Film Review--The Fourth Kind

THE FOURTH KIND
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, and Whitley Streiber as The Beav.

A psychologist (Jovovich) presses on in Alaska after the murder of her husband.  She begins to treat patients who all report the same thing: horribly disrupted sleep cycles and visions of an owl at their bedroom windows.  Through hypnotic regression, the patients begin to relate experiences that drive the townspeople Nome into the abyss of the insane and the extraterrestrial.

This alien abduction film made me glad that I am a scholar of rhetoric.  Jovovich appears at the onset sans character, informing the viewer that what follows is "based on true events," but the names and the professions of those involved have been changed to protect their identity.  Then in true Blair Witch style, allegedly "true" video recordings of psychoanalysis sessions as well as police dashboard cameras are interwoven into the film to add to the documentary-style feel.  So the logical question becomes, "why change the names if you're going to show their faces?"  Don't care if I'm a spoiler, but ain't none of it real, folks.  Through a bit of "rhetrickory," the film can accurately be labeled as "based on true events."  There are people who have indeed claimed to have been abducted by aliens and portions of the film play out according to these reports.
But the cases portrayed in The Fourth Kind never happened.  Period.  If it had, I guarantee that everyone would know about it by now because abduction researchers would finally have the hard evidence they've been so sorely lacking for so many years.  Don't you believe it.  Sensationalized, manipulative, and bereft of ability.  It is inaccurate as documentary and ineffective as thriller.  While I am not yet convinced of the phenomenon of alien abduction, please don't anyone base their decision on the reality of the reports based on this movie.

On the plus side, it was a nice touch to have the aliens speaking Sumerian.  Ancient Astronaut theorists (which I am not, not really, anyway) have long held that humanity's first recorded contact with extraterrestrials was in Sumeria.  Having the language be the aliens' own tongue was a bit of insight that I had not expected.

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