THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE

“I’m done chasing monsters in the dark.”

The theme!!!! After so long!!!

This will be good, no?

First, I don’t care what was cut out. If I have to search for the story you really wanted to tell, I’m already put off. Carter is now working (2025?) on a director’s cut but it seems a director’s cut was already put out? It’s R rated or something? Carter wanted more horror? A two headed mutant dog? More grossness? More Dahmer type horror? NO, thanks.

Not a minute in and I’m already bored. The visuals are stunning but who cares about that? I have a MILLENNIUM feel again from this: a woman driving alone on a snowy road while listening to music, an isolated house, a dog, her parking in a garage and being attacked there, all very MILLENNIUM. Then there’s the men poking the ice and dogs and helicopters which feel like the 1980s THE THING, among others such as Steven King’s rip off movies. Next thing you know, the woman will get killed or kidnapped by a serial killer. Gosh.

Not a big Billy Connolley fan.

I see the X FILES, and more power to them, have a woman and a black man and black woman in positions of power. Good. They almost always did.

Okay, so they’re or he’s telling a good story it seems so far. But I’ve put out some feelers on FB to find out how one reconciles the end of season 9 with the start of this and how Scully can just come back and work as a doctor and NOT help the FBI and avoid charges and danger? I also inquired how one reconciles the end of this movie with the horrid start of the horrid season 10? If feels as if there is no explanation at all as to how things were left both times.

Anderson and David are still sparkling and still shine, together and separately. They’ve sucked me back in and I have some answers already.

Said FBI African American asks Dana to get Mulder. She says she no longer works with Mulder and no longer works with the FBI but she goes to an isolated house to find Mulder. An agent’s life is at stake. Mulder is told that all will be forgiven and all charges dropped if he helps them. He tells her they should ask for his forgiveness and she thinks they are. He turns her down at first but sees the small photo of his sister on the back of his room’s door and agrees.

Flying to DC, made me recall a half remembered cut scene I once read about or read: they discarded a scene somewhere that had the President (one of the Bushes) as a super soldier alien. Anyone know if that was from THE TRUTH or from this movie or season 10 and 11? Or 11?

Agent Monica Bannon (really, they had to give her the name Monica?) was taken on a Sunday (X Files used to air on Sundays for a majority of its life). We meet agent Whitney.

When we see George W’s photo, we hear the X Files theme a bit. Why?

Whitney explains that Joseph Crissman claims psychic powers led him to a severed arm of a man linked to this case and the arm matches blood found in the garage.

Whitney then tells the two heroes that Father Joe is a convicted child abuser.

In the murky night, in the next scene, when they visit the sex offenders’ rooming complex, the Jeffersons is playing on TV, the theme song.

In a rare case of bad writing, Scully immediately tries to question a possible aid, Father Joe, with questions designed to make him angry and unhelpful. What? Yes, his actions are disgusting and yes, gross but why would she do this if they are trying to determine if he is trying to help for real or not?

Reviewers who complain that Mulder and then Scully have to be talked into being involved in the “adventure” and I use the term loosely as this is not a fast paced adventure but interesting all the same, do the movie an injustice. It all makes sense, other than Scully deliberately antagonizing Joe other than character conflict. AND Mulder salutes her for it. She challenged him.

Whitney mentions Mulder’s work with other psychics: Luther Lee Boggs, Clyde Bruckman, Gerald Schnauz…

In another well filmed but disturbing and horrific extended sequence, a young girl is watched as she swims, gets into her car and is side swiped by an evil man driving a snow plow. He causes her to crash in the snow while music plays from her car radio, then walks across her hood and punches in her window and then punches her in the face. He drags her out the car while dogs or wolves howl (dogs also were at the pool center) and drags her to his truck. The entire snow filled, ice filled chilling scene could come right out of MILLNNIUM. It’s hard to watch but visually stunning by way of location and sound. But gosh, horror.

Just before that a more subtle horror is the priest at the hospital Scully works at, a Catholic thing. The priest has been looking at Christian, the boy Scully is treating and he tells her that he thinks he would be better at another facility as his case is not to prolong his suffering. In other words, he’s given up on helping cure the boy or easing his pain to give him up to a facility that might help him die.

Horror.

But it is odd that the moment the priest confronts Scully for an answer, some nun or orderly drops a pan, giving her time to get away from the creep.

I’ll give this movie this: it’s engaging. Scully worries in bed…with Mulder and with requisite jokes about his manhood aside, the dialog is serious and doesn’t skirt the hard issues. Scully wonders about God and why this boy has to die and she thinks about radical treatments no one wants to talk about. Mulder thinks it is Scully’s connection to William that has her connect to the boy.

They both seem to be cursing God. Does Mulder even believe in God?

Mulder shaves due to Scully not liking his scratchy beard. And as he can’t sleep now that Scully gave him another clue: an animal tranquilizer found in the severed arm’s blood, he gets up. I will say this for David: he’s never looked better than here: he’s ripped and built and looks more fit than ever, even when he was in the first nine years of the X FILES.

Then in questionable dialog, Scully tells Mulder he is still trying to save his sister (we settled this already!) but he cannot. He tries to ignore her. Why would she do that?

Mulder’s phone has as contacts some of the behind the scenes staff (writers I think): Bowman, Gilligan, Shiban.

Some have felt, including me at times, that the first movie was like two episodes of the TV show and that this second movie was like one episode extended into two. I don’t think that’s fair to either movie to be honest.

I must admit killing off the main target of the investigation and mission: to save agent Monica (sigh) Brannon and the main ally Dakota (Amanda Peet) was a brave, bold move. It means that Mulder, like he felt himself at the start of the movie, comes off as a bit of a failure. He even has to have Scully bat down the main killer who is about to take an axe to a drugged up Mulder who also experienced a car slide down a hill due to the killer, the snow plow man. Later, he has to have Skinner hug him to protect him from the cold. Still, killing off the two main females other than Scully, whose prone to giving up the entire movie, is a brave move.

Most fans seem to hate this movie but I like it. It does feel slower but it is also undeniably the X FILES universe and has merit, emotion, puzzlement, confusion, meaning, and atmosphere. It is movie wide DIE HARD or NORTH BY NORTHWEST scope? No. Does it have some action? Meh. Is it worth watching? Yes. It is a bad movie? Not by a long shot.

Oh and I wish someone would ban Carter from ever having animals in his movies and shows ever. Here, the Russians experimented on dogs and when the second victim (that we saw anyway) tries to escape, a two headed dog (very briefly) stops her (she lives). I’m tired of Carter’s (and other writers, producers, and movies and tv shows) killing off dogs, cats, and other animals. I hate that. I know, nowadays anyway, that’s it is not real but there is no need for it in the narratives.

Bad marks for using two gay men as the villains.

I fucking hate Carter for writer that scene with the wounded two headed dog. Fuck him. Fuck this movie.

Fuck Mulder, too. Wish he died in that car accident. Sorry, I love dogs.

Love that Skinner shows up and not sure why he wasn’t involved more but I guess he’s make things too right.

This movie, other than the dog shit of hurting dogs even in fiction, was a good one.

The end credits are beautiful and the message of not giving up and redemption for even Father Joe (did Scully tell Mulder about the Bible verse helping her find him, the verse Joe told her?) is also.

Not sure why this movie is so hated.

I guess in my mind an X FILES movie should be more cartoonish BUT I don’t feel that way now.

Still, I wanted to see a movie that connected the conspiracy arc and the Syndicate and the CSM to the monster of the week monsters such as Tooms, Fluke Man and others. Not sure that would work.

This, however, did work. Did the boy survive?