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The Fourth Kind

Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton

“Every scene in this movie is supported by archive footage.” – Milla Jovovich, trailer for The Fourth Kind.

“Bullshit!” – Trevor Soderstrum

The International Telecommunication Union states that there are over 4 billion cell phones subscriptions worldwide and a huge chunk of them have a digital camera built into them. That means every Tom, Dick, Muhammad, and Li have one. That means there are homeless people walking around with one attached to their belt. Why do I mention this? Because if Art Bell space aliens are visiting us, I expect some photos, not the fuzzy kind, where it could be a spaceship or just a pie plate some kid has thrown. I am not asking for a picture of the Great Kazoo putting on a rubber glove to give some abductees an anal probe or Xenu wearing a “I came 100 billion light years to Earth and all I got was this t-shirt” t-shirt. Just something. Anything.

Eighty percent of Americans, according to a CNN/Time poll believe that our government is hiding information on the existence of extraterrestrial life. Sixty-four percent of us believe that little green men have made contact with humanity and 50 percent believe that human beings have been abducted. These numbers are kind of surprising given that 91 percent of those surveyed claim to have never had an extra-terrestrial contact or know anyone, even distantly, who has. Similarly, 93 percent claim to never have been abducted or know anyone who has been. Okay, given that there is a 3 percent margin of error, factoring in sleep paralysis, or what is called a waking dream (before space aliens became hip, people imagined angels or old hags, incubuses, or succubus visiting them and doing all sorts of bad things to them), the garbage known as recovered memory syndrome, hallucinations, pareidolia (the minds ability to find familiar patterns in chaos, i.e. why we can see the Virgin Mary on a piece of burnt toast), just plain lying and other psychological problems, that pretty much means there is a better chance that Sarah Silverman, draped in just a towel, will be knocking on my door, than Mork from Ork and Alf stopping by Earth to sexually abuse individuals no one else on this planet wants to touch. (Okay, can someone please explain to me how these little green or gray men can conquer traveling at, or faster, than the speed of light but still have to treat Earth like it is last call at a single’s bar?)

Am I saying that there is not life on other planets? No. Given the Drake equation, the odds of there being life out there on some distant rock somewhere is pretty good, but when you take into account that intelligent life, being around long enough to conquer long-distance spaceflight and that just the universe is at least 156 billion light years wide and filled mainly with a whole bunch of nothing, or less matter per light year than active brain cells in Paris Hilton’s noggin, the odds of two intelligent races connecting are slimmer than a Twiggy/Karen Carpenter beauty pageant.

Still, Hollywood is a dream factory. There is no such thing as ESP, telekinesis, time travel, or hot chicks that fall in love with fat, ugly dudes who constantly screw up but are good-natured at heart. Fantasy. It tells stories of men that can fly, action heroes that can outrun explosions, and that good guys always win. I am all in favor of that. We all need to dream and get away from our problems, but there has been a disturbing trend lately. Maybe it is the bad economy or the need to capture people’s attention with hundreds of different possible kinds of entertainment vying for attention, but when you market a film as being based on true events and then doctor up several websites to back up your claim that “[t]his is a dramatization of events that occurred in October 2000,” that is unethical. Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich), a psychologist in Nome, Alaska, is supposed to have stumbled on “the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented.” One little problem, she does not exist. Never has. The state board of licensing and the state psychologist association have no records that a Dr. Tyler ever practiced in Nome, or anywhere else in the state. Yet, Universal Studios has set up several phony new sites including the North Pacific News Archive, Alaska Psychiatry Journal, and the Alaska News Archive to fool people into believing that she is a real person. They even claimed that she published an article in the June 1997 American Journal of Psychiatry, which is a real trade journal. No such article was ever published.

Who cares? One little problem, in 2000, the FBI really did investigate a large number of disappearances. Real living, breathing people, people who were loved and cared about, that disappeared. So, did space aliens take these people? No, there was never a question of that. For years, friends and family members believed that a serial killer was at work in Nome. More than twenty people just vanished. Travelers began to view the city as a dangerous place. After five years of leg work, the FBI concluded that given the large amount of alcohol abuse, depression and harsh weather were the common linkage in most of the cases. Unlike many towns in Alaska, Nome is a “wet city” with hundreds of bars and liquor stores and many people from outlying towns, Inupiat and Siberian Yupik villages, come there to have a good time. Federal authorities concluded that most of these individuals died of exposure or fell into the Snake River. They also concluded that in a couple of cases, particularly that of a Native Alaskan gentleman from Savoonga that he was probably killed because of racism.

It is one thing to make a “space aliens are visiting us” movie that is “based on real events.” It is another when there are still people in pain, searching for answers that they will probably never get. Universal Studios never even bothers to send a representative to Nome to ask if they could trivialize the deaths of people they loved or at least give the families some money. Both The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity claimed to be “based of real events” to ratchet up the fear factors but they both were fictional and never tried to connect with real life events, or to profit off the deaths of men and women who had names, had people who shed tears for them, and have left holes in the hearts of those left behind. At best Universal’s conduct is insensitive. At worst, immoral.

Abigail Tyler is a psychiatrist who comes to Alaska to continue her murdered husband’s work with patients who are having trouble sleeping in Nome. Her patients report that they wake up every night to find the same “white owl” staring at them. She decides to hypnotize one of her patients to find out what it really happening. The man named Tommy (Corey Johnson) starts freaking out and later takes his family hostage. Of course the police have the place surrounded and when she gets there he is talking in a language he could not possibly know, Sumerian. He then kills everyone in his family. She then decides to hypnotize another patient named Scott (Enzo Cilenti). He goes through the same horrifying events that Tommy spoke of and then drops the bomb, space aliens. Hit the spooky music.

Even if this was a decent movie, a good thriller instead of a piece of garbage, I would still tell people to avoid it. There are ethical ways of acting and in this case Universal should feel a great amount of shame about how they have conducted themselves. The only way to do that is to punish them at the one place they listen, the box office. You should be ashamed of yourself if you go to this movie. If you think this is just a movie, just ask Delbert Pungowiyi who is still trying to make sense of his uncle’s death and then if you still want to plunk down money to see this film about made up encounters with extraterrestrials then go, but I do not want to know you.

Verdict: Anyone who sees this movie or contributes one dollar towards it should be ashamed of themselves.