X Files: I Want To Believe

I wonder whom the makers of X Files: I Want To Believe fancied would come to watch their film.  People who had never seen an episode before, curious as to the hype? Filmgoers eager for a dose of conspiratorial entertainment? Or fans still eager for a reunion of Mulder and Scully? Either one will likely leave the cinema disappointed, as the film pitches between gruesome horror, a patchwork meditation on faith, and a love story between the two protagonists.

The X Files entranced me as a series because it was able to build up a tapestry of allusion and repetition accessible to anyone with a pause button or wikipedia.  Visual and aural motifs flickered in and out of the episodes, hinting at the underlying connectedness unveiled during the investigators’ work.  As a stand-alone film, however, the possibilities of subtlety are reduced and, attempting to cater for both an audience of newcomers and established fans, the references are signposted with slabs of dialogue: “You’re still searching for your sister, Mulder…you want to believe”.  The film’s pacing is uneven too: the exposition is tiresome, with Mulder playing the bearded and hurt hero being tempted back for one last mission/ballgame/parachute jump, and as with all last orders, a pint of pathos shandy makes its irresistible way towards us.

Once the story line kicks in, it feels like too much is being attempted.  Scully wrestles with questions about faith and human medicinal intervention; Mulder places his faith in a psychic, paedophilic priest; the two of them share a bed discussing their intimate past (their son William from the series) whilst calling each other by their surnames.  Each storyline in a single episode would have been sufficient and the issues can only be jabbed by the stick of insight before the main plot engulfs all that went before it.  At their best, the monsters of X Files episodes provided correlations to the internal themes of Mulder and Scully; here, the revelation of the enemy has little more than a tenuous relevance to the film’s themes.

Catholicism takes a fair amount of bashing in the form of the priests who run Scully’s hospital: a manipulative, insipid lot, they do their best to frustrate her with unexplained dogma about “letting God’s will be done”.  Elsewhere, Mulder’s psychic priest has visions seen as if “through dirty glass” – a 1 Corinthians 12 theme that has been taken up more fully in other X Files stories.  Father Joe’s visions are balanced briefly on the question mark over whether they are God’s offer of redemption or a human attempt to draw attention away from his previous sins: provocative fuel here for the battle between psychology and theology to explain the extraordinary, but it is a short lived debate.  Likewise the tension between being passive and letting God’s will be done, and being active in trying to bring about God’s will, figured here in Scully’s conflict over how to treat a terminally ill boy.  Much of interest, but dealt with so briefly as to raise the issue without really examining it.

Finally, the love story.  It isn’t just nostalgia that leads me to claim that Scully and Mulder were always much more engaging with their brand of repressed attraction, and it was a credit to the writers that they managed to keep up the spark between them for so long without any consummation.  Their relationship in this film is pretty bizarre: as noted above, the surnames in bed incident amused this audience, whilst much of the talk about “not giving up” seemed to be aimed at Mulder and Scully’s relationship as much as the other plots.  I was left nonplussed by it: their kiss felt awkward and less romantic than the late night phone calls and ideological debates that had made up their previous relationship.

In all then, the film is a decentish crime story glazed with X Files paraphernalia, diverting enough for a couple of hours, but nothing more than a commercial addendum to the X Files world.

Nathan Koblintz

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