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The Fourth Kind – Review

reviewed by Skot
directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009
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The Fourth Kind is a sci-fi horror picture starring action movie princess, Milla Jovovich.  I don’t know how many reviewers would classify it as science fiction, but I do so, though with hesitation, because U.F.O. movies tend to be a sci-fi sub-genre.  The director of Fourth Kind attempts to follow the examples of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Quarantine, and Paranormal Activity by presenting supposed documentary on-the-scene footage.  Then Fourth takes the technique to the next level by adding in dramatized re-enactments portrayed by Hollywood stars, cutting back and forth between the documentary footage and dramatizations, even occasionally running the two side by side for certain scenes.

Milla Jovovich plays psychologist, Abigail Tyler, who is investigating a series of unexplained phenomena she hears about from a number of her patients.  Early in the film, Dr. Tyler notices that several of her patients report trouble sleeping and peculiar images in their dreams, including that of a white owl watching over them.  We’ve all had weird dreams that we couldn’t quite shake off the next day.  So it is mildly creepy to hear different people describe seeing the same detail, and an unusual one at that, in their night terrors.  (Allow me to say that I was watching this movie with my 14-year-old son who was opening an eighth grade graduation card he received at this point in the film.  The card had an owl on it.  Woooooo-oooo).  The patients are all plagued with the feeling of not being able to remember something significant that happens during their dreams.

Dr. Tyler tries using hypnosis to bring these repressed memories into the light of day.  Not good.  Bad things happen.  People die.  Could it be that some things are so terrible that the memory of them causes madness?  An incomplete memory is bliss after all.

I applaud the filmmakers for taking a risk and doing something out of the ordinary.  It’s not exactly a nail-biter but there are a few genuinely disturbing moments.

The Fourth Kind is a different kind of U.F.O. movie that has more in common with supernatural chillers like The Exorcist than it does with sci-fi adventures like Star Trek or War of the Worlds or television’s V. This movie suggests that inhabitants of Nome, Alaska, and possibly millions of other earthlings, are being visited and even abducted by other-worldly entities which may or may not have arrived in your run-of-the-mill spacecraft.  Some scenes resemble episodes of demonic possession or spiritists channeling otherwordly intelligences more than merely patients in psychoanalysis coping with painful recovered memories.  This opens the possibility that these extraterrestrials could be from another dimension or universe instead of merely a distant galaxy.  The influence of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel can be seen.  Like a good postmodern sci-fi horror movie, The Fourth Kind delves more into metaphysics than astrophysics.

Like many examples of the horror genre, The Fourth Kind challenges the ability of reason to explain every aspect of human experience.  This movie explicitly argues the point that some phenomena, real and true, lie outside the scope of the scientific method.  Those who cling irrationally to the sufficiency of rationalism are the bad guys here.

Unfortunately, the interspersing of documentary style footage in and around the dramatized parts of the movie failed.  It didn’t make the movie scarier.  It was just distracting at first, but became annoying later on.  The filmmakers should have been forced to make a decision.  Either go the Blair Witch route entirely or scrap that technique altogether and just give the audience a solid dramatization.  It’s possible to have too much of a good thing.  And what works in one scenario, one project, in the hands of certain artists, might not work elsewhere.

I don’t usually use a star system to rank movies, but for this I’d give it a 2.5 out of 5.  Now, if Milla Jovovich had gone all Jack Bauer on the aliens, that might’ve been worth the full five stars.

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District 9 – Review

reviewed by Skot
directed by Neill Blomkamp, 2009
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District 9 is proof that you don’t need a ginormous budget or famous faces to put together a terrific movie.  The special effects were stunning.  The unknown main actor deserves to win awards.  And the documentary style utilized by The Blair Witch Project (one of the scariest movies I have ever seen), Cloverfield, and Quarantine was effective.  Not only did I enjoy it, but it has also reaffirmed my faith in the sci-fi and horror genres as sources of meaningful story telling.  Many people would classify it as science fiction because it has space aliens and freaky technology.  But I think of it mostly as a horror flick because it has. . . well, some pretty horrible stuff.  Of course, many movies are a combination of both genres like Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s The Fly.  In particular, District 9 engages in something critics call body horror, but I don’t want to say too much. This summer’s Transformers picture may be science fiction too but let’s face it, it’s little more than two hours of robots hitting each other.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I love a good robot rumble.  But occasionally, I like for movies to make me think.

There is some pretty obvious social commentary in D-9’s portrayal of apartheid redux, it being set in South Africa and all.  Think of the spacemen as metaphors for any oppressed group.  Consider racism.  Because natural law tells us it is wrong to brutalize other human beings, a racist convinces himself that the “other” is somehow sub-human, less human than himself, which thus releases his conscience, though never fully, to treat the “other” with disrespect or worse.

Like all good horror, District 9 forces you to think further about what it means to be a human being.  This is an extremely important question that, frankly, needs to have more attention paid to it, especially in these days of advancing bio-technology.  We are performing face transplants; swapping body parts, internal or external, with new bits from other people and even animals, replacing human organs with machinery.  Now add cloning experimentation, genetic manipulation and nano-creation and we’ll have all forms of chimera to consider in days to come.  Soon if not sooner.

Scary stories always have to have a monster.  But what is that?  A monster is usually an entity whose essence is ambiguous.  In other words, a man is not a monster, even if he’s a bad person.  And a dog is not a bad animal.  But a half-man/half-dog?  That is a scary monster.  When the essence and identity of a being is ambiguous, it instills a sense of repulsion in us.  Darth Vader is scary not because he dresses in black.  Some of my favorite people dress exclusively in black.  He is scary because we can’t tell how much of him is human and how much is machine.  His essential identity is ambiguous.  Metamorphosis is prominent theme.  Now I ask you, go see D-9 and then tell me who the monsters are.  Is the protagonist more of a human being at the beginning or at the end?  So what makes someone a human being?  His exterior or something else?  While I agree that beauty is more than skin deep, it troubles me somewhat to suggest that one’s humanity is completely unrelated to his corporeality.

On to the theme of Good vs. Evil.  There is value, to be sure, in stories that clearly demarcate the goodies from the baddies.  This is especially for the moral education of children.  Fantasies often do this well.  The Lord of the Rings is more like a fairy tale in this way, a comparison which J.R.R. Tolkien would consider a compliment.  In that beautiful epic, there is no ambiguity, except in the occasional marginal figure like Gollum.  The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated.

Fairy tales serve an important function and can benefit adults as well as kids.  An adult reader/viewer can also appreciate moral complexity, situations where it is not easy to tell who the baddies are.  This more closely resembles human life on earth the way we presently experience it.  Bad people do good things.  Good people are sometimes bad.

Be warned; this is a graphically gory movie.  Lots of splatter yuck.  Stay away if you like your combat scenes to be no muss, no fuss.

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Paranormal Activity – Review

reviewed by:  Skot
directed by Oren Peli, 2007
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There is a new film called Paranormal Activity that some people are calling one of the scariest movies ever made.  Produced in 2007 by unknowns with just $11,000 and shot in seven days, it’s being compared to The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago.  It too was made by amateur filmmakers for a pittance and it too became a phenomenon.

My comments will come from two perspectives that, in my case, overlap.  First, as a discerning moviegoer.  Second, as a pastor.

If you think you might see this movie, I recommend not reading many reviews (except this one) or watching the trailer.  I don’t want to tell you much about it because it’ll be more fun when you don’t know what to expect.  Just know that it is relentlessly suspenseful and may make you want to sleep with the lights on for ten or fifteen years.

Paranormal Activity is being promoted as the scariest movie in the history of always.  Calling anything the “scariest” or “funniest” or “best” is almost setting it up to fail.  If your expectations are impossibly high, then you are sure to be disappointed by what is otherwise a terrific film.  Some of the ads for the film say “nightmares are guaranteed.”  Seems like that should be deterrent, but not so.  I’m telling you, for all the adrenaline junkies, this will not disappoint.

Horror movies go up and down in popularity and they’ve been pretty popular recently.  Because we build up tolerance, the tendency is to try to out-shock, out-jolt and out-disgust everything that went before it.  But let’s face it; the envelope can only be stretched so far.  Once you’ve seen one subterranean, nazi, zombie, seven-headed, man-eating Hydra you’ve seen them all.  The problem with many horror pictures is that they show you too much, they over-explain the inexplicable.  What is most refreshing about this movie is that it has the guts to let its story convey the horror instead of the spectacle.  Paranormal Activity stands out because of its restraint, for what it doesn’t show.  It scares you more by suggestion that explication.

Parenthetically, how intriguing that the other surprise hit of the year was District 9, another non-Hollywood movie, made on a shoestring with unknown actors.  It had a lot more going for it in terms of the special effects but like Paranormal, the emphasis was on the tale itself.

God is a storyteller.  There is a grand narrative from which all others, to some extent, derive.  As God is imaginative and talkative, it is thus also constitutive of human nature to tell stories and to hear (see) them told.  This characteristic, almost above all else, distinguishes us from the animals.  Creative storytelling is what is most godlike about us.  Sometimes we spin yarns, fiction and non, for entertainment, to pass the time.  Usually to convey values, beliefs, tradition and other culturally valuable information.  Storytelling has been used to inspire great virtues such as courage, compassion, and integrity.  It has also been used to manipulate and undermine.

This story, Paranormal Activity, is told to instill fear.  Fear is a deeply entrenched emotion.  All children are afraid of the dark, a condition we never truly outgrow.  We are wary of things that go bump in the night, or in the hallway outside your bedroom door.  Sometimes rightly so.  Fear can serve us or defeat us.  Can I get an “amen?”  Sometimes fear is helpful.  A man who is never afraid is not brave, he is a fool.  That is one thing that Paranormal Activity says.  If it conveys any existential meaning at all – and I believe that it does – it is that sometimes you SHOULD be afraid.  It is one of the standard conventions of such movies to have a character who is a skeptic, one who thinks he understands the nature of things and is in control of his life, but who is rudely awakened, usually one moment too late.

My assertion is that this is what most people are like, most of the time.  We are know-it-alls when, in fact, we only see a fraction of the cosmos and all it contains.  We’ve only scratched the surface.  Christians acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world.  The Bible certainly teaches that angels and demons exist and that God Himself is daily active in our world.  Read the four Gospels.  It is evident that exorcising demons was a significant part of the earthly ministry of Jesus.  These things are real and yet many of us live daily as materialists.  Not necessarily materialist in the sense of loving money and possessions (though that may be true too), but materialist in the sense of behaving as if only the material world matters.

When I was a pastor in Pittsburgh, I was genuinely surprised at how often people in the church-at-large and community came to me with tales of ghosts and haunted dwellings.  Paranormal Activity.  You can devote yourself to science to try to understand the world.  Or you can consult psychics and mediums.  But the philosophies of this world will always fall short.  And that brings me to my criticism of this film.  For all of Katie and Mika’s attempts to understand and overcome that which tormented them, they never phoned their pastor.

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