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 In cinemas now [M]
Director: Chris Carter
Runtime: 104mins
What made the X-files so compelling as a television series wasn’t the small-town monster stories, or the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully. It was the elaborate, all-pervasive matrix of conspiracy that Mulder was hell-bent on exposing. The X-files was essentially about Mulder’s – about Man’s – quest for Truth in the face of prevailing opposition.
Did he ever expose the Truth? No, he didn’t. And Chris Carter’s second attempt at a feature film, The X-files: I Want to Believe, finds Mulder bearded in hermetic isolation, obsessively researching everything from university ESP experiments to, of course, UFOs.
At the behest of the FBI, Scully and Mulder are pulled out of their respective occupations as doctor and lonely conspiracy nut to assist in an investigation of the unexplained body parts turning up in the snow and ice of West Virginia. They’re kinda getting too old for this shit, and they’re operating under the auspices of the next-gen of FBI upstarts, the skeptical Agent Mosley Drummy (Xzibit), and the reverent Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet).
It becomes apparent early in the film that we aren’t going to get any feverish conspiracy blow-outs in the latest X-files movie. Scully herself verbalises a reluctance to ‘go there,’ telling Mulder she “is afraid of the darkness, of what it does to you, and of what it does to me.”
Despite Mulder’s resistance, Scully’s fearful retreat ultimately limits the film to a mildly supernatural, small-town mystery story, involving a convicted paedophile priest (Billy Connelly), and some nasty Russians.
For fans who really needed more of Scully and Mulder’s relationship, the film will deliver. For those who like a spooky little supernatural crime thriller, it will satisfy, even if it does play out like a forgettable, extended episode of the television series. But for fans such as myself, who encountered the X-files simultaneously with the boom in underground/internet conspiracy lore circa. 1993, it comes as a pretty big disappointment.
Technically speaking, there isn’t any conspiracy in this movie at all. No one is really covering anything up. Assistant Director Skinner makes a bold appearance late in the piece to help bring things to a close, which is nice. But the closest we get to the good stuff is a visual association of George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, as Scully and Mulder ponder their portraits outside an FBI office.
The Truth may be out there, but unfortunately, this movie just doesn’t want to go there. Wait out the credits and you’ll see what I mean.
**½
ADAM DODD
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