X-Files: Voglio crederci

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a trailer for this movie a while back. I always enjoyed the show when I caught it on TV, except when it got really stupid towards the end (Mulder dies, then is buried in a coffin and is then dug up again and is alive--Excuse me?). Given that, I was happy to catch up with Scully and Mulder. It had been six years. Six years. Six years for the shows creators to come up with a script worthy of the legacy of the show. NOT! What a piece of doo-doo. This wouldn't have cut it as a two part episode during season eight. What were they thinking? That show had some of the best writing and directing in the history of television. Part of the joy of watching that show was that it was so much like a movie. Every week you got to watch an incredibly engrossing mini-movie. I felt bad for the actors. They looked slightly embarrassed to be there. Imagine having read the script, knowing it was a dog, and then having to do it and not be able to tell the writer, "You know, Chris, this really sucks..." because he's the big honcho and gave you your big break seventeen years ago. This is supposed to be a movie. Movies are supposed to be BIG. This seemed chintzy. It felt like a rip-off. Six years! If they weren't going to do it right, why did they do it at all? During the movie, my friend, who is not really a big fan of X-Files, leaned over and said, "This is like a remake of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" with an actual budget..." Sadly, I had to agree.

The world is a greatly changed place since the heyday of "The X-files." Back in the late 1990's the TV show was at its height and tapping into the shared fears of the day: fear of the unknown, fear of the impending millennium, and fear that something larger than us (the government or alien invaders) was up to no good. Flash forward to the year 2008 and we know all that hubbub about the millennium was for nothing, our government has been up to no good for years, and it's not space invaders we need to worry about but other people terrorizing us. The murky, gloomy, grim style of "The X-Files" is now the norm with feverish and dark films like "There Will Be Blood" and "The Dark Knight" tapping into the mindset of culture today from opposite ends of the film spectrum.

Apparently creator Chris Carter didn't realize his baby was irrelevant now. His only mission should've been to please the faithful. If he wanted to revive his series on film, he had best stick to the labyrinthine alien mythology that still has some die-hard fans buzzing, or at the very least deliver a fun stand-alone monster-of-the-week style flick that would make fans jump in their seats. With "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" he does neither of those things. Instead, he gives us a story where Mulder and Scully come out of hiding to work on a case where the FBI are using a psychic criminal priest to help locate a missing agent and track down a potential serial killer. The plot fits more into the mold of his far less popular companion series "Millennium" than it does to "The X-Files." Apparently Carter wanted to please no one except perhaps himself.

The weirdest thing about the film is that it isn't all that bad. Carter as a director lays on some decent atmosphere (with all the global-warming defying snow and some eerie nighttime shots) and creates some palpable tension as the horrors of the case grow grimmer. The chemistry between Mulder (a lazy but effective David Duchovny) and Scully (an amazingly fully ranged and emotional Gillian Anderson) is still there, and Anderson's performance is especially gripping. Billy Connolly, cast against type, gives an interesting turn as the corrupted priest searching for redemption through his visions that probably would've garnered an Emmy nod had this been a very special two-part TV episode. Also good is Amanda Peet, looking smashing in her smart FBI pantsuits.

Most interesting is the story arc given Dana Scully. I honestly had stopped watching the show after the sixth season, and aside from the mythology storyline that built up to the first film released ten years ago, I recall some of my favorite episodes being the ones where Scully questioned her faith and struggled with reconciling her Catholicism with her scientific approach to the paranormal investigations. This is again explored here, as Scully, always the skeptic, so desperately wants to believe in something. However, it's an odd choice for Carter to focus on this internal human drama when he should be focusing on how to bring fans back into the fold. It would've been an interesting and compelling layer had Carter not been so inept with the rest of the plot.

In the end some fine performances and a moody atmosphere do not add up to a good time. Eventually it becomes an uncomfortable and anachronistic creep-fest that plays like the type of suspense thriller that ruled the roost in the mid-1990's after films like "Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven" made police detection and serial killing popular entertainment. Well, it's 2008, Mr. Carter, and it's time to wake up from your prolonged nightmare that was rendered uninteresting in 2001.

It's not hard to imagine how time flies, when you realize that one of your best loved television series of all time had already ended its run, and you reminisce the times back when one of your weekend nights revolved around sitting in a bunk with your army mates, all glued to what Chris Carter had conjured as adventures for the two best known goggle box FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). While we always needed to crank up the volume to try and make sense of the murmurs involving shadow governments and secret conspiracies, our favourite episodes almost unanimously were those one-off ones, so called the "monster" episodes.

And it's been 6 years since The End, and 10 years since the first X-Files movie hit the screen. While that movie was intricately linked to the major conspiracy thread, this movie, as the trailer led us to believe, was a one-off monster episode, or so I thought. While it's indeed a one-off episode, it's no monster of an episode in the mould of those in the television series, though it really felt like an extended, stand alone episode which gave us a slightly more in depth look at the dynamics of our beloved duo, especially what happened to them in the last few years they went off the FBI radar. But as the saying goes, you can't put a good man, and a lady, down for too long.

This is a story about obsession. As we all know, Mulder's obsessed with everything X- classifiable, and in the years of absence, here comes an opportunity for a breath of fresh air when Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) comes knocking to seek his expertise, as the FBI now has a case on their hands and a psychic, convicted pedophile of a Catholic Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly) who volunteers key information to help in that case. The FBI isn't sure if Father Crissman is a liar, or worse, connected to the crime, and hence Mulder's help is to be their lie-detector. Naturally with religion and her usual cynicism in the mix, Scully is disgusted by the sheer presence of the religious felon, and thus set the stage for some conflict with her beau.

Like an old, quarreling couple who can't seem to give way to each other, their philosophies clash as their interests - Scully battling the hospital system to save her young chronically ill patient - differ, and threaten to pull the couple apart. He thinks that she's not being supportive of his venturing into an X-case even though they're now civilians, while she thinks he's latching onto Father Crissman to use his prowess, if proved true, to find Samantha Fox. Which I thought would probably make an excellent sub plot, but alas the potential was dangled like a carrot in front of us, and then went totally off tangent.

Don't expect any big sets or intricate subplots here, as it really looked like it's done on a shoestring budget, with the look and feel of a typical classic television episode, a two-parter in fact. There are strange aberrations of course, but all these go unexplained, and you know they're just going to be glossed over since everything will be wrapped up by the time the end credits roll. However, there are adequate moments to keep you at the edge of your seat, and some developments do enough to leave your mouth gaping wide open, especially those involving extreme medicine.

David Duchovny does look more comfortable reprising his role as Mulder, but Gillian Anderson, as interviews have revealed, required a lot more time trying to get back into character, and this uneasiness unfortunately shows on screen. The chemistry's still not lacking, but given that their respective characters have aged and grown more comfortable with one another, gone are the tensions between them, though the problems that surface here did try to rekindle some of the opposition they felt during the course of their long running series.

Chris Carter and X-Files regular scribe Frank Spotnitz did incorporate a nice surprise in the movie, so do keep your eyes peeled as you will silently cheer when it happens. But I thought what was a ghastly way to bid farewell, was the little coda toward the end of the credit roll, which somewhat signals the finale of everything, though in a very out of place manner. Anyhow, this X-Files movie episode isn't going to win any new fans over, but for X-philes, I'd bet we're probably just satisfied already with our heroes appearing in celluloid one more time, that no matter how wafer thin the plot is, it's not going to dampen our collective fan spirit.

And to thank our lucky stars that Mark Snow's iconic theme song, didn't get played in the movie under the horrific techno rendition.

This is the second X-FILES movie, made a decade after the first and a good six years after the series finally ended on television. In many respects, it feels like nothing more than extended episode; gone is the government conspiracy stuff, to be replaced with a stand-alone storyline involving psychics and FRANKENSTEIN-style experiments that recalls the good old days of the early seasons. Many fans were disappointed that the underlying alien stuff was dismissed for this film, but I didn't mind it at all. If they made films like this every couple of years, I'd be happy.

As a piece of entertainment, it isn't entirely satisfying, although I found it watchable enough. The plot is meandering in places – especially during the mid section – and the low budget readily apparent in some cheesy effects scenes (such as where we see someone falling). However, the relationship between Mulder and Scully is spot on, and the script allows for plenty of soul-searching between the two leads. Duchovny effortlessly slides back into his character, although Anderson fails to convince in some of her dialogue sequences (although her emotional stuff with a child patient is spot on).

Kudos, too, for eliciting a good performance from Billy Connolly, who bags a fantastic role as a priest-turned-paedophile-turned-psychic. I never thought I'd see somebody like Connolly give a quiet, mannered, understated turn, but he does that here. Amanda Peet is fine as another investigator, and even Xzibit convinces as a 'real' actor. It's great to see Mitch Pileggi make a cameo, too.

It's not an amazing film, and much of it is familiar stuff done numerous times in more successful episodes, but I enjoyed THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE on nostalgic terms alone. It recalls the glory days of when the show was unmissable entertainment, the best thing on the box, and that's some achievement

"It's here! It's here!" shouts Billy Connolly's mysterious, questionable, and apparently psychic Father Joe Crissman in the film's opening scene, and although he is talking about something much more grotesque than the return of "The X-Files", the words clearly echo the thoughts of every last X-Phile awaiting the return of Mulder and Scully, of "The X-Files", and, as surely everyone hoped, something to make up for the many hours wasted on the show's astonishingly mediocre final season.

If you do not enjoy "The X-Files" you will not enjoy "I Want to Believe". That is a simple fact. Although this film was marketed as a standalone feature requiring no prior understanding of the series, the final product is quite far removed from one of the more straightforward standalone episodes, and is actually more about characters and themes than the plot itself, which is not on its own very good.

What it comes down to in the end is whether or not I was satisfied when the credits started rolling and UNKLE's excellent version of Mark Snow's theme started playing. The answer is yes. "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is not entirely satisfying as a straightforward thriller. It is not entirely satisfying as a procedural or as a medical drama. It is, however, satisfying when the disparate elements come together to form the thematic core of Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz's solid screenplay, and although the journey to the ending is occasionally frustrating, preachy, and even downright annoying, the end result is worth it.

Nobody can rightfully accuse Carter and Spotnitz of writing a hurried screenplay. If anything, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is too preoccupied with including as much as possible on a thematic level. This film could have been a tight, thrilling 90-minute film if they had decided to go that way. What "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is, is a combination of various sorts of episodes into one feature film. If you crave a straightforward, scary thriller you will inevitably be disappointed, because that simply is not what this film is about, regardless of what Carter himself might tell you. When the film comes together as a whole at the end, the X-File (or in this case, not so much) itself couldn't possibly matter less. The title, which seems frustratingly awkward on paper, is incredibly fitting once you have actually seen the film.

"The X-Files", also known as "Fight the Future", released in 1998, was a mythology-based story with plenty of action. It was "The X-Files" in blockbuster mode. Although it satisfied many fans I found it rushed, inconsequential, and severely lacking in substance. While "I Want to Believe" may feature a main plot that often feels like a sub-plot, and one that is quite far from being the most inventive or exciting Mulder and Scully have ever dealt with, it feels like a more complete film. What is lacking in thrills, scares, and action, is made up for with outstanding character moments and an effective thematic core.

Chris Carter's feature debut as director, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" provides some solid visual moments in addition to some misguided decisions. All in all Carter keeps the film moving at the slow but involving pace of most episodes and the prelude to the film is a very well-executed scene.

The performances are uniformly outstanding except for Xzibit and Amanda Peet, who are both not given much to do. Billy Connolly's understated performance is a masterclass in acting that is quite possibly one of the best male performances of the year thus far, and Duchovny and Anderson slip back into the roles of Mulder and Scully (albeit an older, slightly different Mulder and Scully) with no problems whatsoever.

The film features several outstanding scenes, the final conversation between Mulder and Scully in the film, and Scully's late-night confrontation of Father Joe (a stunning scene, really), stand out as the finest. Carter provides the romantics much to swoon over but never allows the romantic plot to become cheesy or overpower the remainder of the film. The film is far from completely serious, as there is much humor here and a lot of treats for the fans including some very, very pleasant surprises and small references to the series (the latter taking place mostly in Mulder's office at the start of the film). Also look for a bizarre but funny gag involving J. Edgar Hoover, George W. Bush, and Mark Snow's "X-Files" theme.

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is an atmospheric thriller that while flawed and certainly not providing a definitive "X-Files" experience, is much better than 1998's "Fight the Future", and an enjoyable return for Mulder and Scully which encapsulates much of what made "The X-Files" so addictive- humor, drama, great characters, and an excellent musical score.

7.5/10