X-Files

The movie fans have been waiting for is just a big tease.

By Joyce Millman

May 30, 1998 |

I want to believe.

But I felt my faith shaking the moment Mulder and Scully appeared on screen, playing uncharacteristic "Gotcha!" jokes on each other as they searched a building for a bomb. Scully? Gotcha jokes? I don't think so. It was as if they had been sucked up by some powerful alien force and deposited into a Bruce Willis movie. And I lost my faith completely when William B. Davis, aka the Cigarette Smoking Man, aka Cancer Man, made his entrance and I realized that the larger-than-life presence he usually casts from within my Zenith in the corner of the living room was no more than a trick of the light. He is no many-layered embodiment of evil -- he is merely the luckiest chain-smoking unknown character actor alive.

I had come here seeking answers: Why did those old guys in expensive suits make a deal with aliens who want to take over Earth? What exactly is the black oil? What happens to Mulder's pet fish when he takes off for Antarctica on a moment's notice? But I found only obfuscation, partial explanations and the ear-splitting big-budget rumble of whirring helicopter blades and explosions.

But, I digress ... You really can't treat "The X-Files" as a movie because it isn't one. It's a two-hour episode of the show, except with better production values and a nicer wardrobe for Scully. It looks like a typical episode, from the opening location/date stamp in the lower left corner of the frame ("North Texas, 35,000 B.C.") to the minimalist lighting (most of it takes place at night or in murky shadows or in caves). It sounds like a typical episode, too, with Mulder (David Duchovny) reciting his usual poetic/flaky monologues and Scully (Gillian Anderson) chewing mouthfuls of rational skepticism. Every so often an endearingly clunky bit of B-movie expository dialogue like "Sir? The impossible scenario that we never planned for? Well, we better come up with a plan!" slips out of some lesser player, just like it does on TV. Yes, the movie is true to the spirit of the show -- it's the biggest, best-looking "X-Files" episode ever. But it's far from the most satisfying.

The movie (which is unofficially called "Fight the Future") continues last season's TV finale in only one respect: The FBI has shut down the X-Files. Mulder and Scully are now plain old feds, reassigned from the paranormal to the normal. But what they find in the rubble of the bombed building puts them back, without authorization, on the alien-conspiracy trail. Here's hoping you caught the past season's two-part episode in which aliens with gruesome facial markings staged mass executions of former abductees as part of a (not-fully-explained) war between alien races; you'll need it for background. (The second part is being rerun on June 21 on Fox at 9 p.m.)

Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that the movie expands on the Syndicate's (the old guys in suits) super-secret agenda to create a race of alien/human hybrid clones. We meet yet another Syndicate member, German industrialist Conrad Strughold (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose master plan is so nasty, even the heretofore suavely conscience-free Well Manicured Man (John Neville) has trouble swallowing it. The alien-virus-carrying bees from the "Herrenvolk" episode make a stirring return. Mulder gets a new conspiracy tipster, a disgraced former Defense Department employee named Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau) who was a crony of Mulder's late father. And in the most salient development, we learn that the black oil is actually an extraterrestrial virus that was the first life form on Earth. It has mutated into something very bad.

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