Here was me thinking I would make it through the festival without stumbling across a film I hated but alas that wasn’t to be…
The Fourth Dimension is a pretentious, non-sensical and indulgent film which attempts to be some sort of clever mix of sci-fi and reality but fails in making it intriguing or, most importantly, interesting.
The movie consists of three segments. The first stars Val Kilmer as a sort of version of himself in which he is a motivational speaker at a local bowling alley. The second follows a man conducting a scientific experiment in which he attempts to view the past. And the third follows a group of young people who run around and do what they want in a small abandoned town.
These stories don’t appear to share much connection while watching it and that’s only amplified when you think about it more afterwards. Apparently it was all put together by each separate director of the segments – Harmony Korine, Aleksei Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski – being given specific instructions, such as the hero having to tell bad jokes and that the film, “has to have real life,” all of which appear on-screen as text before each part.
It’s conceited, arty nonsense that’s repetitive, confusing and boring, only markedly of interest in so far as it represents a unique experience. But this is not the sort of individualistic material that works on its own originality alone. There’s nothing to grab onto emotionally – all of the characters are either too weird, too distant or too vacuous to care about in any way – and intellectually it’s not satisfying either. It felt like a bunch of half-baked ideas, thrown onto the screen and then they just rolled with whatever way it stuck.
Beyond uniqueness The Fourth Dimension offers no enjoyment and barely anything to take away from it other than it’s possible to make something that thinks outside of the box. Points for trying but the result is a pretentious and insufferable bore of a film.
http://muvi.es/w1680