctor's sessions with her doomed patients(the same technique to preserve anonymity should have applied whenever the owl gets a mention.

), but it all seems so pointless, so laborious, this fabrication, when the film is so lacking in suspense.