2 out of 5

Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi

While The Fourth Kind moves along briskly enough, and is admirable in its composition, its curious what exactly the aims of the director were in structuring the movie as the combination of actors / found footage. Its hard to say how well in advance the movie was planned. It was announced quite some time before Paranormal Activity, but it certainly seemed to be released just to jump on the reality bandwagon that that indie biggie re-started. And the plot is not so dissimilar from many of the this is real films, except that it deals with aliens and not ghosts or witches. But when Milla Jovovich walks up to the camera at the beginning, before an oddly cheap looking background wash, and announces that shes an actress, and shes playing the role of the Dr. in the movie, and everything is real but re-enacted… it immediately takes you out of the film, as does each subsequent title card that announces the actor playing the real life character. Why not save this for one announcement at the beginning of the film, in text even? What was the point of pairing the real life footage with the re-enacted stuff? And because youre not wrapped up in the film, it allows you to see the silliness – that no ones face in the real scenes are blurred, and that theres no plausible way that this could be a true story. And the directors interviews with the real doctor share that same amateurish setting as the opening. It was an interesting idea, and, again, admirable for the way its stitched together, but ultimately failed beyond the conception stage.