Director Olatunde Osunsanmi, really wants you to believe that his movie, The Fourth Kind, is based on real events; so much so that he includes “historical video” of them right along with the dramatization. It even opens with actress Milla Jovovich introducing herself as none other than “actress Milla Jovovich,” informing her audience that she will be portraying a character named Abigail Tyler throughout the film. Like 1999’s mega-hit The Blair Witch Project though (to which this film will undoubtedly be compared to), the “real” events depicted in the film very much deserve the quotation marks to which I have assigned them. However, the validity of this so-called true story is irrelevant. The film should be able to stand on its feet whether the depicted events are fact or fiction. Unfortunately, it does not.

As Jovovich so graciously tells us, she plays Abbey Tyler, a psychologist from Nome, Alaska who is dealing with an outbreak of patients all experiencing the same strange phemomenon – they wake up every night at 3am in a panic with an owl staring at them intently. She puts the patients under hypnosis where they relive this experience and discover that this strange owl may not be an owl at all. Shrieking, frenzied seizures and levitation ensue.

The problem with the film is that it goes to such great lengths to convince us that it’s real (showing the “real” Abbey Tyler videotaped sessions along side Milla Jovovich’s dramatized version, the two characters speaking the same words nearly in synch) that it is simply a constant reminder that we are only watching a dramatization. A good thriller gets its audience so involved in the suspense that they temporarily forget that they are staring at a movie screen. The Fourth Kind is unable to achieve this precisely because it is constantly reminding us that we are.

- Daniel Gray