Posted on Friday, 1st August 2008 by Rob
Its been six years since the X Files television series ended with a whimper rather than a bang. I suppose I should admit that I enjoyed the final season of the X Files, I just thought that the last epiosode was underwhelming. I even liked the new agents they brought on when David Duchovny decided he’d had enough. I thought that there was some potential in a spin-off featuring the new agents in a monster of the week format.
With all that having been said, I was obviously looking forward to the new X Files movie. The basic story (some minor spoliers ahead) is that Scully is now a doctor working at a religious hospital. Her patient is a young boy that has some sort of brain disease that can’t be cured, except maybe it can be if she injects him with stem cells. The FBI comes to her to find the missing Fox Mulder to help them with a case. Since this is an X Files movie, Mulder eventually agrees to help and he and Scully are taken to FBI headquarters.
It turns out that an FBI agent in West Virginia is missing and a psychic pedophile priest (alliteration for the win!) has been having vision concerning her whereabouts. These visions lead them to an arm that doesn’t belong to the missing agent. Scully doesn’t like the priest because he’s a pedophile but Mulder, well, he wants to believe. The FBI continues to work with the priest at Mulder’s request, but they get nowhere fast. Meanwhile, more women are being kidnapped. This just leads to more searches in snow covered fields that lead to more severed body parts.
While all this is going on, Scully is faced with the problem of how to cure her patient of an incurable disease. She does a ton of research on stem cell treatments and just as all if about lost, she notices an article about a Russian scientist that was working on attaching severed dog heads to other dogs, creating some kind of two headed wonder dog. The surgery pictures of the dogs match up with the wounds on the recovered body parts and she realizes what’s going on. It turns out the whole thing has been done so that this Russian scientist can save the live of another Russian guy that’s got terminal cancer by putting his head on a woman’s body. That’s logical, right? But the bodies wear out pretty fast, so they have to have a steady supply of women to change out the bodies. As you can imagine, the FBI put a stop to it at a critical moment and that’s the end of the movie.
Ok, so that might have been an acceptable two-parter of the television series, but it is not a compelling movie. Even at matinee prices I felt like I overpaid. There are a few problems here. First, the movie has an identity crisis. This movie is set in the bleakness of winter, which does a good job setting the tone, but its tough to relate in the middle of summer. The writer also went to great pains to reset the Mulder/Scully relationship. If you remember the early seasons of the show, Scully was a skeptic that was there to balance out Mulder. But over time, she saw lots of fucked up stuff and had to start believing, even if reluctantly. But for this movie to work, she had to be a skeptic again so they made the priest a pedophile so now she hates him and won’t believe a word he says.
You’ve also got the problem that people like the X Files for two things: conspiracies and monsters. Since this movie had neither, that’s a problem. Yes, there was some “weird science”, but it was almost an afterthought. The experiment was the cause for the missing women, but it wasn’t treated as that big a deal. Because of that, I’ve got to deduct major points for the lack of anything really creepy.
The redemption for this movie was in the question of ethics and morality in the comparison between Scully’s stem cell treatment and the Russian doctor’s experiements. Both are playing Frankenstein and both are doing it to save lives, but one is relatively acceptable (as long as you’re not a right wing nutjob) while the other is grotesque. But does that make one right and the other wrong? Well, if you take the kidnapped women out of the equation, I mean.
Overall, this was a disappointing flick. Like I said, I could have put up with it as a throwaway episode of the series, because I know that writing 22 episodes a season, a few aren’t going to be so great. But when you’re writing a movie and have the time to focus on just that one script, well, you’d better have your shit together. This movie did not have its shit together. So, if you’re home and it comes on tv, give it a shot, but certainly don’t pay to watch it.
Tags: X-Files
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