Hanging in Fox Mulder’s cluttered X-Files office is a poster showing a flying saucer with the caption “I Want To Believe.” Well, I do want to believe. Not just in the existence in life on other planets, but that Hollywood could create a quiet, intriguing and eerie alien flick for adults. But try as he does to convince me otherwise, I never believed in director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s “is it real?” extraterrestrial invader film The Fourth Kind.
The premise of The Fourth Kind is that Nome, Alaska, a small town accessible only by air, has a long history of disappearances. Several residents of the town all seem to be having the same dreams of a white owl watching them, followed eventually by disturbing recollections of being taken by little gray men for experiments. Milla Jovovich is Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist studying the town’s sleep disorders through hypnosis when she stumbles on the abduction epidemic.
The Fourth Kind has a clever-on-paper concept where the “true” story of alien abductions is told through dramatizations intercut with “authentic” archival footage, audio and interviews from “real” people (yes, there’s a need for a lot of quotation marks when discussing the “reality” of this movie).
