How much truth is in the fourth kind

Even though Tyler has two credible witnesses to every single hypnosis session, including one that involves alien possession and levitation, those credible witnesses mysteriously never corroborate her story. So we see her screaming and crying when police arrive to arrest her for breaking her patient's back, and neither of her credible friends comes forward to say, "Actually I was there, I am a licensed whatever, and this guy broke his own back while having some kind of alien-induced seizure.

Second, there is the mystery of how Tyler's husband died. She remembers him being murdered by an intruder, and for most of the movie her psychiatrist friend is trying to hypnotize her so she can remember the intruder's face. But then it turns out that actually her husband shot himself, and she hallucinated the murder. And everybody, including her friend, knew this all along.

But nobody tried to tell her. So we've got this hallucinating, crazed lady who is being allowed to hypnotize people?

And who still has custody of her kids, even though her son is clearly scared of her? By the time the aliens "abduct" her daughter during a fuzzed-out documentary moment, you are ready for her to be arrested and put in a psychiatric hospital. Finally, there's a whole "chariot of the gods" idea that's sort of flung into the story as if we weren't already up to our eyeballs in disbelief we couldn't suspend even if we wanted to.

The aliens speak in ancient Sumerian, which a professor is inexplicably able to understand, despite the fact that the only access to Sumerian he has are from ancient texts.

Nobody knows how the language would have been pronounced. Still, he figures out that the aliens are yelling things like "I am god," and using the word "destroyed" a lot. We also don't understand why they're still speaking an ancient language - you'd think by now they would try speaking English since they've been abducting Alaskans since before Sarah Palin was born.

So we're left with an absolute mess of crappily-done documentary footage, inexplicable aliens who act more like demons than scifi creatures, and a main character Tyler who seems like a complete crazy lady. Milla Jovovich still manages to shine, though it's hard when she has lines like, "My baby!

They stole my baby! By the end of The Fourth Kind , you'll feel swindled - and not in the happy, they-fooled-me way. I can only assume that people who were scared by this movie, or even vaguely intrigued by it, were responding more to the movie's concept rather than its execution. There were a lot of ways Osunsanmi could have taken this movie to salvage it. He could have focused on making the documentary hoax convincing by creating believable footage and a smarter online presence.

Or he could have pushed the movie over into the realm of Weekly World News camp, winking at the audience while also delivering some chills. Both the trailer and the film itself open with an assurance to that effect, direct to camera, from the film's star:. This film is a dramatisation of events that occurred October Every scene in this movie is supported by archive footage. Some of what you are about to see is extremely disturbing.

At least the latter statement is accurate, although not for the reasons intended by the filmmakers. This approach seems to have backfired badly on the filmmakers as most reviews of the film are highly critical of this unconvincing "archive footage". Kyle Hopkins wrote an excellent piece for the Anchorage Daily News debunking the movie. He conceded that there is a long history of disappearances and suspicious deaths in Nome. They have been investigated by the FBI who "mostly blamed alcohol and the cruel Alaska winter".

Hopkins goes on:. According to promotional materials from Universal, the film is framed around a psychologist named Abigail Tyler who interviewed traumatized patients in Nome. But state licensing examiner Jan Mays says she can't find records of an Abigail Tyler ever being licensed in any profession in Alaska. No one by that name lived in Nome in recent years, according to a search of public record databases.

Still, there is a shred of "evidence. Except the site is suspiciously vacant, mostly a collection of articles on sleep studies with no home page or contact information. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. The Fourth Kind is a pseudodocumentary that re-enacts the true events that happened in a small town of Alaska.

The film's story revolves around the incident that occurred in in which some native men traveling from the smaller villages suddenly went missing. The FBI looked into about twenty cases through which they came to the conclusion that alcohol and frigid temperatures were the reasons for death.

However, nine bodies were never found, the film is based on those disappearances and frames it as alien abduction to create a story that somehow fits the form of documentary realism. The film revolves around an incident in which a psychologist named Abigail Emily Tyler tries to find the reason for the death of her beloved husband in Nome, Alaska. She decides to proceed with clients that have insomnia and amnesia after seeing a white owl. When she uses hypnosis with two clients, they get nervous and have breakdowns.