X-Files: Fight the Future

X-FILES: THE MOVIE (1998)

Sometimes there are movies that you feel like you should talk about, but really not have much to say. I've told four or five people that I've seen this movie, and they ask how it is, and I say it was good, not great, but good. "It wasn't a disappointment, but I wasn't expecting much either." And then I don't say anything else. It lends credence to the idea that Hollywood has hit the critical equivalent of thermodynamic heatdeath; everything's the same temperature, and that appears to be okay with those in the audience.

I've gone through the various stages of X-Files interest and obsession and I seem to be on the far side of it. I spent most of the week before the movie really worried about how I would get ahold of the action figures. Once I did, I relaxed a lot, but looking back on it, the quest for my action figures involved me more than the movie did. I don't mention this to slight the movie, merely to give everyone a standard for my X-Files fan factor. Honestly, if it wasn't for Scully and Gillian Anderson, I would have stopped watching the show a while back.

Anderson, probably after reading the script Whereas the writers and David Duchovny seem to have hit the wall with Mulder, both in terms of his character arc and possibly Duchovny's talent, Anderson and Scully are more watchable to me than ever. Part of this is that Scully is a strong female character; arguably, the strongest, most positive role model that American pop culture has ever beheld, not least because the character's strength does not come from sexuality, maternal strength or anger (which seems to be about the only way female pop role models are presented these days). Scully is someone who is dedicated to logic and rationality but also operates from a base of instinct, loyalty and emotion (unlike, say, Spock, these two sides are integrated together and each comes into play when necessary); in this way, Scully is also one of the best representations of what it's like to be a scientist, a tall statement in this science and technology obsessed culture that needs to disempower the figures it powers and fear (scientists are either lovable, eccentric nerds or driven, dehumanized robots). By reversing the traditional roles assigned to men and women in genre fiction (analytical men, intuitive women), the X-Files provides something that me and a lot of other people around me seem to crave; role models for the age in which we've smashed (and have to keep resmashing) the sexual sterotypes.

Doomed noir hero waiting to happen So there are a few thrills in the X-Files movie, but considering that Scully is kidnapped for a good section of it, not nearly enough for my liking. I wanted Scully to kick some ass and, as far as I could tell from the San Francisco audience I was with, so did everyone else. Without Anderson having much to do, I was surprised that the movie wasn't a complete wash for me. Part of the reason is that the director Rob Bowman has a good idea of who to steal from and how to make it work. He grabs a camera P.O.V. stalking scene from John Woo's Bullet in the Head, a chase through a lit tunnel from Kubrick's The Shining, and some more chase stuff from Hitchcock. Again, what's surprising is that he knows how to make what he steals work, which makes him pretty rare in Hollywood, indeed. What's also surprising is that I have a lot more interest in Duchovny as an actor again (I basically saw him as a very handsome comedian before); at several points in this movie, he comes across like a Hitchcock protagonist, and in his unselfconscious handling of a mouthful of supposedly drunken exposition (one of the movie's low points), he catches that sort of handsome passivity of many film noir heroes. If I was ever assigned the nightmare task of remaking film noir classic Detour, I would cast Duchovny. He's got at least one great doomed noir hero in him (and no, I don't think it's Mulder). The movie is good enough (and it seems, successful enough) that they'll probably do another one, and I think that's good. Not because it will allow this picture's macguffins to be solved and replaced with new ones; it'll be good because I'll get another chance to see Scully kick some ass, and another chance for a group of talented people to make something better than lukewarm.

More About this Movie

To see the action figures