The X Files: I Want to Believe

Damn evil homos!

2008

Review: August 5, 2008

Director: Chris Carter

Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly

If you like, but it’s pretty darn slow.

THE SETUP:

Mulder and Scully are drawn in to solve a case of abducted women.

DISCUSSION:

I was pretty excited about this, given how terribly entertaining the first movie was. I didn’t watch the show when it was on, but one of the people I went with was a total devotee, so he was there to explain the whole backstory and mythology.

We open with a woman driving along a snowy road. She pulls into a garage and is assaulted by two men. She rakes one of their faces and hands with a small garden rake. Intercut with this is a guy leading a group of FBI agents walking through a snowy field. The guy suddenly starts digging, and they find a forearm—marked with the same wounds as the guy the woman just injured. This seems like it’s happening at the exact same time as the woman’s attack, but it’s actually a day or two later. Then the FBI calls Scully and asks her if she knows where Mulder is. She finds him holed up in a rural house, wearing a big fake-looking beard. After a little convincing, she gets him to come along and help with the investigation.

So they go to the FBI office, where there’s a little joke as the camera pans to a photo of President Bush, and we hear the X-Files whistle theme. Then a pleasant surprise as we realize that Amanda Peet is leading the FBI team. Basically the woman abducted at the beginning was an FBI agent, and the long-haired guy leading them through this field is a psychic, and also a convicted pedophile. The question that will reverberate through the movie is whether he is to be believed or not.

There’s some hugger-mugger as they visit the psychic and Scully makes sure he knows that she does not approve of his sexual proclivities. There’s also this whole subplot about this young boy patient of hers [she’s a pediatric doctor now] who has a rare brain disease, and everyone but her thinks they should just let him die. Now comes one of the main frustrations of a series like this, in which the characters are not allowed to grow too much left they ruin the dynamic, when someone asks Mulder if he believes in bizarre paranormal stuff and he says “Let’s just say I want to believe.” Well, uh, didn’t you see a giant spaceship rise up out of the arctic and fly away [in the exact same final image as Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, by the way]? And you’re not sure you believe after THAT?

So another woman is abducted, and we have a disastrous edit in which one party, driving, says “turn here,” and we see a car turning—but it is actually a different car, three hours later. The psychic leads them to a body frozen in a lake, where they also find 12 or so other limbs. Despite this, the stern black FBI agent still thinks the psychic guy is a crock. Then—Scully has to get back to her day job!

SPOILERS > > >
So their search leads them to a Russian guy who is involved in organ transplant, who is “married in the state of Massachusetts” to this other Russian guy—the one with the rake wounds from the start—who was one of the pedophile psychic’s victims from way back when. Since we’re in the spoiler zone I can tell you that these guys DO turn out to be the villains, which makes it ugly that the movie goes out of its way—in a detour that adds nothing to the overall story—to make the villains homos. Not just homos, but ones that support gay marriage! And the one was made this way because of homosexual contact by a priest. You see, once you’ve been “tainted,” you turn into crazy psycho homos that target women [there are male victims, but all we see are women]. Furthermore, [I’m going to reveal the big secret, be warned] it turns out that it’s essentially a Frankenstein thing where the Russians are keeping the one alive by giving him new body parts—some of which are female. We see him with a woman’s hand, long nails manicured. So what—gays want to replace their nasty male bodies with delicate women’s parts? Perhaps not all of this was intended, but dude, THINK about the implications of what you are showing! THINK!!!
< < < SPOILERS END

Okay, rant over. I decided I’m not even going to go any further into the plot. The thing is that half way through you start to think “Boy, this is really low-key.” Then a while later you start to think “I sure wish I had a fast-forward button.” Because it’s all just going along at the same, dull pace, which is a real shot in the foot for the movie, because by the time exciting things do start happening, one is completely disengaged. But truth be told, not all that much exciting ever really happens. The big secret is kind of a big so what, and the extremely subtle connection to the whole thing about the dying kid [which we spend a LONG time on] will probably be missed by most people and thus remain a mystery as to its purpose at all. Toward the end Scully confronts a freaky surgical situation and announces “Oh God—I’ve got work to do here!” which can be somewhat amusing. You will note that once the mystery is solved, the snow melts! The warmth of life has returned! If you stay to the end of the credits you will see what seems like a little goodbye to the characters and series.

My friend who was really into the series thoroughly enjoyed it, and didn’t find it fatally sluggish, because he said it was like an extremely long episode of the series. He also noted the astonishingly homophobic content, however. If this is the end, the send-off to the series, it’s too bad it has to end on such a generally nondescript note.

I do really like the poster, though.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

You can totally wait for the DVD, if you have to see it at all.