If you’re like me, you’ll go into “The Fourth Kind” expecting it to be an alien-centric “Paranormal Activities.” You can’t be blamed for thinking that, since that’s exactly what the trailers and the ad campaign set out for you.

You’d be right, at least on the surface. It is like “Paranormal” in that both movies consist of a lot of chit-chat about the supernatural punctuated by creepy, low-quality video sequences meant to terrify you with their “authenticity.” Both movies are nearly endless in their exposition and both fail to deliver on their threats when the third act starts winding down.

The films are quite different, however, in scope and ambition. “Paranormal” knows that it’s small – about small things happening to small people. “Fourth” reaches for something much larger. In my opinion, it doesn’t get there, but reaching is definitely something.

The movie moves along two simultaneous tracks. There is a re-enactment of “real” events that took place in Nome, Alaska in 2000, and there are frequent intercuts with the “original” footage. We are meant to believe that the character played by Milla Jovovich is modeled very tightly on a Nome psychologist. This point is so crucial to the structure that sometimes they are on the screen at the same time, saying the same things in unison.

We are meant to believe that the grainy footage from Nome is real – in this way the film owes a great debt to “Blair Witch.”

I think the idea here is that the director can give us a glossy movie with the pretty stars we expect, and then shift into overdrive by adding grainy footage of ordinary-looking people for extra realism. This strategy doesn’t really pay off, but it is interesting.

I had a few problems with the tandem storylines. If you had the kind of footage we’re exposed to in this movie, why would you bother with the Jovovich crew at all? What is the benefit of the movie crew’s footage except to remind us that anything can be faked?

Further, why so much emphasis on aliens when the second and third reels are about something else entirely? It stops being about aliens when we learn that our malevolent vistors speak Sumerian.

I don’t have a problem with the film going “Exorcist,” but I wish that thread came across as less of an afterthought.

In the end, it’s supposed to be scary, and it is. But only a few times, for a few minutes at a time. The rest of the time it’s dull and spotty exposition. I think it fails more grandly than “Paranormal” but it fails just the same. You’ll probably get more chills watching a few episodes of “In Search Of.” Skip it.