Reviews on the 4th kind.

I personally really wanted to watch this movie, i didn't get to this weekend it was a jam packed weekend for me.. but now after hearing all these reviews on the movie im starting to think maybe i should just wait till it comes out on video.

first i hear that the " real" footage isn't even real! which i mean if you think about its understandable that they would used the Phrase" based on actual cases" to draw us ..its a from of publicity. but i will admit its a bit disappointing. i think if they would have just left it as just a movie it would have done much better, because then no one would be criticizing the " real" footage part.

here's a paragraph or two from one a screamfest review.

I'm not sure exactly what quality it is that real people possess and actors lack, but any time a film pretends to document real behavior, either literally or as a reenactment, something is almost always missing. Sometimes the problem is a deliberate decision to enhance events with artificial emphasis or drama, and sometimes it's simply too great a sense of self-awareness in the actor, who knows he or she is performing. But while there are a precious few movies that nail that authenticity, notably the recent underdog-blockbuster Paranormal Activity, such is certainly the case in The Fourth Kind, a film that purports to build an argument for alien abductions using "actual" footage from case studies.

While much of the movie's so-called source material carries the convincing roughness and deficiencies of homemade, handheld recording, too much of it seems far too calculated, both in its technical proficiency and the performances contributed by its "real" people. Further, its accompanying reenactments by recognizable actors undermine the possibility that audiences can take its case seriously, all of which adds up to thriller that unravels easily even if it nevertheless occasionally qualifies as a scary good time.

The film opens with a literal introduction by Milla Jovovich, who explains that the film is based on actual footage from real cases, some of which is used alongside the reenactment footage she participates in as Dr. Abigail Tyler. The "real" Tyler more or less provides a through-line for the story via an interview she agreed to with Olatunde Osunsanmi, who also happens to be the film's writer and director. As she describes the discovery of a shared vision of a smiling white owl among her patients, Jovovich provides context for Tyler's increased hysteria: after Tyler's husband dies under mysterious circumstances, she immerses herself in his work, a psychotherapy study which alienates her from her children, lands her in hot water with the authorities, and eventually endangers her life.

The main problem with the film may be that audiences are just plain too sophisticated to buy into its combination of actual and staged material; even if it's believable to release therapy sessions and private interviews, much less ones where strange and violent behavior occurred, there's just no way that the police would allow filmmakers to include actual shots of a man killing himself and his family. Meanwhile, the rest of the movie is so aggressively over-stylized that you get the impression even the filmmakers don't quite know what they're doing when they keep the camera constantly moving, flip, shift and juggle "actual" images with reenactment footage, and generally overplay the falseness of the acting footage as some extreme counterpoint to the real stuff.

original article.
Category:DVD Horror
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