These 'Fourth Kind' aliens don't come close

What we most need in the case of "The Fourth Kind" is some benevolent aliens to abduct the bad actors.

To the moon.

Maybe as far as Pluto.

Whether you believe in UFOs is entirely beside the point of whether you can sit through this lifeless, absurd and painfully overacted attempt to rip off a "reality" concept.

The producers try to mine the fact that an abnormal number of people have disappeared from the old Gold Rush town of Nome, Alaska, in recent years. The FBI even sent someone to investigate. The movie suggests that aliens abducted them, and others who were examined and returned, with their memories erased.

If you've heard of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," this is the fourth kind. After "contact" (the third kind) comes "abduction," the fourth kind. It sounds most unpleasant. E.T. would never do anything like that.

In order to ensure a laugh, Milla Jovovich is cast as a psychologist who goes to Alaska to investigate after her husband dies mysteriously in the middle of the night. Jovovich has two of the more strange-looking eyes of any actress and she is altogether a stunning model, but it is hard to accept her acting as a doctor. The casting is almost as absurd as when she played Joan of Arc. When it is suspected that her husband committed suicide, she has to say lines like, "I would have known if that were the case. I'm a psychologist." Even Meryl Streep couldn't play these lines.

Moviemakers seem to think that if they flash a time and date across the bottom of the screen, audiences will think you are actually documenting fact. Michael Moore tries it regularly. Here, they go even further by claiming that a haggard, bad-hair-day woman on screen left is the "real" Dr. Tyler, with Jovovich on the other half of the screen recreating real-life incidents.

Actually, some enterprising Alaskan reporter has revealed that there never was a Dr. Tyler registered in the state. We are indebted to him, although there was nothing in the movie to remotely suggest reality anyway.

People wake up in the middle of the night and see an owl in the window. This is worth 10 minutes of filler time, and a close-up of an owl's eye. Hypnosis is tried to make the "travelers" remember their abduction. All that counting down is an added suggestion that the audience might take a nap. It soon becomes clear they're not going to miss anything.

Will Patton plays the requisite local sheriff who is a nonbeliever. He seeks to arrest Jovovich when a man breaks his back while she has him under hypnosis. (It was the aliens that did it, we betcha.)

When special effects are called for, a snowy TV screen is as good as it gets.

No wonder there is a long list of folks over the final credit who supposedly refused to participate in this movie. The intention, one supposes, is to suggest that the revelations here are so daring that there was a cover-up. We suspect that these people never existed.

In any case, the two dozen cases actually investigated by the FBI in Nome resulted in the suggestion that excessive alcohol consumption and the winter climate were more responsible. Nome is a "wet" city with bars and liquor stores, which is a marked contrast to the other commercial hubs that surround it in rural Alaska. The authorities claim that some of the missing folks died as a result of exposure or from falling off a jetty into the frigid Snake River. That might make a more interesting movie.

UFOs, abduction and all that deserve a more serious examination than this gimmicky speculation on the fourth kind.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com