"The Fourth Kind" is a horrible mess of a film that attempts to deliver what it thinks is an important message about alien encounters, but instead fails miserably on all counts. Based on alleged actual events, the film stars Milla Jovovich as Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist in a small, remote Alaskan town. When her husband is brutally and inexplicably murdered in front of her very eyes, Abigail feels lost and confused because she can't recall any clear details about what happened or remember the killer's face. Soon after several of her patients begin experiencing strange sleep patterns with mysterious visions that are too similar to be discounted as coincidence. Could all these happenings point to alien abductions, or is all this just happening in Abigail's mind? The filmmaker tries to lend credibility and pathos to the story, but the device he uses - a split screen between actual audio and video recordings of the events blended with dramatized scenes of the film - is distracting and serves no purpose other than to give the film an unnecessary edginess. At best, this technique is gimmicky and at worst it is outrightly disjointed and unintelligible. Also, we never see any actual scenes or images of the aliens, which the director probably thought was cleverly mysterious but instead comes off with an air of cheapness, almost as if the production was not allowed any budget for special effects. It seems like the purpose of this movie is to prove the existence of aliens and extraterrestrial encounters, but if anything I believed less in them than before I watched this film. By the end, you are so bored and confused that you'll be praying to be abducted.
1 out of 5 stars
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