REVIEW: The X-Files "I Want to Believe"
By: Lee Rice
Back in the 90’s, The X-Files took the world by storm, creating a fun and interesting world where there was a conspiracy around every corner, an alien in every shadow, and a sinister conspiracy in every coincidence. Now, years after the end of the show, The X-Files is back on the big screen, but even though legions of fans may ‘want to believe,’ chances are that they‘ll find themselves disappointed.
“I Want to Believe” is, like many episodes of the T.V. series, a standalone. This means that it has no connection to the main story arc that ran through the entire series. Although it sounds like a great idea, and may be a wonderful way for those unfamiliar with the series to become acquainted with the characters and feel of the series, it is actually the major conceptual flaw that threatens to bring this movie to its knees.
Adapting a television series to the big screen has never been an easy task. It means not only pleasing rabid fans, but also attracting newcomers who don’t have a solid knowledge of the series’ mythology. This isn’t an easy balance, and it means that the writers and directors have to do several things.
First, they need a story big enough to hold the audience’s attention for an hour and a half to two hours. This has been a source of major trouble for filmmakers in the past, including the granddaddy of all sci-fi franchises, “Star Trek.” The writers of Trek went through dozens of stories in countless drafts before settling on what became “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
All the hard work paid off there, as it did with the first “X-Files” movie, but the real problem with “I Want to Believe” is that the story just isn’t big enough. In the first film, we got some serious hints about what the conspirators were planning, and the answers we got raised a whole new set of questions. This entry, being a stand alone, feels like it’s much ado about nothing. It would have made a great one-hour episode (with commercial breaks), but it just doesn’t affect the X-Files universe enough to warrant its existence as a full-blown movie.
The result is a movie that feels like an episode of the television series that has been purposefully inflated with meaningless subplots and forced scenes that don’t seem to serve any purpose other than to expand the running time. In all honesty, I can honestly say that this is the first movie I’ve ever seen that could have benefited from a one-hour run time.
Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny slip into their old roles as Agents Scully and Mulder very well, even if some of the chemistry that was there in the show seems to have waned. The classic debate between the two about faith in science vs. faith in the unexplainable is still there, and it’s as interesting as it ever was. As for the old ‘will they/ won’t they’ thing, this movie seems to clear that up pretty well.
As for where “I Want to Believe” fits into the “X-Files” canon, it feels like a bit of a placeholder for something bigger. The creators of the show have publicly expressed that they want to do one more film dealing with the supposed end of the world in the year 2012, and I had the unshakable feeling while watching this movie that they were just trying to show the audience what happened to the main characters after the conclusion of the series.
On the whole, the secrecy behind the movie’s plot was pretty unwarranted.
I think that my opinion on this movie is basically a moot point. Everyone who loved “The X-Files” will be going to see it, and everyone else will be one theatre over, taking in “The Dark Knight” for the 4th time.
Final Verdict: 3/5
