The X-Files: I Want to Believe

I am an X-Phile. I watch reruns on TNT and the Sci-Fi channel (until they start showing the Doggett episodes then I find something else to watch for a couple of weeks). I have my favorite episodes and I have seen all of them repeatedly.

Chris Carter has blessed people like me with reopening the X-Files and offering Mulder a pardon for his alleged crimes. When I heard there was going to be a new X-Files movie this summer I asked why, then vowed to see it opening weekend. In the months between hearing about the film and today, I started questioning whether or not I should see it. The thing is that sometimes these things come out to a great deal of hype from the media and high expectations from the fans and they bomb. The numbers don't show it because the die hard fans are going to see it come hell or high water but they leave disappointed. I didn't want that.

I reasoned that Chris Carter is in charge and David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson obviously approved of the script so it couldn't be all bad. So, after much debate, I decided that I would go.

I say that I have my favorite X-Files episodes. Very few, if any of them are centered around the core plot of the show; Mulder's quest to find his sister. UFO's and aliens, while interesting in concept, don't interest me much in fiction. But I was fully expecting to see this as the whole of this new movie and was not only surprised but a bit disappointed to be met with little more than the pilot of a "next generation" spin-off (P.S. Don't get all excited, I am only making a comparison - to my knowledge there is no scuttlebutt of a spin-off).

While my reviews rarely contain spoilers, I feel compelled to tell my readers that The X-Files: I Want to Believe doesn't even so much as mention aliens (unless you count Russian immigrants). Even in the brief discussions of Samantha, the word abduction is only used once. This is only important if your love of the show was centered around the alien conspiracy and you didn't like the ghost/mutant/demon/psycho-kinetics episodes. If you watched the show because you were interested/a believer in the paranormal, or just liked to find out what kind of predicament Mulder would get them into next, then the absence of UFO's is completely irrelevant.

And if you are as committed a fan as I was for several seasons (and still am, to the reruns), you will spend a great deal of the film waiting with bated breath for Walter Skinner. Let me say this, as I teeter on the edge of spoiler.... His appearance is late but significant and I fully expected the theater to erupt in applause (to my chagrin, I was apparently the only bonafide, card-carrying geek in the room because I was the only geek who actually applauded).

The agents are being led through their case by a self-proclaimed psychic, Father Joe. Father Joe was an excommunicated priest with a soiled past (if you don't understand that, pick up a newspaper sometime). Father Joe was the subject of my debate in my own head - is that Billy Connolly? No, yes? No. I finally settled on yes and apparently the Scot went through some serious work to get ready for the role. Yes, the drawn, emaciated old man leading agents through the middle of a snowy nowhere, is Billy Connolly. And near as I can tell from my research (because I wanted to make sure before I wrote this) he's not ill. Of course, in true X-Files form, we never really find out if the old priest was truly psychic or a con, but I don't think true fans would expect to find out.

Basically, my recommendation is to go see it. It is fully worth the ticket price.