The Worst Kind of Film
While Hollywood has done some pretty wretched things in the name of making a dollar, The Fourth Kind is pretty low even for them.
I generally hold alien abduction stuff to be generally bogus. I think most of the people who claim to see UFOs are largely like most of the people who come into my job every day, which is to say they are genetically stupid on a molecular level or clinically insane. Some worse than others to be sure, but generally not the kind of people I want knowing where I parked. What I guess I’m saying is, I’d exercise more patience with UFO witnesses if they didn’t have library cards.
While I believe there must be life on other planets (I’m not against God. I just believe in math too) I do not think much of it is aware of our pitiful existence. If they are I wish they'd just come and invade us already so I’d have an excuse to not go to work every day (“Can’t come in today: fighting with the resistance”). Talk about calamity pay! I wonder how many days I’d get CP if we were invaded by aliens? They’ve GOT to give you at least a couple of days. If I can get a day if a water main breaks, I can certainly get two if we’re invaded by Scientologists' gods.
Anyhow, films about alien abductions are generally lame unless they just go full monty with it. When it's "based on a true story" it's almost never good. These films always try to creep you out with the idea that the events portrayed might have very well happened because, well, it works. Why? Because nobody actually wants to meet an alien. We have to change too many history books and planetariums, and plug our asses with cork.* Seeing a UFO would be scary, but seeing an alien would probably fuck you up for life. And being abducted by one? Well, let’s just say that if you weren’t already living in a trailer home, toothless, wearing aluminum foil on your head that being abducted would likely make even the biggest-dicked Master of the Universe on Wall Street start spreading out jelly sandwiches.
Think about it:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Not based on a true story, very good movie.
X-Files - Not based on a true story, ate up America’s brains for 9 years-awesome.
V (the original series) - Not based on a true story, rocked even for the 80s.
The Forgotten - Not based on a true story, not a half bad film. The abduction “yank” was pretty sweet.
And the rest?**
Incident at Roswell - “True” story, sucked dick
The average episode of Monster Quest - “True” story, sucked demon dick
Communion - “True” story, sucked Satan’s dick
Fire in the Sky - “True” story that gave us the kind of thing you want to see in an abduction movie - you know, ALIENS, probes and general cosmic debauchery - but it still sucked, so it still belongs on the second list anyway. So it sucked balls.
My point is that when Hollywood doesn’t HAVE to convince us that what we’re seeing might have any basis in reality, they give us a good movie…sometimes a great movie. But when they try to sell us on the human, “real” side of the paranormal, they drop the ball. Monster encounters in general that are supposed to be based on true stories are lame. The Mothman Prophecy sucked so much ass I thought someone dropped a black hole in my toilet and flushed. But Alien and The Thing? Completely untrue and completely scary. It’s like the same weird dynamic that prevents Hollywood from making good movies out of superheroes who, for all intents and purposes, they shouldn’t be able to fuck up because they should be easy to shoot due to a lack of flash (Batman, Daredevil, Punisher).
All of which brings me to the horrendous crime of The Fourth Kind.
This film, prior to release, was being sold to audiences as featuring footage from real psychiatrists sessions featuring people who believed to be abducted. We were led to believe this was the case because the lead actress came to us baring it all plainly, stating without a blink that the film was based on the realest of the real shit. During the film the actress and director gives us the same spiel and all of the characters are introduced as being played by actors like Will Patton and Elias Koteas. You know, so we don’t confuse these reenactments with shit that actually happened. The movie even goes so far as to juxtapose the original source footage with the fictional footage so you can gauge how closely the film is portraying the facts.
Turns out the whole thing is a mind-fuck: the source material isn’t real, and the spiels given by Milla Jovovich was part of a marketing campaign. The company even got sued by a media source over the matter…and settled.
See, that’s fucked up. You can’t do that.
You can’t come to audiences and say, “This is based on real shit” and then proceed to give us un-real shit as a source. You can’t go online and create fake obituaries and try to build a case to suspend belief for a movie. You can say “based on a true story” or “based on actual events” and then fuck the movie up every which way to Sunday, sure. We’re all used to that. Nobody thought that Whitley Strieber actually high-fived an alien. When we saw it in Communion, we knew it was a liberty (and bile inducing). We get that. But you can’t just flat-out LIE to us to sell a ticket. That would be like me going up on the mic and saying, “This poem I’m about to do is based on true events,” do this gut-wrenching poem, then come back and say, “Sorry guys. In the interest of investing you emotionally in my art, I lied about it being real.” There is something wrong with that, and just because it happens to be a science fiction film and about dumb-ass alien abductees doesn’t make it okay or not worth discussing. There is something criminal in the act - they got sued and lost, for God's sake - and there is something artistically abhorrent about it as well. The movie would have played just fine if they had simply said “based on true events” and then never tried to push (and push and push) its “reality”. We wouldn’t have held it to any higher standard than anything else that’s “based on a true story”.
I get that there are some directors out there who like to see how far they can push an audience. Funny Games is a film designed expressley for this purpose and it's another "exercise" that pisses me off. I don't go to movies to be a lab rat.
Hollywood, don't do this again. I'm warning you.
NOTES
* The one Planet 51 joke I chuckled at.
** Before anyone says “Signs”, recognize that no one had been abducted. As far as we know Mel Gibson’s kid was just collateral to get out of the house. No one actually disappeared or was taken and brought back. Also, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is technically cloning, not abduction, but I guess you could make a case for it. No one to my knowledge is suggesting they’ve been taken away and brought back as less or more than human. Cloning is not abducting…that’s erasing. Also, I recognize “Taken” ended up sucking. Also, anybody who says “Men In Black” can just get un-friended right now.
I generally hold alien abduction stuff to be generally bogus. I think most of the people who claim to see UFOs are largely like most of the people who come into my job every day, which is to say they are genetically stupid on a molecular level or clinically insane. Some worse than others to be sure, but generally not the kind of people I want knowing where I parked. What I guess I’m saying is, I’d exercise more patience with UFO witnesses if they didn’t have library cards.
While I believe there must be life on other planets (I’m not against God. I just believe in math too) I do not think much of it is aware of our pitiful existence. If they are I wish they'd just come and invade us already so I’d have an excuse to not go to work every day (“Can’t come in today: fighting with the resistance”). Talk about calamity pay! I wonder how many days I’d get CP if we were invaded by aliens? They’ve GOT to give you at least a couple of days. If I can get a day if a water main breaks, I can certainly get two if we’re invaded by Scientologists' gods.
Anyhow, films about alien abductions are generally lame unless they just go full monty with it. When it's "based on a true story" it's almost never good. These films always try to creep you out with the idea that the events portrayed might have very well happened because, well, it works. Why? Because nobody actually wants to meet an alien. We have to change too many history books and planetariums, and plug our asses with cork.* Seeing a UFO would be scary, but seeing an alien would probably fuck you up for life. And being abducted by one? Well, let’s just say that if you weren’t already living in a trailer home, toothless, wearing aluminum foil on your head that being abducted would likely make even the biggest-dicked Master of the Universe on Wall Street start spreading out jelly sandwiches.
Think about it:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Not based on a true story, very good movie.
X-Files - Not based on a true story, ate up America’s brains for 9 years-awesome.
V (the original series) - Not based on a true story, rocked even for the 80s.
The Forgotten - Not based on a true story, not a half bad film. The abduction “yank” was pretty sweet.
And the rest?**
Incident at Roswell - “True” story, sucked dick
The average episode of Monster Quest - “True” story, sucked demon dick
Communion - “True” story, sucked Satan’s dick
Fire in the Sky - “True” story that gave us the kind of thing you want to see in an abduction movie - you know, ALIENS, probes and general cosmic debauchery - but it still sucked, so it still belongs on the second list anyway. So it sucked balls.
My point is that when Hollywood doesn’t HAVE to convince us that what we’re seeing might have any basis in reality, they give us a good movie…sometimes a great movie. But when they try to sell us on the human, “real” side of the paranormal, they drop the ball. Monster encounters in general that are supposed to be based on true stories are lame. The Mothman Prophecy sucked so much ass I thought someone dropped a black hole in my toilet and flushed. But Alien and The Thing? Completely untrue and completely scary. It’s like the same weird dynamic that prevents Hollywood from making good movies out of superheroes who, for all intents and purposes, they shouldn’t be able to fuck up because they should be easy to shoot due to a lack of flash (Batman, Daredevil, Punisher).
All of which brings me to the horrendous crime of The Fourth Kind.
This film, prior to release, was being sold to audiences as featuring footage from real psychiatrists sessions featuring people who believed to be abducted. We were led to believe this was the case because the lead actress came to us baring it all plainly, stating without a blink that the film was based on the realest of the real shit. During the film the actress and director gives us the same spiel and all of the characters are introduced as being played by actors like Will Patton and Elias Koteas. You know, so we don’t confuse these reenactments with shit that actually happened. The movie even goes so far as to juxtapose the original source footage with the fictional footage so you can gauge how closely the film is portraying the facts.
Turns out the whole thing is a mind-fuck: the source material isn’t real, and the spiels given by Milla Jovovich was part of a marketing campaign. The company even got sued by a media source over the matter…and settled.
See, that’s fucked up. You can’t do that.
You can’t come to audiences and say, “This is based on real shit” and then proceed to give us un-real shit as a source. You can’t go online and create fake obituaries and try to build a case to suspend belief for a movie. You can say “based on a true story” or “based on actual events” and then fuck the movie up every which way to Sunday, sure. We’re all used to that. Nobody thought that Whitley Strieber actually high-fived an alien. When we saw it in Communion, we knew it was a liberty (and bile inducing). We get that. But you can’t just flat-out LIE to us to sell a ticket. That would be like me going up on the mic and saying, “This poem I’m about to do is based on true events,” do this gut-wrenching poem, then come back and say, “Sorry guys. In the interest of investing you emotionally in my art, I lied about it being real.” There is something wrong with that, and just because it happens to be a science fiction film and about dumb-ass alien abductees doesn’t make it okay or not worth discussing. There is something criminal in the act - they got sued and lost, for God's sake - and there is something artistically abhorrent about it as well. The movie would have played just fine if they had simply said “based on true events” and then never tried to push (and push and push) its “reality”. We wouldn’t have held it to any higher standard than anything else that’s “based on a true story”.
I get that there are some directors out there who like to see how far they can push an audience. Funny Games is a film designed expressley for this purpose and it's another "exercise" that pisses me off. I don't go to movies to be a lab rat.
Hollywood, don't do this again. I'm warning you.
NOTES
* The one Planet 51 joke I chuckled at.
** Before anyone says “Signs”, recognize that no one had been abducted. As far as we know Mel Gibson’s kid was just collateral to get out of the house. No one actually disappeared or was taken and brought back. Also, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is technically cloning, not abduction, but I guess you could make a case for it. No one to my knowledge is suggesting they’ve been taken away and brought back as less or more than human. Cloning is not abducting…that’s erasing. Also, I recognize “Taken” ended up sucking. Also, anybody who says “Men In Black” can just get un-friended right now.