The film goes to great lengths to be realistic. "I am the actress Milla Jovovich," Jovovich tells us at the outset, explaining that in the film she plays the psychologist Abigail Tyler, whose testimony was videotaped. Other fact-based characters are her colleague (Elias Koteas), the local sheriff (Will Patton) and a professor who interviews her (Olatunde Osunsanmi). "Every scene in this movie is supported by archived footage," she says, and to prove it, Osunsanmi, who's also the director, uses split screen to show Jovovich and the real Abigail talking almost simultaneously. The real psychologist's name has been changed, but since she's right there on the screen, how much of a mystery can she be in Nome?
It was with crushing disappointment that my research discovered this is all made up out of whole cloth, including the real Abigail. The film wasn't even shot in Nome, but mostly in Bulgaria. And Dallas Massie, a retired state trooper who's the acting police chief in Nome, says he's heard nothing about aliens.
I learn all this from the blog of an Anchorage Daily News reporter, Kyle Hopkins, who says about 20 people have indeed disappeared in the area since the 1960s, and writes: "The FBI stepped in, reviewing two dozen cases, eventually determining that excessive alcohol consumption and the winter climate were a common link in many of the cases. Some of the dead were killed by exposure or from falling off a jetty into the frigid Snake River."
All right, then, "The Fourth Kind" is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events. When we see Will Patton, for example, a subtitle informs us: "Will Patton, actor." Oh! I already know well that Will Patton and Elias Koteas are actors, and Jovovich identifies herself at the start. I wish they'd had gotten a really big-name star. It might have been funny to read, "Bruce Willis: Actor."
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