Top Stories Reno

Sneaking up on me like a bad-movie ninja, ‘The Fourth Kind’ was kind of like watching a very slow-yet-violent assault on my intelligence. Milla Jovovich plays Dr. Abigail Tyler, a shrink who has recently lost her husband due to tragic circumstances. She gets roped into finishing his research dealing with patients experiencing paranormal events plaguing the small town of Nome, Alaska. As per usual in this type of movie, she too begins experiencing the phenomena herself and quickly goes nuts.

Poorly made on all levels, it plays out like an overlong UFO abduction re-enactment on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. Even though it’s supposedly based on “actual events” that took place nine years ago, overwhelming evidence to the contrary is coming out of the woodwork, the most convincing of which being the fact that, while there have been a few disappearances over the years, the entire town of Nome denies anything abduction-like has ever happened there.

Even with that “shocking” revelation, people are still eating this up as a true story, despite the fact that the “real” footage is brutally unconvincing and the plot holes are so large, someone could drive a truck through them. Other issues include the fact that the movie is so exasperatingly boring that I nearly tore my hair out and that the acting is beyond bad. Jovovich hams it up to an annoying extreme and even though I like the guy, Elias Koteas looks just as bored and mortified being in the movie as I did sitting there watching it.

What really makes the movie so egregious, however, is that the filmmaker, Olatunde Osunsanmi, is trying to pass this off as the reason why there have been so many deaths and disappearances in Nome. This makes the movie not only insulting to the viewer’s intelligence, but also to the memories of the people who have died or disappeared due to the harsh climates of Alaska. I get that everyone wants to achieve success on par with that of ‘Paranormal Activity’ but it’s such an embarrassing, insensitive cash-in on tragedy that it leaves a bad taste lingering in the viewer’s mouth.