The Edge Film, DVD, TV: The X-Files: Fight the Future

The X-Files: Fight the Future
Rob Bowman
USA, 1998, 122 minutes
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)

The truth isn’t in here. Like you ever expected it was. Mr X-Files, Chris Carter, has too much at stake, even on a $60M-plus event picture, to throw it away so easily. If there even is a truth. Which there almost certainly isn’t. After all, what could it possibly be? That secret government organisations are in league with ET’s parents to colonise us? Like we don’t know. And it’s not that we’re sceptical: unlike the perennially distrustful Scully, we know space-aliens are out there, plying their space-alien trade. And if you had any lingering doubts, then the end of this movie offshoot from the supernaturally popular TV franchise will dispel them. Of course, when the proof revs up its engines and skims our heroes’ heads in the frozen north, she is unconscious. Always one to miss the party.

No, The X-Files movie is very much the show as we know and love it - just that much larger. The score is bigger (a full orchestra and not just one man and his mighty Wurlitzer), the effects are grander, the sets are much much grander, and the screen so much wider. More room to scout out with those sexy torches.

That much vaunted ability to pull in both fan base and newcomers alike, however, is a non-starter. It’s possible to make sense of it all without five back series of creepy (and very probably made up on the hoof) knowledge of our deep-space pals’ shenanigans, but its chief joys are playing with pieces we recognise, slipping in moves from games we know some of the rules to. And in the frisson you get from seeing a regular character iced in some fiery style. Without that investment it must surely mean very little. Much like the almost-kiss between our nubile Febee leads: it’s one for the fans. Two for the fans.

The plot, however, does read relatively - and vaguely disappointingly - straight. It makes commercial, if not dramatic sense to ditch Krycek, for example. But to advance the black cancer (there’s a smart, if overlong, prehistoric intro), pull in that smoky cabal of conspirators, have The Cigarette Smoking Man stalk satanically about the screen and have it make sense to first-timers does seem like pushing it. The actual X-Files themselves, you’ll recall, were toast at the close of the last season and our heroes transferred to routine duties. Like helping out on a bomb-call in Dallas. And naturally it’s down to Mulder (David Duchovny, having fun) to find not only the explosives but a man (Martin Landau, playing mad) who tips him off that, far from terrorism, the destruction (one of the great screen explosions) was planned to conceal a new outbreak of the black oil.

From there it’s business as usual: all about joining the dots, leading a weaving path from Dallas to an FBI hearing in Washington to a gigantic frozen spaceship where - again - poor Scully (Gillian Anderson, taking the money) is under the microscope. Along the way there’s lots of pregnant warnings about a ‘planned Armageddon’ and how the ‘virus has mutated’, and at one point the world even seems to be run by John Neville from a cottage somewhere in Somerset. Enough to keep you on your toes then, but stuff that - like 90% of the series - runs about a lot, issuing dire predictions without ever actually proving a damn thing. Five years, dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in car rentals later, and still the improbably named Fox Mulder ends the day with bugger all to show the American tax payer.

Unlike Fox the studio, who round out the summer with a respectable $80M in US box-office, good word of mouth and an entry back into the (pre-signed) sixth and seventh seasons. On the back of returns like that all they need do is keep their cantankerous stars sweet (neither is set for screen stardom otherwise; Duchovny in particular looks to have trouble opening an envelope, let alone a movie), and Carter off the idea of Millennium: The Movie. If the inevitable sequels are even half as good, then no one, fans least of all, will have any cause for complaint.