The truth is…oh, who gives a damn: “The X-Files: I Want to Believe”

The X-Files: I Want to Believe leaves the viewer pondering a central mystery: who thought this was a good idea? Seriously. Chris Carter, I can understand. He wants to revive his cash cow and can’t admit that it’s been slaughtered, rendered, sold off as ground chuck and eaten as a hamburger by some overweight Middle American family. But David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have gone on to fairly successful post-X-Files careers. And didn’t anyone at 20^th Century Fox look at the script and go “Uh..erm…pass.”

 

As a TV show, The X-Files tapped into a certain ‘90s malaise. With nothing tangible to worry about, the show drummed up conspiracy theories about evil government cover-ups of UFOs and alien invasion scenarios. Of course, in a post 9/11/War on Terror world, these story lines don’t quite work as well. Watching the episodes now, it’s hard not to think I don’t care what you do about the aliens, as long as you don’t use them as an excuse to invade anyone else.

The show was also a cautionary tale about the limits of televised mythology (a lesson not learned, apparently, by Lost) as Carter’s overarching conspiracy went from teasingly tangled to crushingly complicated and ultimately unintelligible. The show long outlived its natural lifespan and by the time it finally staggered and collapsed to an ignominious finale, both leads could barely hide their boredom with it.

All this is a long-winded way of wondering why 20^th Century Fox decided to resurrect the show a scant six years after it ended. The second question is why they thought this movie was the ideal vehicle to rejuvenate the franchise. Written by Chris Carter and longtime X-Files scribe Frank Spotnitz, The X-Files: I Want to Believe inexplicably manages to deliver virtually none of the pleasures of the TV series. Chris Carter was always a weird kind of TV creative force in that his scripts were often weaker than the staff writers (unlike Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczinski, whose scripts usually meant an episode would a be a series classic). What Spotnitz’s excuse is, I don’t know.

The plot—aw goddamn it, do I really have to summarize the plot? I do? Crap, I hate being a movie reviewer sometimes. Okay, well this FBI agent goes missing and a defrocked priest—a former pedophile—claims to have psychic visions of the crime. This leads the case agent (Amanda Peet) to call Mulder and Scully out of retirement, since they have experience in dealing with the paranormal. Oh and to dismiss the murder and treason charges against Mulder that put him on the run in the series finale. I guess the government wasn’t all that serious about those. Scully, who now works as a pediatric surgeon in a Catholic hospital (we can tell it’s a Catholic hospital because there are crucifixes everywhere and it’s home to nuns wearing habits that haven’t been around since the ‘50s), is trying to convince the parents of one of her patients to try radical stem-cell procedures to treat his brain cancer. What does one have to do with the other? Nothing, really.

So, with all this in place…well, nothing really happens. The plot plays out more like an episode of Millennium, first-season when it was serial-killer of the week. Mulder does virtually nothing to show why he’d be necessary to the case and the only reason the movie lasts as long as it does is because everyone is amazingly stupid. FBI agent Xzibit refuses to believe a second victim has been kidnapped when they come across her abandoned car (he things she just ran off the road and wandered off) despite the fact that the driver’s side window has been shattered and there are no footprints in the freshly fallen snow leading away from the car. Not even the FBI is that dumb. Later, an unarmed Mulder and Amanda Peet chase a suspect into an abandoned building without radioing for backup from the dozens of FBI agents in the next building.

But all of this is supposed to be about matters of faith. Mulder has faith in the psychic priest, even if no one else does. Scully questions her faith, wondering why God would make such a bad man the instrument of his divine investigational support. Meanwhile the priests and nuns at her hospital want to discontinue treatment for cancer kid and simply leave it up to God. Should Scully put her faith in prayer or action? Really, my freshman theology class in high school would have made minced meat out these crises of faith. The script really does play to the worst of the show’s instincts. Every time it tried to deal with metaphysical matters it just came off trite and self-serious.

Finally, for a show with an engine that ran off of the leads’ chemistry, the movie keeps them apart for much of the running time. Mulder runs around with the priest and Amanda Peet doing nothing in particular and Scully hangs around the hospital fretting about matters of faith. How is that a good idea? The movie does show them canoodling under the covers in one scene, but doesn’t do much else to illuminate how their relationship has developed in the past six years. They don’t seem to live together, but then it’s suggested that maybe they do. Seriously, did anyone even proofread this script?

So to recap, we have an X-Files movie with no real paranormal elements, no aliens, static main characters, and no real interplay between Mulder and Scully. Again, I have to ask how did this seem like a good idea?

Chris Carter has claimed that this film was a way to rejuvenate interest in the series in preparation for a fuller, more mythology-heavy third film. Right, Chris. Why don’t you take another hit off the bong and think some more deep thoughts, okay?