-By Michael Rechtshaffen

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Landing very closely on the sleeper heels of Paranormal Activity comes The Fourth Kind, an alien-abduction thriller that combines purported raw case-study footage with dramatic "recreations" to unsuccessful effect.

While writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi puts a lot of work into the film's "Is it or isn't it" (as in a hoax) conceit, the gimmick proves more distracting than disturbing, with those multiple split-screens shared by supposed real-life victims and actors playing them ultimately serving to distance viewers from the mythology instead of drawing them inward.

Whether the film's question of authenticity is enough to draw decent opening-weekend audiences will depend on the effectiveness of Universal's viral marketing campaign, but it's likely the theatrical encounter will be brief.

Taking its title from ufologist J. Allen Hynek's classification of extraterrestrial sightings, with the fourth kind referring to a hands-on abduction, the picture is set in Nome, Alaska, where psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) hears a number of her traumatized patients describing chillingly similar nocturnal experiences. They all begin with the appearance of a strange white owl at their window but, through subsequent hypnosis recorded by Dr. Tyler's trusty video camera, her subjects each become victims of a violent encounter with a nasty-sounding, Sumarian-speaking entity.

That The Fourth Kind is actually not as dismissively silly as the above sounds is due to all that back-up documentation which Osunsanmi assembles, including an archival interview he does with a woman identified as the real Dr. Tyler shot at Southern California's Chapman University. Although both Osunsanmi and producer Terry Lee Robbins, who shares story credit, are both Chapman alumni, the closest you'll come to an interview with an Abigail Tyler on the university's website is one with Abigail Van Buren, a.k.a. Dear Abby.

The fact that the film is already driving folks to the Internet means it accomplishes its goal to some degree, but it would have been far more potent without that simultaneous dramatization supplied by Jovovich, Elias Koteas as a sympathetic colleague and Will Patton as a dubious law enforcer.

Adding to that artifice is an insistent orchestral score by Atli Orvarsson that constantly feels at odds with the production's desire to be taken as the real deal.
-Nielsen Business Media