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Thursday, July 24, 2008
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'X' APPEAL New movie will prove 'X-Files' is more than just that '90s show Entertainment Editor This is going to sound kind of random, but here's evidence that "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" isn't your ordinary summer blockbuster.
When you watch the preview, which finds Mulder and Scully scrambling out of their six-year hibernation to investigate bodies under the ice, the movie seems to be about something, doesn't it?
You don't know exactly what; you just know you have to see it. Reminds me of Sunday nights in the 1990s.
I admit to a bias: I loved - still love - "The X-Files." And not just when Mulder and Scully were heading the investigation. I still enjoyed it when Doggett and Reyes took over in 2000. I even liked it when Kolchak and Reed took over in 2005 and they renamed it "Night Stalker."
"I Want to Believe," as true fans of Chris Carter's series will sense, isn't a nostalgia trip. Although "The X-Files" is often called a (or "the") show of the 1990s, it's only anchored to that decade because that's when it aired - from 1993-2002, with a 1998 movie thrown in.
The main theme of the mythology episodes was "don't trust the government," as David Duchovny's Mulder tried to figure out if, why and how the United States struck a devil's bargain with aliens, and Gillian Anderson's Scully tried to keep her partner sane. American citizens, after the debacle of the Iraq war, are even less trusting of the government today than they were in the 1990s.
The main theme of the stand-alones (or "monster of the week" episodes) was the search for what's lurking in the shadows. Since the series ended, we certainly haven't suppressed our innate curiosity about the unknown, the paranormal and the supernatural.
While no "X-Files" clone has been a hit in the last 10 years (R.I.P. "Freakylinks," "Miracles" and "Night Stalker," and good luck to "Fringe"), "Lost" is a success, and that series plumbs both "X-Files" staples - mistrust and mysteries.
If you go
What: "The X-Files: I Want to Believe."
When: Opens Friday.
Where: Area theaters.
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Xzibit.
Written by: Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter.
Director: Chris Carter.
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Here's how good "The X-Files" was: I found the mythology completely engrossing even though I often had no idea what was going on. Usually I cringe at style meshed with pseudo-substance (sorry, "Matrix" trilogy), but I make an exception here.
"The X-Files" was almost always filmed in color, but in my mind's eye, it's a black-and-white show like the original "Twilight Zone." That's because of John Bartley's cinematography, where the black was the darkness and the white was Mulder's flashlight. When the Barenaked Ladies espoused the simple pleasure of "watching 'X-Files' with no lights on," they must've been applauding Bartley's work.
Along with the gray Vancouver locations and the score by Mark Snow - more aural mood than actual music - the style defined the show as much as the black oil, the bees and those holdover aliens from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
But as fun as Mulder's clashes with the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the Syndicate were, I really love "The X-Files" because of the stand-alone episodes. My mind goes back to early season classics like "Ice," which taps into "Thing"-esque paranoia; "Space," where Mulder investigates a ghost in his beloved NASA; "Squeeze," about a killer who can get into the tiniest spaces; and, of course, "The Host," with its man-sized sewer mutant.
In a recent column for Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King - who penned the "X-Files" episode "Chinga," about a doll that forced people to kill themselves - wrote that "I Want to Believe" doesn't look very scary. Fair enough, but "The X-Files" was never scary (the medium is naturally comforting, so it's hard to make a truly scary TV show). It was always creepy, spooky and weird, and that was plenty impressive.
Although 1999's "Blair Witch Project" gets credit for innovating scares from "what you don't see," "The X-Files" - relatively big-budgeted, but still a thrifty TV series - was doing that for years beforehand. Early episodes ended with Scully typing a report with the computer screen reflecting in her glasses or Mulder pontificating about what it all means. But after awhile, Carter dropped the device and episodes ended with almost no resolution. A style choice of the '90s? Maybe, but the 2000s can lay an equally strong claim to being the "age of uncertainty."
"I Want to Believe" will be a stand-alone story, making it the first "monster of the week" yarn to go beyond the TV-episode length of 44 minutes (not counting the six novels, in which Mulder and Scully were more immersed in the investigations).
I happily don't know what the story will be about, aside from what's teased in the preview. But this is "The X-Files" we're talking about, so it won't be bad; it'll be a certain degree of good. That's what I choose to believe.
JOHN HANSEN, entertainment editor, may be reached at john.hansen@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5863.
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