BEFORE: I confess that I've never seen the "X-Files" TV show. Oh, I probably taped it every so often for work, and fast-forwarded through it, but it's one of those corners of the geek universe that I didn't take time to fully explore. And I sure don't have time to watch the whole series now. Fortunately this past week on "Jeopardy!", there was a question about what happened in the final episode of the show - so that's really all I need to know, right? It's not like the show was on for nine seasons and had a really complex mythology to it...
Linking from "Muppets in Space", Josh Charles was also in "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" with David Duchovny (last heard in "Queer Duck"). Nope, haven't seen that film either.
THE PLOT: Mulder and Scully must fight the government in a conspiracy and find the truth about an alien colonization of Earth.
AFTER: OK, so from watching this film, here's what I deduce about the "X-Files" show - Mulder was the "conspiracy nut", but I'm guessing he usually was right about whatever the Freak of the Week was - and Scully makes reference here about how she was teamed up with him to disprove his theories, so I'm guessing whenever the alien (or Bigfoot, or monster or vampire) showed up, she was in the bathroom or fixing her makeup or something and never saw it. "But he was RIGHT HERE," Mulder would say, "you JUST missed him!" Cue the laugh-track, and roll credits.
Finally, once the movie deal came through, they can finally let Scully see the alien nasties (and after what happens to her in this film, she has to become a believer...) and they can finally get these two crazy kids on the same page, and watch the sparks fly. Nothing gets a romance going better than working together for nine years and always being at odds with each other - remember "Moonlighting"? "Remington Steele"? "Buck Rogers"? But once you relieve that romantic tension, the rest of the show is like a loose rubber band, it never snaps back to its original shape. So the makers of "The X-Files" were wise to wait for a feature film.
So the movie explains a lot, about the aliens and the virus and the way it all works - and it ends up being sort of reminiscent of "Prometheus" (or, since this came first, should it be the other way around?). Black goo is NEVER good - just ask Spider-Man, his alien costume made of black goo seemed like a pretty sweet deal at first, until it started bonding with him and making him go web-swinging at night while he was asleep - who knows WHAT it also made him do?
I can't help but be reminded of "Twin Peaks", which was a TV that ran for just two seasons (and also featured David Duchovny, but as a cross-dressing DEA agent), yet somehow merited its own feature film. It also had a complicated mythology, with people who talked to owls, people who talked to logs, giants who talked in riddles, and a little person who talked backwards. It started out as a murder investigation, but ended up being about demonic possession and weird sex stuff, which is not surprising since David Lynch thought up the whole thing. But he was a busy guy, and only directed about two episodes of the show each season - those were the ones you just HAD to watch, and the rest of the time the characters sort stood around not really knowing what to do, and the plot never really advanced. In the end everything got explained, provided you paid attention. For those that didn't, the feature film went back and over-explained the day of the murder, even though most of the details of the victim's death were so unsavory that fans of the show tended to block them out and focus instead on the quirky characters who weren't dead.
So yeah, I admit I'm playing catch-up here without all the possibly necessary background information. But a feature film should be able to stand on its own - you should be able to watch the new Superman movie without having read the comic books or having watched 11 seasons of "Smallville". So if I'm judging this film on its own merits, it's entertaining enough, there are enough surprises, and some cool things I haven't seen before in other films. But on the other hand, there are a few things that I've seen in many other films, so in the end I think it's a wash.
NITPICK POINT: Corn is in the grass family, another factoid I learned from watching Jeopardy! this week. As such, corn is not pollinated by, or eaten by, bees. Just thought I'd mention that.
Also starring Gillian Anderson (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), Mitch Pileggi (last seen in "Recount"), Blythe Danner (last seen in "Brighton Beach Memoirs"), Martin Landau (last seen in "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!"), John Neville, Terry O'Quinn, Armin Mueller-Stahl (last seen in "Mission to Mars"), Lucas Black (last seen in "All the Pretty Horses"), William B. Davis, with a cameo from Glenne Headly (last seen in "Mortal Thoughts")
RATING: 5 out of 10 flamethrowers
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