What’s a movie that you really love that was pretty widely abhorred?

One of mine is The Fourth Kind with Milla Jovovich.

The objections seem to be that it’s in a documentary-ish style and that it goes full meta right at the beginning. However, I loved that at the commencement there’s a bit of narration where Milla herself tells us that’s she’s portraying another character — but then it claims to be a documentary recording “true” events as well.

It’s a huge wink at the audience and it rips up the barrier between cinema, documentary and life as it’s lived, just as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell does so in a different but extremely related way.

What’s miraculous that after this the movie still works so well even with its narrative suspended in this framework of de-contextualized artificiality.

The movie is also a tragedy. People these days do not like tragedies. And like all great tragedies, it’s clear at the beginning that it will be one, too.

Also, it was marketed as some alien abduction snoozefest and it’s so much more than that. That was also a strike against it as people who saw it weren’t expecting what they got.

There’s just so much cleverness in this film — more than I can write about. And it is also truly creepy, as few films manage to be.

If I had to state the message of the film, it’d be that things we think that happen to us are just the same as things that actually do happen to us. Post hoc, it’s like an algorithm that can’t be reversed. There’s just no way to travel back to distinguish the difference.