The X-Files (1998, Rob Bowman) (Patreon)

46/100

Movie's barely worth discussing—it's just a bloated mythology episode, and those are generally tedious even at 42 minutes + ads—so instead I'll relate my whole X-Files experience to date. Didn't see the show when it aired, as I watched basically no TV at all from 1992 (when I moved to New York) until Xmas 2002 (when my dad bought the 24 S1 box set; I started watching, having little else to do at his house, and got sucked in by the nonstop cliffhangers). For quite a few years thereafter, I retained the prejudice that I'd always had against genuinely episodic TV, sitcoms excepted. Heavily serialized, "novelistic" dramatic series like The Wire and Breaking Bad were very much my thing, whereas I just couldn't take a show seriously if it managed to wrap up 22-24 separate and largely unrelated crises per annum. I even initially had trouble getting into The Sopranos and Mad Men, both of which, I later came to realize, function more like a collection of short stories featuring the same characters than like a single plot-driven narrative. As for something like The X-Files, with its monster-of-the-week approach, forget it. Gave it four episodes sometime around maybe 2006 and had zero interest in continuing. My feeling was: If you're gonna go that route, do an anthology series à la The Twilight Zone* or The Outer Limits. I don't want a tidy resolution for our heroes every week.

Eventually, that stance softened a little, thanks to shows like Atlanta that straddle the line between episodic and serialized (not to mention between comedy and drama). Plus I watched The Fall, in which Gillian Anderson delivers quite possibly the greatest performance I've ever seen by any actor in anything ever. So I gave The X-Files another chance. Ironically (given my feelings now), it was the mythology stuff in S1 that won me over—there was more of it than I'd anticipated, and the extraterrestrial conspiracy is actually quite intriguing at the outset, before the show's success forced writers to continually expand it while being careful never to foreclose anything. (Same basic problem all shows experience, really, given enough time.) But I also enjoyed many stand-alone episodes, including ones like "Beyond the Sea" (death of Scully's father) that barely feature anything supernatural. And I'm not sure I can think of another series in which it's so easy to predict quality strictly from the writing credit. Both Darin Morgan and Vince Gilligan made a point of tapping Duchovny's little-utilized comic instincts, with S5's "Bad Blood" in particular serving as a knowing parody of his most exasperating mannerisms. I don't imagine that The X-Files will ever stop being portentous and kinda stupid, but over the course of those first five seasons, it has loosened up and gotten more fun. 

This movie, however, is not fun. Reviews were mixed at the time, so my expectations were low—only watched it because my anal-retentive nature demanded that I do so before continuing to season six. (I'll likely watch I Want to Believe, too, though it's a couple of years away at my current rate of speed. I don't binge-watch ancient shows; one episode per week, or even less frequently at times, is fine.) What surprised me was just how closely it resembles a typical mediocre episode, both structurally and visually. Most of the budget appears to have gone to the Antarctica sets/CGI, which are fairly impressive; I had to remind myself at one point that The Matrix wouldn't be released for another year and hence couldn't have been an influence. In every other respect, though, it's all but indistinguishable from the show's standard look and rhythm, to the point where I could sometimes even spot where the commercial breaks would normally have been placed. (The cut from "BEE ATTACK!" to Scully back at the hearing clanks particularly hard in this context, even when viewed on my same ol' TV screen. That transition really needed several interposed minutes of "In these challenging times...") Guffawed when Mulder and Scully's kiss gets interrupted by a clumsily set-up bee sting—that's some truly legendary shipper-pandering. (I was aware of those folks at the time thanks to my EW subscription, as the magazine ran breathless will-they-or-won't-they? articles like 20 times per year.) Also guffawed when we're supposed to feel threatened by...FEMA. Also also guffawed at "North Texas. 35,000 B.C.," though I think that one's supposed to be funny? Anyway, obviously not a film worth bothering with unless you're working your way through the saga two decades-plus after the fact. Even then, if you (unlike me) feel okay skipping one or more of the MCU installments, you can probably skip this.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Opening title reads The X Files, without a hyphen (also true of the TV series, at least through the first five seasons); end credits call it The X-Files, hyphenated. Normally I favor whichever variant appears first, but in this case there's an element of stylization in the opening title—the 'X' appears as more of a symbol, circled, distinct from the words surrounding it (also albeit slightly less true of the TV series, at least through the first five seasons)—so I've chosen to go with the very clean end-credit version, which is also conveniently what everybody else uses. 

* Which I'd loved as a teenager in the '80s, obsessively taping episodes as they aired in syndication until I'd seen them all...except for the 18 hour-long episodes of season four, which weren't part of the package. I'm actually in the process of watching those for the first time right now, nearly 40 years later. Also now watching the early seasons of SCTV, which I was likewise obsessed with during its "Network 90" run ca. 1981-82. Used to have to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to record that one; it aired at like 1am or something.