Wikipedia:Sandbox

Sandbox
Written by	Olatunde Osunsanmi
Produced by	Paul Brooks Joe Carnahan
Starring	Milla Jovovich Elias Koteas Hakeem Kae-Kazim Will Patton Charlotte Milchard
Cinematography	Lorenzo Senatore
Edited by	Paul Covington
Music by	Atli Örvarsson
Production companies	Gold Circle Films Dead Crow Productions
Distributed by	Universal Pictures Japan: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release dates	November 6, 2009 (2009-11-06) (U.S., U.K., and Canada)
Running time	98 min.
Country	Template:FilmUS
Language	English
Budget	$10,000,000
Box office	$43,080,189 (as of March 30, 2010)

The Fourth Kind is a 2009 American science fiction/horror film, starring Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton and Mia McKenna Bruce. The title is derived from the expansion of J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the fourth kind denotes alien abduction. The film purports to be based on a true story, and the movie contains what are claimed to be actual clips and records, made by Nome, Alaska psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Jovovich), in a mock-documentary style similar to The Blair Witch Project and Lake Mungo. It purports to faithfully portray events that took place in the year 2000.

While the film was poorly received by many critics, it did achieve moderate box office success earning over US$43 million worldwide.

Plot

Tyler taped an interview in 2002, at Chapman University, and retells her story. It is October 2000. It has been just two months since her husband's death and the case is still unsolved. Dr. Campos encourages her to take some time off, but she refuses, explaining that Will’s research meant a lot to him, and she needs to begin it for him.

She flies back to Nome from visiting Dr. Campos in Anchorage, and tapes sessions with three different patients, all of whom have the same experience: they have difficulty sleeping, and every night that week, they have each seen a white owl at their window just staring at them. One patient remembers the same owl visiting her as a child. Another patient, Scott, says somehow, it got in his house. Patient Tommy, a middle-aged man, agrees. She puts Tommy under hypnosis to try and help him remember what happens at night. Under hypnosis, he screams and leaps off the couch, knocking over a lamp, and wakes up before she snaps him out of it. When Abbey asks Tommy to tell her what he saw, he says he doesn't want to talk about it, and they'll discuss it next time. He calms down and leaves her office, seemingly recovered.

Abbey goes to pick up her children at school: she has two: Ashley and Ronnie. Ashley, about eight, has been suffering from conversion disorder since her father was killed, and is blind. Ronnie, about 12, blames his mother for his father’s death.

During the night, Tommy holds his family at gunpoint in their home, demanding to speak to Abbey. After a brief conversation with Abbey in which he says he must do this, he mumbles something in a strange language, and then shoots his wife in the head, then the children, and himself. The sheriff interviews Abbey and wants to know what Tommy said. The sheriff is very skeptical of her explanations and suggests that her hypnosis directly caused Tommy's violence.

Dr. Campos flies to Nome and again tries to convince Abby to rest. He joins her in a hypnosis therapy session with Scott, where Scott starts shaking, foaming at the mouth and making distressed gurgling sounds. When Scott wakes up, he rushes to the trash and vomits. Abbey suggests alien abduction as a possible theory to Dr. Campos, who is skeptical.

Abbey's secretary rushes into the office, saying Abbey must listen to something. Abbey had asked her earlier to make a transcript of her tape recorded notes from the previous night, where she made speculations on the phenomena. The girl hands her the tape and says "I won't listen to it again" and leaves the room. They turn on the tape; Abbey hears the same notes she recorded the night before, but then the tape goes quiet. Heavy, frightened breathing is heard, then suddenly hysterical screaming that doesn't stop. Over the screaming, an eerie metallic voice is heard speaking a strange language. Abbey is shocked by the recording and goes home, listening to it over and over, trying to make herself remember. She then finds scratch marks in the floorboards that match up with her broken fingernails.

She decides to contact a man who specializes in ancient languages and he comes to Nome and identifies the words in the tape as Sumerian, one of the most ancient languages in the world. The words "Examine" and "Destroy" are translated from the tape. He then tells her that if she were to go into any Sumerian exhibit, she will find strange etchings on stone tablets of creatures that look suspiciously alien, as well as pictures that are undoubtably rocket ships.

Later, Abbey gets a phone call from Scott’s wife. He is hysterical. He has an unexplained bruise on his upper arm, and wants to be hypnotized again, to get the voices out of his head. Under hypnosis, he bolts up, screams and levitates while speaking in Sumerian. Sheriff August goes to Abbey’s house and tells her Scott’s neck is broken and he is paralyzed. Convinced she has caused the injury, he begins to arrest her, but Dr. Campos arrives and pleads for clemency. The sheriff relents, but says she cannot leave her house, and places an officer outside her residence. At 3:33am, Deputy Ryan wakes up, sees something in the sky, and then rushes in the house. Abbey’s daughter, Ashley, is found to be missing. A hysterical Abbey says she saw a beam of light come down and that they took Ashley through the ceiling. The sheriff thinks she is insane and removes her son from her custody.

To get Ashley back, Abbey decides that she must make contact with these beings, and the only way to do that is to be hypnotized, to try to remember what she saw. Dr. Campos and Dr. Odusami tape her session, and once hypnotized, she remembers seeing the white owl, looking down at her, smiling. Then she says it is not really an owl, and begins screaming. She also screams various words in Sumerian including “I am...God”, yet it is not her voice. Something is injected into her shoulder and she remembers drills, and the tape goes blurry again. Back to the interview in 2002, Abbey says all three of them were abducted, and then returned. They have no memory of where they went, but when asked if the entity was God as it claimed, she remembers a feeling of total hopelessness and doubts it.

Back in 2000, she wakes up in a neck brace in the hospital. Sheriff August is with her and speaks very calmly. He asks her how her husband died. She tells August he was murdered. The sheriff then pulls out two photos: one of a gun and one of a man with a bullet-hole in his temple. It is revealed to her that Will committed suicide, because whatever he was after drove him to the edge. She tries to maintain that Will would never do that, that he was murdered in their bed, stabbed to death by unknown intruders. She concludes she must have unknowingly created a delusion to repress the actual events of that night because they did not make sense.

The interview in 2002 ends and the camera zooms out to show that Abbey is in a wheelchair, as her neck was also broken. The movie ends saying that Abbey was cleared of any wrongdoing, particularly in the disappearance of Ashley, and that she was never found. Her son, Ronnie, still blames her for Will and Ashley and is estranged from her. Abbey left Alaska and now lives on the East Coast of the continental U.S. Nome has had the highest number of unsolved disappearances in all of Alaska, and the FBI has visited them much more than any other Alaskan city in the last fifty years.

Marketing campaign

The film's trailer states that the story is based on "actual case studies", but did not specify any cases. As a result, much speculation has arisen regarding the search for documented evidence from the actual cases and whether Dr. Abigail Tyler is a real person or a fictional character for use in an internet viral marketing campaign.

On September 2, 2009, an investigation by Noori Wright and the Anchorage Daily News examined the validity of the film's premise, and its relation to actual disappearances that have occurred in and around the town of Nome. The investigation found no specific events to back up the claims in the film and also revealed that unsolved deaths in Nome are no more a majority of disappearances (just as in other remote areas).

On November 12, 2009 Universal Pictures agreed to a $20,000 settlement with the Alaska Press Club "to settle complaints about fake news archives used to promote the movie." Universal acknowledged that they created fake online news articles and obituaries to make it appear that the movie had a basis in real events.

On November 13, 2009 WorstPreviews.com reported "Universal Pictures has just reached out to us to let us know that the studio was not sued and the money was just a contribution Universal made to the Alaska Press Club. The contribution was not a result of any lawsuit."

Basis in reality

Although the film's events are grandly fictional, its claims about Nome's missing persons history and frequent visits by the FBI are not; since the 1960s, countless Native visitors to the town have reportedly vanished, some whose disappearances were never solved. Ten persons have gone missing in the town since 1990. The movie is based on the theory that the missing-persons cases were actually alien abductions.

The actress who plays Dr. Abigail Tyler in the "archive footage" is a real life psychiatrist (her name appears in the DVD and Blu-ray credits of The Fourth Kind as a Nome resident while the name of the Doctor Abigail))

External links

• Official site
• The Fourth Kind at IMDb
• The Fourth Kind at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Fourth Kind at AllMovie
• The Fourth Kind at Box Office Mojo