Hi Gang! Bebarce here with a new update. I’m instituting Irregular Guest Post Thursdays.  What are Irregular Guest Post Thursdays?  On Thursdays I may or may not post an article that either I or a guest will write.   I can’t guarantee I’ll find a guest, and I can’t guarantee that I’ll post myself, but if I do it’ll happen on Thursday.  So the word is out!  If you think you have what it takes, send me a review!

Today’s post comes from a good friend by the name of Tracy (totally not a chick) aka Metalbourne.    I’m a fan of pretty much every word he writes, even when he isn’t composing articles.  People who know him, knows that he doesn’t pull his punches. That’s why I’m thankful he lives on the complete opposite end of the country, because I don’t think he’d like the chick joke.

So enjoy Tracy’s article on 4th Kind.

(Oh and one last thing, these articles, much like my articles always contain spoilers.)

Plot Fragments: The Fourth Kind of Failure

I’m going to spoil it right away: Her husband killed himself. The sheriff shows her a picture of his bullet riddled head and a separate picture of a gun and we’re supposed to assume he killed himself.

I think he faked his death to get away from the insane bitch.

And that, right there, is The Fourth Kind in a nutshell. It is a movie about critical thinking where you are required to view the evidence and then make decisions on your own. I know this is the point of the movie because Leeloo Dallas Multipass climbs up on her soapbox right at the beginning and tells me that this is exactly what I am supposed to do.

I know you’ve already tabbed out and added this to your Netflix queue, but don’t, she’s not wearing that bandage bikini thing.

Milla Jovovich plays a psychologist named Abbey Tyler, who is trying to solve the double mystery of her husband’s death and why some people in the town of Nome, Alaska aren’t sleeping so well. You see, early on, we’re shown a scene of Tyler’s husband being brutally stabbed by an alien, but this is all a false memory. So, really, Tyler is just batshit insane. The perfect person to start hypnotizing people to find out why they’re not sleeping at night.

Everything goes well until the first guy she hypnotizes remembers something so terrible that he can’t describe it, and then goes home to kill his family and then himself. At this point, both the town sheriff and Tyler’s son ask in a passive aggressive tone, “How did your husband really die?”

Because, lets face it, hypnotizing a guy into killing himself is starting to look like her M.O. Sadly, the sheriff isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and lets her go. It would have been nice if this were a formulaic movie about a woman dubbed the “hypnosis murderer” and then has to clear her name by producing proof of aliens, but there’s a twist at the end and she actually is so insane that it’s rubbing off on everyone else.

Speaking of “everyone else,” another of her patients is at home, and calls Tyler up desperately wanting to be hypnotized. My guess is that he’s probably afraid that he’s too lazy to drive all the way home and kill his family after being hypnotized, so he wants to get it done right then and there so he can get around to the brutal murders before the momentum wears off.

Things go horribly wrong for the number two guy, as he is possessed by the aliens and made to levitate off the bed and scream a warning in moonspeak right before suffering a seizure so bad that his spine breaks. It’s actually pretty logical that, as a cover up for their dalliances with humans, the aliens would scare people away by doing something way more spectacular than whatever it is they were trying to cover up, because this is exactly the method that has worked for every Scooby Doo villain. Ever. That’ll show those meddling fucking kids!

I’m going to spoil something else here: There’s no trap or reveal where they pull off the rubber mask. As awesome as that would be, it just doesn’t happen. Instead, Tyler discovers that she’s been abducted also, has herself hypnotized, and then gets herself and her two kids abducted. The sheriff makes more comments about her husband, then breaks the news to her. Then the movie ends without resolving any of that. Seriously, it was glossed over just as well as I just did here.

Her daughter doesn’t come back from the abduction, and nobody cares except for a footnote at the end of the movie. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Back to the critical thinking thing I was talking about earlier, Tyler video tapes her hypnosis sessions, and not only are these “actual recordings” played in the movie, the screen splits and the “actual video” plays alongside the dramatic reenactment. As if they’re trying to make the argument, “This is real! Why would we video tape it twice?” of course, my question is, “Why would you tape this travesty even once?”

But it’s okay, it’s all an exercise in critical thinking. Just so long as you don’t think about how you could be better spending your time.

Here’s something you could be spending your time doing: Watching a movie with real fucking aliens in it. In real life, every time someone says, “I have real video taped proof of aliens!” you know he’s actually saying, “I have five minutes of static I want you to watch,” and this movie follows that same trope to the letter. Every scene where there might be an alien, or even something interesting, is obscured by static. Just to be even bigger cockteases about it, anyone witnessing whatever is going on will exclaim about how spectacular it is. There’s no aliens seen ever in this movie. They’re as real as ghosts.

Even in the climax of the movie, Tyler shares her no-alien memory of the abduction in the form of a shot and an implied probing.

Not anal.

Oh! So maybe that’s why her daughter is abducted and never brought back! She’s half al– Nope. We never find out. That’s the end of it.

My guess is that after the abduction by aliens and presented with the choice of being reunited with her batshit crazy mom, she decides to stay with the aliens. Not wanting to care for the whining little brat, they drop her in the woods and she just makes a run for it. Whatever the decision is, the producers decided to stop paying her and wrote her out of the last ten minutes of the movie.

The entire movie is wrapped up in a scene where Tyler is being interviewed and the movie was her story. At the end we’re back to “real” tyler, a sort of frumpy looking skeleton in a wheelchair. Based on what I’ve seen of aliens, I can imagine why they found her attractive enough to inseminate. The camera pans over to her interviewer, who stares for several long seconds, and finally says, “Where the fuck is this story going?”

No, I’m just kidding. The idiot hung on her every word like a desperate guy hoping he’ll get laid. The movie ends with some audio recordings of 911 calls of ufo and alien sightings. Frankly, I didn’t even bother trying to find out if those were real or not.

Sadly, that’s all there is to this movie. The aliens are just as present as any kind of plot resolution. The one redeeming factor is that you can look at The Fourth Kind as a kind of satire about how people will believe almost anything so long as they’re shown a picture as proof. It doesn’t really matter what quality or how relevant the picture is, just so long as someone says, “This is the proof.” The only thing this movie is proof of is that you wasted time watching it. But, hey, Milla Jovovich wants you to make your own decision. (She doesn’t take her clothes off)

3 Comments »

1. Can you tell me who did your layout? I’ve been looking for one kind of like yours. Thank you.

   Comment by Rick Boyer — April 8, 2010 @ 6:30 pm

2. I modified a community offered wordpress theme. (carnavera?) The banner was done by Tyler Capps of http://www.cappslock.com He’s an awesome artist.

   Comment by Bebarce — April 8, 2010 @ 9:01 pm

3. I really enjoyed this movie! Freaked me out, it wasn’t what I was expecting! Didn’t like the cheesey “real people” though…

   Comment by CinemaObsessed.com — May 13, 2010 @ 6:51 am

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