The Fourth Kind is a movie about alien abductions. It is also boring and contrived.
I like frightening movies. I also like aliens. When I first heard about a movie that placed aliens and people in frightening situations, I was excited. It could only get better if they added my other two favourite things, I thought: Bigfoot and ghosts. But instead of being scary, suspenseful, or even interesting, The Fourth Kind ended up being a waste of 98 perfectly good minutes of my life (and poor Maria’s, too).
The Fourth Kind was marketed much like The Blair Witch Project was, back in the 90’s: as a true-story, based on real accounts, yadda yadda. It ended up being a publicity stunt, of course, but I do find it mildly amusing that Universal Studios actually released fake obituaries and news articles to drum up interest in their film. Maria quipped, “if you need to do that kind of stuff, you don’t have a movie worth seeing.” Or something witty like that.
As for a review of the actual content of the film: what content? I think the director was working with the thesis that in a monster movie, if you don’t actually show the monster, it’s scarier. While this is sometimes true, that technique, unfortunately, has to be paired with two other critical features: a plot and good suspense-building. Oops.
Truly, I’m disappointed by this movie, by what it could’ve been. Put in the hands of a capable director (I’m looking at you, M. Night) and it could’ve been truly terrifying instead of truly terrifying. Still, if you happen to find yourself forced to watch this film for whatever reason make a game out of trying to count the number of times the cinematographer chooses to use that really goofy top-down bird’s eye view shot. I guess they rented a camera crane and thought it was super cool. I counted at least 5.
[...] not bad, probably even pretty good. That is to say, we watched it after just finishing The Fourth Kind and it didn’t fully was the bad taste from my mouth. Tags: based on a novel, Canadian, [...]