Heather and I have been working our way through each season of the X-Files over the past six months, including the first movie Fight the Future placed in its appropriate spot.  So when we learned that there was a new X-Files movie about to be released, reuniting Scully and Mulder, we were quite excited about it.  It didn’t have to be some major global-conspiracy-alien-invasion movie…just a good monster of the week.

Judged on that basis – as an episode from the series – it is middle-of-the-road.  But as a feature-length movie, it doesn’t hold up all that well.  I wouldn’t classify it as a failure; it just isn’t that good.  No longer with the FBI, Scully (Gillian Anderson) now works as a doctor, while Mulder (David Duchovny) lives in solitude, a bearded recluse who still clips articles from newspapers and tacks them to his walls.  When an FBI agent goes missing, and a psychic pedophile former priest is somehow able to supply the FBI with information, the Bureau approaches Scully to ask her for help in getting Mulder to assist on the case.  Exactly why Mulder is required is never fully explained…the typical “ignore the phony psychic” company line at the FBI is just a bit too predictable. 

Eventually the plot bogs down into a combination of religious conviction, stem-cell experimentation, and black-market organ donation.  The once razor-sharp Mulder/Scully chemistry has dulled quite a bit over the years, and those unfamiliar with the last few seasons of the series may have unanswered questions about where their relationship is now, and how far it progressed in the past.

Despite all of these misgivings, I wasn’t completely disappointed by the movie.  Perhaps it was just a recognition that I don’t seem to be properly wired for most of the new releases these days.  Comparing I Want to Believe to the coming attractions I had to sit through beforehand, aside from the upcoming Coen Brothers film (with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Francis McDormand) I’d rather sit through this X-Files film again than see any of them for the first time.  But that is less a recommendation of The X-Files as it is a condemnation of Hollywood.