Release Date: July 25
Director:
Chris Carter
Writers: Chris Carter, Frank
Spotnitz
Cinematographer: Bill Roe
Starring:
David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy
Connolly
Studio/Run Time: 20th Century Fox, 104
mins.
Considered in the
landscape of current television programming, The X-Files is an
intensely interesting TV saga. The series, which followed FBI
agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)
as they investigated paranormal occurrences around the world, made
its debut in 1993. For the next nine years, viewers tuned in each
week for a glimpse into the increasingly complex X-Files
mythos, replete with alien abductions, government conspiracies and
gruesome investigations.
This was during an era before TiVo or
DVD box sets, so X-Files fans
could do little more than program their VCR to record each weekly
installment for posterity while hoping a power outage didn't disrupt the process. And
for all the creativity series creator Chris Carter brought to the series,
its important to remember the context: Lost, The Sopranos
and The Wire hadn't yet come along to redefine our notions of
engrossing, plot-driven television, so X-Files viewers were
occasionally saddled with nigh-unwatchable episodes and banal story
elements.
Still, the fan base grew. This is particularly
notable because a good portion of the series didn't even involve the
overarching X-Files metaplot. Rather, it was made up of these one-shot programs that
saw Mulder and Scully pursuing a singular crime, typically involving
a supernatural villain of some sort. Fans dubbed these the "monster
of the week" episodes, and they remain some of most
entertaining, accessible aspects of the original series.
Carter
returns to this familiar formula for The X-Files: I Want to
Believe, the second full-length feature film in the show's dark,
conspiratorial landscape. The movie's creators were nearly frenetic
in their rush to shrug off the cumbersome trappings of the television
series (which got its own treatment in 1998's X-Files
film), but they may have gone too far. The new movie is a jumbled
offering that grabs at a number of different, disconnected themes,
including religious zeal, psychic power and weird science, then
resolves everything without the series' hallmark blend of action and
suspense.
The film opens in the present day, six years after
the courtroom battle that brought the X-Files series to a
close and effectively ended Mulder's career. A handful of unexplained
murders in West Virginia convince both Mulder and Scully, the latter now a
well-meaning physician at a Catholic charity hospital, to lend
their expertise. Together with a psychic, Irish, pedophile priest
(Billy Connolly), Mulder and Scully stalk the wintry landscape of
Appalachia, following up on a series of seemingly unrelated clues.
The climax, as expected, is a villainous cabal that must be
dispatched in the name of good, but by this point in the film, it's
clear that I Want to Believe is really about the two ex-agents
and their fitful, misunderstood attempts at a relationship. Scully is
quickly cast as the questioning skeptic, left to dawdle on the
sidelines while Mulder pours himself wholeheartedly into the
investigation. Sound familiar? It's the same formula for the very
first episode of the original series. Some things never change, even
if movie audiences do.
Carter made the right decision to
return to the "monster of the week" format, and the film
stands as an agreeable thriller flick. Mulder and Scully's chemistry
is virtually unchanged from the series, which ought to please
longtime fans. Similarly, the movie contains a spare collection of
chewy plot points that make reference to the series' convoluted
storyline—again, added for the fans. But if you stripped out Mulder
and Scully and added in Somerset and Mills from Se7en, you'd
still have a watchable summer crime thriller. This suggests that,
unlike one of this summer's other much-anticipated saga installments
(Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), the new
X-Files movie actually tries to do more with less, and is
forced to jettison a measure of the original series' magic along the
way.