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Fight the feature >> Just about everything but the truth is in the X-Files movie by CHRIS YURKIW
Well, agent Mulder, exactly 120 times. That's how many episodes of the hit TV sci-fi drama The X-Files have aired over five seasons, all held together under the slogan/hope that "The Truth Is Out There" but always digging up more mysteries about extraterrestrial colonizers, conspiracy by cabal and sundry paranormal phenomena. This time, on the surface, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are in a different place--your local megaplex--a place which is more often the resurrection ground for dead TV shows than the birthplace of a film franchise from a thriving series. But in effect, Mulder is right: the X-Files film finds our favourite FBI agents right back where they started --fuzzy on the details of the Syndicate/alien plot, unclear on who their allies are and equivocal on the nature of their feelings for one another. Which is fine, except that the show's creator (and the film's co-producer and co-writer), Chris Carter, has been hyping the movie by saying, "We're definitely going to be giving away some big secrets"--secrets that have been built up over the years in the X-Files' neo-serial. Not true and for shame Mr. "The Truth Is Out There" Carter. Of course, I can't tell you just what "big secrets" are revealed, since secrets are this film's only ace, but if I could you would surely be underwhelmed. I understand now, however, how the vagaries of The X-Files make for good suspense. For example, if I tell you that Mulder does in fact lay his lips on Scully's, I give nothing away. Hmmm... Carter has also been saying that the film will satisfy both fanatic followers of the show and newcomers to the flick, and here he's only telling a half-truth. If you're a fan you'll probably find that X-Files: Fight the Future is a solid, expanded episode of the show that has higher production values, bigger explosions and more aerial shots. Big deal. If you're not, you'll most likely be confused by too much oblique information: too many bad guys (Cancer Man, Well-Manicured Man and the hidden Syndicate honcho played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), too many forms of the alien/virus (black oil, bees, corn, alien/human hybrids), too many little concessions to fans that make little sense--even to them. It shouldn't be surprising that the X-Files film fails to give the answers Carter promised, since it's questions that drive the series. Director Rob Bowman, who's also overseen 25 episodes of the show, is much more ingenuous about The X-Files' appeal: "There's no such thing as solving these mysteries." And that's the way it should be. Promise-free. On TV. The X-Files: Fight the Future opens in theatres Friday, June 19
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"How many times have we been here, Scully?" asks Fox Mulder of his partner in crime-fighting, Dana, in the X-Files feature film Fight the Future. "So close to the truth only to end up where we started, with nothing."