by Writer/Producer Kevin Lane

The movie The Fourth Kind was just released on DVD & Blu-ray this week, and here are some thoughts from a Christian worldview about it.

***WARNING SPOILERS**** if you haven’t seen the movie this is your fair warning that I intend on sharing spoilers about it in this article.

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The Fourth Kind hasn’t been as well received as I would have expected, but I believe it’s actually very well made.  Will Patton gives the most believable performance I’ve ever seen him give. The special effects happen mostly in your mind, and the story can be summed up in two words; clever & creepy.

The premise of the movie is that Dr. Abigail Tyler  of Gnome Alaska filmed sessions with her patients who were experiencing alien abductions. She became obsessed with investigating these events and found that she was also being abducted. Things go down hill from there, if you can imagine.

During the initial act of the movie Dr. Tyler is seen praying at the dinner table, her son is not impressed by this. However, by the end of the movie we hear her blaspheme the Name of the Lord. The attacks on Christianity that one might expect in this genre are much more subtle in this film than in others though.

The most interesting aspect of the movie is how video is presented as being the actual video recorded during Dr. Tyler’s sessions and from police cameras. It is very convincing. At one point in the film they push it a bit far however. Breaking from reality they show a family suffer a murder/suicide on police recorded video. They attempt to maintain the suspension of disbelief by using blurring over the gun shots, but at this point I was out of the movie experience.  Until that point I was wondering if the video tapes were real or not. The faked video is very well done and shows sessions which look more like demonic possession and influence than anything else.  I think this is very intentional, and is bait for audience.

At the beginning and the end of the film the audience is told directly that what they believe is their choice. So what do you believe about alien abductions?  In September 2008 we sat down with Gary Bates the author of Alien Intrusion to ask him about aliens and the encounters that are so widely reported.

What came out of the interviews we had with him is probably our most popular series ever, TCC Phone Home. Are those lights in the sky real? Are alien abductions real? Here’s a hint, the last episode of the series is called “They’re Here!”

TCC Field Report | January 16, 2010

As our team of radio reps gathered together to pray before we went out for our weekly witnessing, a thought occurred to me. Haiti had just experienced one of the greatest earthquakes in recorded history. The people there had lost everything: family, friends, all their possessions. It also occured to me that they would probably give anything to be where we are right now.

God has graciously blessed us with so much in this country, and what can we do to say thanks? Well, we could start by doing what He has commanded us to do – go out and preach His Gospel to every creature. Not that we need to pay Him back for His grace (and not that we every could), but if we are truly thankful to the God Who has given us so much, why would we not all want to please  Him by doing the very thing He has commanded us all to do?

What if tomorrow was our “Haiti experience”? What if we were in their shoes tomorrow? This overwhelming thought drove me, and the rest of our team, to step out in faith and talk about the Haiti earthquake with the people in our community and to more boldly share the Hope that is within us. If tomorrow we knew people were going to die in an earthquake here, where would these people be going when they died? Do they know the Lord Jesus Christ?

We had some great conversations with people and our hope was that they would see that in a blink of an eye, everything could be taken away…even their life! What are you hoping in, or more importantly, who are you hoping in? We need to plead with people to see that in their current state, they have no hope (or a false hope), and true hope comes only with repenting and trusting in Jesus Christ. So, if we lost everything here tomorrow like Haiti has lost today, we could rest in our eternal security even through a temporal disaster.

Click here to listen to a conversation God allowed me to have with Shazrim about the earthquake in Haiti

In Him,

Chris | TCC Radio Field Representative