Pseudo documentaries are mostly products whose form is greater than their content. Don't you see the zombies, ghosts, mutant monsters, and foreigners who are all experienced but can make a comeback with the help of the first-person perspective. It is no exaggeration to say that they have a history of decades, no matter what kind of stories have been told by predecessors, and the story of "Fourth Contact" is not even comparable to that of "Encounter of the Fourth Kind" in any episode of previous seasons. The X-Files", their tickets and awards are not supported by the very DV very present illusion behind them. Those very inferior story kits, DV coats, can actually increase the price by a hundred times, and they even "brazenly" claim that this is a real thing ("Blair Witch"); Records”); some also like to mix and match, with top-notch sound and rough graphics (“The Cloverfield File”); those who are masters are also willing to be safe (George Romero). The screenwriters don't have to sharpen their heads to think about stories, and persuade the boss to make all the horror films in the next ten years into pseudo-documentaries, or we will strike again.
Of course, the above is just a joke. Who dares to say that formal innovation is not innovation? Having said that, in fact, sometimes the form is greater than the content, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not that the screenwriter's level is limited, but the screenwriter does it deliberately, such as this "Fourth Kind of Contact". First of all, in form, it jumps out of the pseudo-documentary frame defined by DV. It is a talk show, an anecdote reenacted by actors. The heroine played by Milla Jovovich showed her role as an actress from the very beginning, and the subtext is equivalent to the objective existence of the original version that actually happened. From the very beginning, the audience fell into the trap set by the director, and vaguely associated those specially treated yellowed pictures with the word truth. In this respect it is more technical than the "Blair Witch" era's hard-boiled gossip online to trick audiences into getting in, even though the method was originally imitated from TV shows. "Contact of the Fourth Kind" is also very technical in terms of the completion and similarity of imitation. It can be said that the writers and directors are quite self-control. As a big drama in which aliens play the leading role, it seems that the "foreigner"'s small face is not enough to be outraged. In the film, the scale has always been kept at the level of half-covering the face of the pipa, and the reason for the interference of unknown forces is to let people taste it. In the end, I thought about what I saw, but I didn't seem to see anything, but in fact I saw everything I should have seen. Even if a "foreigner" makes a stunning appearance, it is difficult to guarantee that it will not be criticized as nothing more than that. Everyone knows what an alien looks like, so why take this risk and present this ugliness.
The most commendable part of the film is its ending, which is not intended to tell you how terrifying the aliens are and how terrifying the truth of the case is. The story of the film completely abandons the usual suspenseful ending in order to match the format of the interview. It's playing itself in the mouth, disproving its own arguments in a way that makes the credibility of the whole story open to debate. The secret of pseudo-documentary is to "force" the audience to believe, but they all use dead brains and don't know how to work around them, constantly exaggerating its authenticity, and in the end, it's still not credible, but the effect of "bittering" will be great. . Whether it is true or false, and what is true and what is false, makes the whole story more three-dimensional and realistic, forcing you to look back at the whole film. It doesn’t matter whether you have a conclusion in the end, it is enough to participate in it, and the goal of the director is probably achieved. As the video says believe it or not.
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