The chatter and hype leading up to The X Files: I Want to Believe, was at worst forced and at best nonexistent. It has been only 6 years since The X Files went off the air, but 9 since anyone even cared. I Want to Believe, is a self conscious title that verges on desperate, but The X Files is a 90s phenomenon, so bathing in its own self awareness might be intentional. If this is the case, it will lost on today’s audience.
Things did not bode well for the movie, as it was playing at Kelowna’s grand old theatre, the Paramount downtown, but it was not playing on Kelowna’s biggest screen with a 200 seat capacity that has been around since the golden era of film in the 70s. No it was playing on one of the screens they added in the 80’s, that are smaller than my projection TV, with 50 seat capacities. The X files was playing on screen 2, while Mamma Mia (an homage to everything that sucked about the 70’s) “rocked’ on the “A” screen. Can you say conspiracy?
I was pleased to hear Chris Carter ignored the make-it-up-as-you-go-along alien colon-ization story line (tee-hee I typed alien and colon in the same sentence), and instead focused on a monster of the week script, that tells the story of a child molesting priest (Bill Connolly), who has psychic visions of a missing FBI agent, and the believer agent (Amanda Peat) who goes against her nonbeliever partner (Xzibit) to approach Scully- who is working in a hospital, with an eye rolling name (Our Lady of Sorrows)- to ask her how to get a hold of Mulder, who is hiding from the government (and probably aliens) in the den (of the house they share) clipping Bigfoot articles from newspapers and pinning them up on the wall, while growing a beard. All the while ignoring the pink elephant in the room- that is the whole Mulder alien abduction/ Scully pregnancy thing, that most fans have no idea how it was resolved, because they stopped watching the show in the middle of season 7 -and for that matter, why he hell do they still refer to themselves as Mulder and Scully! That has to be awkward when they are fucking.
This movie functions as an attempt at 90’s nostalgia. We see the characters we love, that are filmed in Vancouver again, so the cast and crew can relieve the high points of their careers. We even revisit such classic 90’s ideas as Catholic Church bashing, the slightly homophobic notion that all molested homosexuals are serial killers, and that professionals can just do Internet searches and get all the information they need (we now know that 99% of the shit Google brings up is questionable Wikipedia pages or the biased undocumented rantings of homophobic racist blogger’s, with no right to have an opinion). Ahhhh, nostalgia is all about longing for a simpler time. A time when the Catholic Church was the only real enemy, closeted gays were acceptable bad guys (not role models), and the Internet had all the answers, but was just a tad slower.
So why was this movie made then? A quick survey of imdb.com shows Duchovny has mostly done random roles on established shows the last 6 years, that Anderson popped up as a background character in Last King of Scotland, and Chris Carter has done sweet fuck all. The break down of the 30 million dollar budget goes something like this;
- 10 million to Chris Carter for direction, production, writing and dead horse beating
- 5 million to Duchovny for being an unbelievable actor that believes
- 5 million to Anderson a believable actress that doesn’t believe
- 14 million on fake snow
- $500 000 for an assistant to follow Duchovny around with a big umbrella
- $498 000 for craft services
- $2000 on film school drop out editor
In spite of my wannabe clever bitching, it was not a bad movie- just and unnecessary one. Aging Gen X-ers view their nostalgia with a dollop of irony, seasoned with a little cynicism, so there is no way this movie could be well reviewed. The X Files would have been better served as a TV movie of the week, to stoke interest, for a time when 90’s nostalgia is a commodity and not just discount Nirvana T shirts at Wal-mart, so as it stands, it is about 10 years too soon to Want to Believe in the X-Files again.
