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The X-Files: Fight the Future
Most ineffective alien invasion EVER
1998
Review: October 31, 2009
Director: Rob Bowman
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, John Neville, Willaim B. Davis
Oh you bet!
THE SETUP:
Much weirdness occurs as Mulder and Scully pursue more alien weirdness.
DISCUSSION:
I never used to watch this show, but I saw this movie at the theater when it was out, and thought it was just a blast. In fact, I saw it twice on opening day, I thought it was so fun. Well, time can change a man. It’s still amusing enough, but it’s too long, hopelessly convoluted, and contains its share of repetitive scenes. We open with some nice credits appearing in this undulating black oily surface. Then there are these guys in the snow and—surprise, they’re cavemen! I like movies that open in caveman times. They go into a cave looking for their sno-cone maker when they get attacked by a big alien who is obviously pretty ticked off about something. The caveman stabs the alien, who then seeps out black blood, and then the blood goes and attacks the caveman! Then this kid in the present day falls into this cave in Texas. I believe we are supposed to understand that it is the same cave, although a bit warmer now. More of the black nasty shit seeps up into the kid, clouding his eyes, and next thing you know its later and the ambulance is called, but the government swoops in, tosses the kid in a Glade® Seal-n-Snak® container, and takes off.
By the way, I got this disc on blu-ray and all of this, and indeed the entire rest of the movie, was accompanied by an annoying module in the upper left saying “Bonusview,” keeping me CONSTANTLY alerted to the fact that I could potentially watch a picture-in-picture commentary video as I watch the movie. And it’s a good thing that it stayed there the entire time, ruining my movie experience, because otherwise I might have forgotten that there were bonus features THAT I DON’T WANT available at any time. If it had just appeared at the beginning and then disappeared, so I could enjoy the movie without constantly looking over thinking “What’s THAT?” I might have forgotten that there are bonus features THAT I DON’T WANT. So you see how helpful this is.
We then join a bomb scare at a federal building. Scully is wandering around on a roof across the way, having a long phone conversation with Mulder, in which they re-establish that he thinks everything is aliens and she is rational and doesn’t believe all this stuff, and furthermore wishes she could just quit and go back to being a doctor. Turns out Mulder is right there, and they chat for a while, then go downstairs and are about to leave when Mulder goes to buy a soda, and somehow realizes that the soda machine itself is the bomb. After some drama about Mulder getting locked in the room with the bomb, they get out and their boss, Michaud, who was apparently a regular on the series, goes in with the bomb and we see he just sits down and allows it to go off. Mulder of course has a little feeling and wants to go back and check it out when Scully gives a major trailer moment [and it is in all the trailers] where she makes her eyes as wide as hubcaps and screams “THERE’S NO TIME!” Then boom, the building blows up real big. Only coverage of the explosion is a little disappointing, and if you watch the special effects featurette [starring the FUCKING SEXY special effects dude on this film] you can read between the lines that something went wrong and they didn’t get all the footage they wanted. Then, turns out THEY’RE under investigation for finding the bomb! Can you just believe the cheek of some people? And Blythe Danner unleashes her full complement of pinched smug, disdainful expressions as the head of the committee.
We now have the second in our series of serious discussions where Scully says she just can’t do it anymore and is going to leave to be a doctor again. It is oh so serious. Then Martin Landau accosts Mulder and tells him that they blew up the whole building just to get rid of some bodies found in the building, and he should look into it. He gets Scully and they gain entry to this place where there are bodies that were found in the explosion. These turn out to have turned into gummy bodies—they are now clear gelatinous goo. That’s weird, but you have to admit that if the intent of leaving them in the exploding building was to destroy them, it was pretty much a total failure, right? Because they are completely intact.
SPOILERS > > >
Meanwhile in Texas, where the kid fell in, an alien is born out of some body, promptly grows to eight feet tall and attacks some scientist. But rather than saving the scientist—they lock him in! Can you believe how cruel and callous this government is!?!? Jerks! Then, and I forget how this was all delivered, but it came in a mass of government gobbledygook, but it seems that the alien blood can be considered a kind of virus, and is extremely contagious, and what happens is that it takes over the human body and grows an alien inside, and this is how they’re going to manage their alien invasion, which is a pretty clever idea for an alien invasion! Only then you recall that they’ve been around since caveman times and then you think wow, is this like the most ineffective alien invasion EVER, or what?! I mean yes, NOW we have some relatively decent technology for keeping viruses in and all, but what about the beginning of time til, say, the 70s? The aliens had ALLLLL that time to take over humanity, and all they could manage is a meager few victims here or there? These aliens have some serious problems. Or they’re addicted to failure. I don’t know what their problem is, but sorry, I can’t consider them too much of a threat if this is all they can manage. Christ. Fucking moron aliens!!!
So Mulder and Scully go out to Texas, where they find a square area of perfectly green grass in the middle of a big back yard of desert dirt, where the government tried to cover up the site of the cave. But come on, even the government isn’t THAT stupid. That night they’re wandering around when they find a huge cornfield growing in the middle of the desert, with these two white glowing bubble tents in the middle. They go in, find nothing, but suddenly grates in the floor open and a billion bees come out. They run outside without being stung, then are chased by helicopters. By this time one has stopped asking questions such as WHO is in the helicopters and WHAT they’re trying to do, it’s just that there are helicopters chasing them, and that’s all you need to know.
The next morning Scully gets back just in time for the next investigation into her methods, after which she goes over to Mulder’s and they have the next in their series of conversations in which she says she’s going to quit and become a doctor, and he says she can’t they’re too close, he needs her, etc. This shit could just go on until doomsday. Then she gets stung by one of the bees—which has been hanging out on her body nearly 24 hours by this point, having been transported back from Texas with her. I guess she never took a shower? She doesn’t change her clothes? Anyway, she’s not allergic, but she goes into some kind of crazy shock, and is taken away in an ambulance. A moment later, the REAL ambulance shows up. Wu-oh, mindfuck.
Mulder then goes and has some big words with Landau, who ends up getting shot. Then this mysterious man in a limo spills the whole secret about this all being an alien invasion—he doesn’t mention its low success rate—and tells Mulder that his dad LET his sister be taken by aliens because she was sick and they could heal her or whatnot, which apparently is a huge deal if you were following the series. The guy gives Mulder coordinates where he can find Scully, and most importantly a vaccine he can give her to cure her, then blows his own head off.
Mulder gets one of those snow cats like from the end of The Shining and goes off to some arctic wasteland. He runs out of gas just as he gets to where he’s going and… how exactly is he planning on getting back? I wouldn’t be surprised if Avis roadside assistance isn’t going to cover him for that destination. Anyway there are some creepy igloos there, obviously some secret government plant, and apparently Mulder’s plan is to just walk right up to them in broad daylight, wearing black against the surrounding white. Only he doesn’t get there because he falls into an ice cave, like down a hundred feet or more, then sees air being sucked into some hole just bugger than his body. So he throws himself into the hole! Boy, movie characters really are different from you and me.
He ends up inside this massive, massive alien ship. It’s kind of cool, but Mulder struck me as a little over-confident just walking around will-nilly, not even looking if there might be some bad aliens or sinister government worker lurking round. He also, for someone who has been looking for aliens his whole life, seems curiously uninterested in checking out the alien technology. He finds a bunch of people individually-wrapped in little tubs, and whaddya know, just happens to find Scully within a few minutes of being there! This ship is the size of eight city blocks, but he just happened to come in RIGHT at the place where she was. WHAT a coinkidink! So he injects her with this antibody to the virus that very quickly corrupts the entire ship and all its human inhabitants… WOAH, that is fast-acting! He breaks her out and pulls this long cord out of her throat [disgusting] and tries to get her out of there fast, because the whole place is starting to get weird. One finds that there are a curious [and convenient!] amount of ladders on this alien ship. One of the aliens hatches just in time to attack Mulder and up the suspense before he finally gets Scully, who is basically a barely-conscious limp rag, to the surface.
Then comes the climax—the ice field around them starts to collapse, and begin falling into this ever-expanding crater. I like it, because it’s very simple, but it provides a very visceral climax that is interesting to look at, and isn’t the old boring run-away-before-something-explodes climax. Turns out the big alien ship under the snow is going away now, and it flies over them, and Mulder sees it and is amazed. Scully, of course, is lying on her stomach and not looking at it, although she whispers that she saw it—however, you’ll need to have your volume up to 300 and it must be absolutely silent in your neighborhood to hear it. Anyway, there are several things to say about this ending, the first of which is that the fourth Indiana Jones film, the Crystal Skull and the Magical Refrigerator, essentially STEALS this ending wholesale. It just flat-out TOOK it, and tries to use it in the same way, although it works a lot better here. But the ending brings up a bunch of questions, like—well, if no one’s home in the ship, who’s driving? And if the vaccine spread and killed all the aliens, again, who’s driving? And why did that make them have to leave the planet? And why couldn’t Mulder have just shoved over onto her back so she could have seen it for sure? The other thing is that the next X-Files movie, incongruously and bizarrely make ten years later, when no one cared any more, goes back to Mulder saying “He WANTS to believe” in aliens when, hi, you didn’t see that giant spaceship?
Then Scully as the 59th of her 317 investigative panels, and then she and Mulder have the 3,986,264th conversation about moving on from the X-Files, only THIS time Mulder is telling her she HAS to move on! Go! Be a doctor! Leave me and get on with your life! And she says “No! I can’t! I won’t!” Then we see that there’s another field of corn and big bubble tends full of bees in the middle of the Middle Eastern desert, and this one’s even BIGGER! But if the aliens have left, what are they doing with all this? By now I don’t even want to know. That could be the name of the next movie: THE X-FILES: I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
< < < SPOILERS END
It was reasonably fun, and if you were a fan of the show I would imagine it would all go down extremely smoothly. Not being a fan of the show, it left me with the impression that what we have here is a giant load of bullshit. It’s all whispered “what ifs” and clues that seem like they connect to these other clues, which can give you the illusion that it all adds up to something, but I don’t think it ever does—it’s just stringing you along. And if I felt pointlessly strung-along by a two-hour movie, I can only imagine what the series must have been like. I can only KIND OF imagine how many versions of the conversation where she’s quitting and he begs her to stay they’ve had. Or how many times he finds conclusive evidence of something or other then continues not to believe it or still needs further evidence… it seems like just such a waste of time. Which made me again glad I stopped watching television years ago.
Nevertheless, it was fun. Mulder and Scully are good characters, and the actors have years of refined chemistry behind them, so they work really well together and blow up onto the big screen just fine. I’d be happy to see a lot more Gillian Anderson, she’s always interesting in her quiet way, and when she walks out into the lobby of the bomb-laden building and barks that she wants it evacuated in ten minutes, she makes it seem like any reasonable person would do it. Plus, aliens and spaceships and hush-hush conspiracy is always fun. The only thing that the passage of time and a little remove from this series makes one step back and realize that it’s just a giant mass of swamp gas.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you want a big-budget X-Files movie. If not, you could rent any number of other things and basically get the same effect.
