When my wife and I first saw the extremely hyped movie titled The Blair Witch Project advertised on TV, we went nuts. Both of us love that sort of thing – mysteries, missing people, unexplained events, ghost stories. You name it, we love it. We don’t buy into many of them, but the ad campaign was so well-conceived, so well-executed, we were caught up and rode the wave of excitement with a lot of other people.
Turns, out, we got suckered. But before we coughed up the nine bucks to see the movie in theaters, we did a little Internet research with our new-fangled high-speed cable Internet access (remember the late 90s? Ah, technology!). My wife’s a stickler for that sort of thing; she can’t NOT do the research on something. That one stuck in her craw especially because she thought she’d heard ALL the American urban legends and ghost stories, yet never heard of the this Blair Witch. Only a few minutes of digging revealed why.
Flash-forward to 2009. I’m watching Milla Jovovich tell me she’s going to portray psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler in a new movie wherein Dr. Tyler’s actual footage from patient sessions will be used to portray the story of a woman suffering and persecuted for what she discovered doing a research study in Nome, Alaska.
The movie is called The Fourth Kind.
If you don’t already know about that movie, the title of my post gave away the surprise, so you might as well know – it’s all a fake, a hoax. There is no such person as Dr. Abigail Tyler, the statistics in Nome for missing persons have been incredibly exaggerated and the town itself is a little upset by the movie because the real, genuine missing persons cases have been trivialized by the portrayal of what’s going on up there.
I knew almost nothing about this movie, so when my wife and I watched it, we saw things which both had us shaking our heads and shrugging our shoulders. And my wife, as is her nature, jumped on the Internet immediately (she didn’t really watch it with me, she listened from the video game computer) and found that … it was another Blair Witch story.
The film studio was very hush-hush about everything, and there is never the claim of being based on actual events or a true story or any such thing. There’s also no disclaimer at the end (or anywhere else) indicating everything’s fictional, either, so with the blend of “authentic” and “actual” video footage from police dashboard cameras and patient sessions, the illusion is a good one.
As a movie, though, it was sort of entertaining and the style of storytelling was pretty effective. I’d give it a solid “C”, but I like these sorts of things. Your mileage may vary.
Seen any good movies lately? Seen any I recommended? What did you think? Was I right, or off my bean?
-JDT-
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