The X-Files (1998, PG-13)
As Reviewed by James Brundage
Suggested Headline : Perhaps its all a conspiracy towards blandness?
Well, it made it to the big screen just fine. Made it there with a more simplistic plot, a much bigger budget, a closely-guarded surprise, and a huge overrating. Perhaps it is only me but in the summer of 98 I see a trend (with the exception of The Truman Show), towards the bland. Any movie that I like, upon seeing it again (which I do to actually ENJOY myself), becomes tasteless and boring, making me want to throw my popcorn at the screen. Movies that I don't like, like last weeks Six Days, Seven Nights (which by the way only had four days and four nights in it) just seem to try my patience. It's a conspiracy. I tell you, man, it's a conspiracy to make me go mad with the bland, stale taste of popcorn films this summer!
The X-Files, televisions most paranoid show (currently on, UPN's Nowhere Man was a little further out there), heralded in a new era in sci-fi. It was cool to believe -- And not in aliens on starships from the 24th century. And it wasn't enough that the cast and crew could scrounge up enough money between all of them for a budget HALF the $63 million of the film, and it wasn't enough that with a cult following of 25 million weekly American viewers, it would be the biggest cult noir horror since The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it wasn't even enough that they got to film on the lot that old Jim used for Titanic. No. They had to appeal to the mass market. The so called "You and Me" which doesn't really exist.
This "You and Me" demands cheap one liners, green screens, blue screens, special F/Xs that no one can stand, this "You and Me" were the people who had the stupid idea to churn out about fifteen disaster films since "Twister". The X-Files movie is basically an extension of the series: and for all the good it did, for all the taking advantage of the ability to curse and be more violent that film offers over television, it might just have well have been a two or three part-er. The basic plot of it is the plot of every X-Files and or alien movie: prove the existence of E.T.s and stop a deadly virus that controls them from overrunning the planet. I'd go into all of the complexities of the series of this were a review of the series: so I'll let you who haven't been watching see the movie for yourself, it works fine as a mass-market movie, but disappoints as an X-File. You can stop reading now.
As for those who have been watching: understand this. If you have been watching with half a brain the show and the trailers for the movie, then it will come together easy as anything. The villains and heroes of the film, in order to allow the mass market to understand, have not been painted in Carter's trademark ambiguous gray, but instead in a stark black and white. The Syndicate, the infamous group running it all, is purebred evil, while The Well Manicured man, our British friend, is a brighter, sunnier chap. The CSM (Cigarette Smoking Man), is still a dark, evil character, but in the movie it throws away all the heart he had earned in the series with such episodes as "Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man", in which it paints his life. No one mentions the possible Mulder-CSM family connection.
The movie's philosophy is "Don't Complicate Things". As in, don't bring into play the relationship between Scully and God, or Scully's abduction, and don't bring in the unwillingness to martyr Mulder, or the Mulder-CSM connection, or, for the most part, Assistant Director Skinner, or, at all, Agent Spender. Give the fans a Three Stooges (or Lone Gunmen, if you prefer) cameo, but don't bring in the Frohicky-Scully obsession. Come to think of it, if you kept reading from two paragraphs above, I may have just given to you more information on the series than the movie will. AND STILL NOT GIVEN AWAY ANYTHING.
There are no secrets revealed. There are no complications resolved. There are no major plot developments. If the truth is out there, it's not there in this film.