"The Fourth Kind" - My brief review

[Ye Admin]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/

The first time I tried to watch this, I was turned off by the cheap gimmick of alternating "actual" footage with "re-enactment" footage. I read a few comments, years later, that the movie got better and I decided to give it another chance.

I honestly have mixed feelings about this movie. It's brilliant and below mediocre at alternating times. But the main issue is how the "actual footage" was handled. To begin with, it was fake. When they started showing too much of the "actual" footage, with all sorts of weird crap going on, I knew this was fake. Apparently Universal paid a $20,000 settlement to who knows what due to planting faking news stories to make this look like it was actually based on factual events.

That being said, it feels like there are two different movies going on in there. And that's because there are. Both are fictitious and both would have worked on their own. Had they gone for the found footage style, the lesser known actors would have sufficed and it might've been even scarier.

I'm happy to know it was all made up, because one of the "true" scenes involved the death of minor children and I was not prepared for this in a work of fiction. Once that happened, I couldn't focus on the movie anymore for some time and I was angry at the production company. But this is early on enough that it became another step on cementing my understanding that it was all fake.

Why could I be initially made to believe the "true story" aspect? I simply misread the "real" Dr. Abby Tyler's poor acting as something like that "Illuminati mind control" woman that was interviewed on video: She had something to gain from telling a crazy story.