"The X-Files": Fight the Reviews
OK, I've seen it and I'm gonna tell you what I think. After you're done with my review, keep reading--the New York and L.A. Times reviews are below.
The most anyone could expect from a feature-length "X-Files" is production value and set pieces beyond the scope of an episodic TV budget and a fuller accounting of the show's mythology, sufficient to warrant paying for what is normally free. I'm of the opinion that the film succeeds beautifully on the first accounting, but only marginally on the second.
Duchovny and Anderson have both upped their respective games for the big screen--Duchovny spoofs his deadpan Mulder persona effectively and Anderson has the breathing room to show off her wide but disciplined emotional range (especially in the sure to be infamous "hallway" scene).
The production team as a whole has come up with state-of-the-art visual and makeup F/X that stay within the overall feel of the series, yet create a sense of "event". That the film can include an essentially throwaway scene in North Africa is indicative of its sense of scale.
The supporting cast is good, but largely wasted--Mitch Pileggi and William Davis are relegated to the sidelines. Armin Mueller-Stahl's accent buries his brief expository appearance and Martin Landau's role could have been played by anyone. Their appearances smack of an effort to find "feature" names to pad out the cast. The cameo by the Lone Gunmen, though welcome, is pointless and probably the only truly baffling element for non-fans.
Chris Carter's script reflects his normal attention to detail and is not overburdened with the "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" agenda I feared. References to landmarks of the SF genre both subtle and overt abound. Fans will spot intelligent heistings from ALIENS, THE THING, 2001 and even THE TIME MACHINE. More importantly, the film gracefully pulls together the vast majority of the series' "mythology" elements. Even the reference in "Jose Chung..." to "Lord Kinbote's" abode beneath the surface of the Earth is acknowledged in the aliens' center of operations in the movie.
In a sense, however, this is the film's only real failing. It offers no true revelation--even the notion that the alien beings have been on Earth for eons is a non-too-surprising echo of Deep Throat's comment that "They've always been here." There are no new loose ends to contend with, but the series is going nowhere new as a result of the film.
The Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1998
The Truth Is Way Out There
By KENNETH TURAN, Times Film Critic
Who hasn't walked into a movie late and tried desperately to catch up with the plot, to make sense of what's on the screen? For those not washed in the blood, that's what it's like to watch "The X-Files" movie. Except instead of being only momentarily tardy, we're five years behind the curve.
That's how long the popular cult TV show has been on the Fox network. And despite impressive billboards for the movie insisting "Only in Theaters," only those familiar with the small-screen series will get many of the film's characters and references. Despite attempts to make "The X-Files" palatable to nonbelievers, its creators couldn't resist a series of complicit winks to the cognoscenti that can only irritate those not in the know.
"The X-Files" movie is put together by many of the same people responsible for the series, starting with writer-producer Chris Carter, the show's creator. Director Rob Bowman has directed 25 episodes over five years, and editor Stephen Mark and composer Mark Snow are both veterans as well. So it's not surprising that what we've got here is essentially a big-budget version of the small screen, kind of a "Triple-X-Files" to reward the faithful.
With its shrewd mixture of paranoia and the paranormal, the way its elaborate mythology combines enigmatic phenomena with potent cabals intent on running the world, "The X-Files" experience resembles "Twin Peaks" crossed with "The Twilight Zone." It's even replete with recurring characters without real names: Who is the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) after all but the Log Lady with a bad nicotine habit?
At the heart of things are Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a pair of FBI agents usually assigned to investigate the inexplicable. The film awkwardly attempts to fill in five years' worth of back story on this pair, letting us know that Mulder is the true believer who thinks his sister was abducted by aliens, while Scully is the cool, unflappable rationalist, someone not quick to believe sinister forces are out to control the universe.
When the movie opens, Mulder and Scully have been reassigned to an anti-terrorism unit in the Dallas FBI bureau, the X-Files having been officially closed. While they're trying to prevent a major bomb from going off, something seriously weird is going on in a small town in rural Texas.
In an echo of something we saw happen 35,000 years ago, a boy stumbles onto an underground cave and gets more than he bargained for from a skull he encounters. Local paramedics are called and suddenly the area is teaming with helicopters, unmarked tanker trucks and impatient men in white quarantine suits. "That impossible scenario we never planned for," a man says into a phone. "We better come up with a plan."
If this sounds vague, it's because "The X-Files" likes it that way. Writer Carter, director Bowman and cinematographer Ward Russell are expert at doling out information one intriguing dollop at a time. Things get more or less explained by the close, but the fun of "The X-Files" is clearly more in the creation of unease than in the cleaning up of mysteries.
Though the inside baseball stuff, like the appearance of three oddballs known as the Lone Gunmen that no one but constant viewers will understand, let alone appreciate, is a continual frustration, the rest of the movie is a properly spooky, always professional diversion that is happiest when it's throwing continual plot complexities into the mix.
At the center of things is Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil (veteran Martin Landau), a renegade scientist who says he was a friend of Mulder's father. His knowledge of all things sinister leads Mulder and Scully to not only the Cigarette-Smoking Man but also the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) and an operative who has the audacity to have a real name, albeit the strange one of Conrad Strughold (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
As much as these creepy doings, it's the too-hip relationship between Mulder and Scully (co-workers who never resort to first names and have a lot of conversations on mobile phones) that is a major "X-Files" attraction. Their supercool attitudes, however, are too distant to work as well on the big screen, and the intense interest devotees have in whether they'll ever kiss is not one that beginning viewers should expect to share in.
While it's not the ideal introduction to the phenomenon, this feature is assured of at least an "X-Files"-sized audience. People are always happy to believe, as Hamlet (who would've been a viewer had the show been available) said to a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
* MPAA rating: PG-13 for some intense violence and gore. Times guidelines: some violence, gruesome doings and unpleasant-looking creatures.
'The X-Files'
David Duchovny: Fox Mulder
Gillian Anderson: Dana Scully
Martin Landau: Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil
Blythe Danner: FBI Assistant Director Dana Cassidy
Armin Mueller-Stahl: Conrad Strughold
A Ten Thirteen production, released by 20th Century Fox. Director Rob Bowman. Producers Chris Carter, Daniel Sackheim. Executive producer Lata Ryan. Screenplay by Chris Carter. Story by Chris Carter and Frank Sponitz. Cinematographer Ward Russell. Editor Stephen Mark. Costumes Marlene Stewart. Music Mark Snow. Production design Christopher Nowak. Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute.
* In general release throughout Southern California.
Copyright: 1998, The Los Angeles Times
The New York Times, June 19, 1998
'The X-Files': In the Dark, It Resembles a Conspiracy
By JANET MASLIN
Conspiracy theorists, consider this: What if the hush-hush atmosphere and Internet mania surrounding the first "X-Files" feature film were part of a giant plot to hide the uneventfulness of one more summertime sci-fi fizzle? It's as possible as much of what "The X-Files: Fight the Future" has to offer.
If devotees of the television series come to the film with enough baggage for a six-week safari, perhaps they can deepen the experience of watching a middling, unfocused action-adventure with brand-name appeal.
But there's a catch: this film isn't tailor-made for true X-fanatics, because the material has been so broadened to accommodate the uninitiated. Trust no one who dreams up an action sequence in Antarctica for the big screen.
No, no and you must be joking. Those are the answers to the first three questions that the prospect of an "X-Files" movie raises: Do Scully and Mulder get extracurricular while hunting extraterrestrials? Do they solve all the series' outstanding mysteries? Will there be a sequel?
The movie teasingly offers the prospect of big developments in the television X-plot, but all it really does is create a vague omnibus format for future movie spinoffs.
That may make it a crossover hit quicker than you can say Trekkie, but a lot of the show's otherworldly intensity has been lost in the process. Also, "The Truman Show" built a better mousetrap when it comes to paranoid fantasies this season.
The captivating hold of "The X-Files" may itself be more fascinating than the material anyhow. Reams may be e-mailed about this film's tiniest nuances, but tiny they remain. (This week's Newsweek notes that Scully's crucifix is "a small gold pendant symbolizing her faith in God.")
Meanwhile, the movie may raise more questions than it meant to when it offers glimpses of alien troublemakers. Reaching for run-of-the-mill grisly horror, it winds up attributing sophisticated global-domination plans to vicious, long-clawed spacelings who are more prone to screams than schemes.
Without making much connection with the end-of-season television cliffhanger, the film starts off in Ice Age Texas, where aliens lurk in wait for Early Man. Thirty-seven thousand years later, Texas has heated up, but the aliens' modus operandi hasn't much changed.
A nicely diabolical early scene shows a little boy savaged by the invasive virus nicknamed the black oil. Typically, as it works to cover too many bases, the film mentions the virus again but never follows through on one of its best special-effects tricks.
Then it's off to Dallas, where FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) trade affectionate wisecracks atop a Dallas office building. The X-file investigation into alien activity is now officially closed (as if!), so they have been newly assigned to antiterrorist vigilance.
They spot the bomb, but it goes off anyway, shearing off half of a government building. That allusion to Oklahoma City could have been the film's most shameless or daring aspect, but proves to be neither.
The film avoids real political conspiracies in favor of a pie-in-the-sky thesis that the building was destroyed to hide evidence of alien activity, and that aliens have subverted the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
At least it's also jokey enough to wink at this notion, make fun of the stars' somber manner "Y'alllook like door-to-door salesmen"), recall that Mulder is nicknamed Spooky and let him happen to urinate on an "Independence Day" poster in a dark alley.
As written by Chris Carter, the heart of "The X-Files," from a story he wrote with Frank Spotnitz, and directed by Rob Bowman, who has done many episodes of the series, the new film strains to involve as many familiar elements as possible.
So a number of series fixtures (like the trio called the Lone Gunmen) make minor appearances, while Martin Landau, Blythe Danner and Armin Mueller-Stahl establish new characters. (Mueller-Stahl's German mastermind, advocating the strangest of appeasement policies, is the most intriguing of these.)
Bees and cornstalks figure peculiarly in the story. The movie also appropriates a bit of "Alien" for its ideas about space-monster propagation. And thank a product tie-in for automobiles for the specious scene that shows off a car.
But the touch of X-iness that will matter most to both diehards and neophytes is the film's promise of heightened conspiratorial activity between Scully and Mulder. And here's where it does the most mischievous teasing, since the story's big Antarctic spectacle still seems warmer than the not-quite-love-affair.
The film contrives a fairly strangled declaration of fondness from Mulder, a near-clinch and a wild idea of how to get a heroine out of her clothes. This last episode, unfolding in a huge set that resembles a giant carburetor, doesn't actually glimpse Scully in the nude or goad Mulder into anything more daring than a Sir Walter Raleigh imitation. But as on-the-job rescue efforts go, it does qualify as a fetishist's delight.
Though both stars are sometimes eclipsed when the film strains for action episodes, Duchovny sustains enough cool, deadpan intellect and suppressed passion to give the story a center. Ms. Anderson has the harsher, more restrictive role, but she plays it with familiar hardboiled glamour.
All the actors are more at ease with either bantering dialogue or X-ish hyperbole ("like nothing we've ever seen before!") than with the screenplay's more fulsome touches.
Like the title phrase, which comes from this exchange: "What has he seen? Of the whole he has seen but pieces." "He is but one man. One man cannot fight ... the future."
"The X-Files: Fight the Future" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes profanity, grisly corpses, ugly violence and the suggestion of nudity.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE
Directed by Rob Bowman; written by Chris Carter, based on a story by Carter and Frank Spotnitz; director of photography, Ward Russell; edited by Stephen Mark; music by Mark Snow; production designer, Christopher Nowak; produced by Carter and Daniel Sackheim; executive producer, Lata Ryan; co-producer, Spotnitz; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 115 minutes.
WITH: David Duchovny (FBI agent Fox Mulder), Gillian Anderson (FBI agent Dana Scully), Martin Landau (Kurtzweil), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Strughold), Blythe Danner (Cassidy), Mitch Pileggi (Assistant Director Walter Skinner), William Davis (the Cigarette-Smoking Man), John Neville (the Well-Manicured Man), Terry O'Quinn (Michaud), Jeffrey DeMunn (Bronschweig), Glenne Headly (Barmaid) and Lucas Black (Stevie).
Copyright: 1998 The New York Times