The first X-Files fea­ture film Fight the Future (1998) was so tightly bound to the com­plex mythol­ogy of the orig­i­nal tele­vi­sion series that it was mostly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to any­one not already a deeply com­mit­ted fan. I myself had only seen the odd episode over the years, and as such could barely fol­low what was going on. This unex­pected sequel, belat­edly com­ing about six years after the con­clu­sion of the series and a full decade after the last fea­ture film, is a stand­alone adven­ture almost entirely decou­pled from the series’ uni­fy­ing story arc: all that jazz involv­ing an inva­sion of body-snatching aliens col­lab­o­rat­ing with the gov­ern­ment, all of which may or may not have some­thing to do with sticky black goo.

Don’t eat the yel­low snow

Freed of the weight of years of con­ti­nu­ity allows this new film to dig into the true core of the series: the rela­tion­ship between Fox Mul­der (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Ander­son). These are two peo­ple who not only deserve each other (their idea of pil­low talk is to dis­cuss tox­i­col­ogy reports) but are actu­ally each other’s yin and yang. Their believer / skep­tic dynamic fueled the addic­tive sci­ence fic­tion aspects of the show, but also the sex­ual ten­sion that helped make it a hit. They each need each other in order to not self-destruct.

Scully, a know-it-all red­head like a grown-up Hermione Granger, is every geek boy’s crush. In the inter­ven­ing years, she has vol­un­tar­ily left the FBI to toil with­out reward as a doc­tor at the aptly-named hos­pi­tal Our Lady of Sor­rows. As a prag­matic woman who does not oper­ate on faith, a Catholic Church-operated insti­tu­tion is the last place she ought to be. Her coun­ter­part Mul­der, since last we’ve seen him, has become the stereo­typ­i­cal bearded recluse. With­out the medi­at­ing influ­ence of Scully, it’s clear he’s only a few cranky let­ters to the edi­tor away from becom­ing the next Unibomber.

Scully is, as usual, the life of the party

Mean­while, next-generation FBI Spe­cial Agent Dakota Whit­ney (Amanda Peet) inves­ti­gates the alleged visions of a con­victed pedophile Father Joseph Criss­man (played against type by wacky come­dian Billy Con­nolly). Need­ing agents with a cer­tain exper­tise in the weird, she gets the old X-Files band back together. In an unfor­tu­nately dropped sub­plot, it’s evi­dent she crushes on an endear­ingly obliv­i­ous Mul­der. In fact, her entire char­ac­ter is unfor­tu­nately dropped too soon — dropped down an ele­va­tor shaft, that is. Sorry for the snarky spoiler, there, folks.

The plot is a mélange of hot but­tons ripped from the head­lines, Law & Order style. Tick­ing the boxes, we have lung can­cer, gay mar­riage, Catholic church pedophilia (the mur­derer turns out to be the hus­band of a grown altar boy that the Father bug­gered years ago), stem cells (Scully attempts to cure a boy’s rare brain dis­ease with research she cun­ningly finds via Google), grotesque sci­en­tific exper­i­ments (a plot point refers to an actual Cold-War era Russ­ian exper­i­ment that has been mak­ing the rounds on the inter­net recently involv­ing arti­fi­cially sus­tain­ing a dog’s sev­ered head). To top it all off, the movie also fea­tures cinema’s most extreme sex change oper­a­tion since The Silence of the Lambs.

Spe­cial Agent Dakota Whit­ney has an appoint­ment with an ele­va­tor shaft

The X-Files: I Want to Believe was poorly reviewed, and worse, a com­mer­cial fail­ure (although, granted, much of the lat­ter was the fault of open­ing oppo­site Bat­man: The Dark Knight — read The Dork Report review). The most rad­i­cal inno­va­tion to the X-Files for­mula is the new ver­sion of the famous theme music by elec­tron­ica out­fit UNKLE, so per­haps audi­ences and crit­ics wanted some­thing new. But it’s an enjoy­able film, largely because it’s not with­out some humor, and against all odds, fea­tures a happy end­ing for the long-suffering couple.

A note on the DVD: I watched the “Extended Ver­sion” cut, so I can’t com­ment on how sig­nif­i­cantly it may dif­fer from the the­atri­cal ver­sion. Among the bonus fea­tures is an inter­est­ing fea­turette in which Chris Carter dis­cusses the “green pro­duc­tion” for the movie (the use of hybrid cars, recy­cling of set mate­ri­als, etc.), and how he abhors the waste that typ­i­cally goes into tele­vi­sion and movie pro­duc­tion. An anti-smoking pub­lic ser­vice ad is included on the DVD, mak­ing one won­der if the recur­ring theme of lung can­cer in the plot was grafted on or an organic com­po­nent to the plot.

Offi­cial movie site: www.xfiles.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.