THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE (2008) – ***1/2 out of 5
Guest review by RRA
The idea of a new X-FILES adventure in 2008 was very provocative to me early on in how it could possibly deal with our national psyche in Bush America. If the television series was about the Baby Boomers’ unresolved issues over the JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc., then imagine the goldmine to work with in 9/11, Iraq, Tora Bora, Haliburton, Blackwater, the still-unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks, you name it. But in place of a topical popcorn thriller, we get something completely different, a movie that becomes less about any alluring background threat and more about asking the viewer fundamentally uneasy questions with no real answers, which neither mainstream or niche audiences wanted to see this past weekend.
So other words, instead of a CLOVERFIELD we got a summertime BAD LIEUTENANT.
Like so many X-FILES episodes, we open to a lone car driving along a highway in the dead of night, with that useless little white bureaucratical text in the corner telling us where we are, when something mysterious, something strange, and something bad happens to the driver. I was brought back to the 1990s growing up, when I would stay over at my grandmother’s house and watch THE X-FILES on Friday nights. Weekly we would have FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) tackle “x-files” involving everything from aliens to werewolves to demons, or my personal favorite, that abnormal retarded family who bred itself for centuries. Such good fun, such good gross memories.
Certainly the first half of I WANT TO BELIEVE sets itself up to go “back to basics” of the source material this side of WRATH OF KHAN. Scully and Mulder are brought back from the cold by the FBI to help solve the case of a kidnapped agent. Duchovny and Anderson are convincing here as older middle-age people burned out from fighting the system for years and years, burdened with disillusionment, and now trudging through the darkness once again. We have an engaging, if initially seeming opaque, outlandish supernatural mystery, and if part of the fun with the television series was the plotting our trepidation and excitement around exotic and taboo scenes, then the audience at my screening held their breath as the duo visited the apartment complex housing convicted sex offenders.
Yet it’s when BELIEVE gets involved with Billy Connolly, the pedophile ex-priest psychic helping the FBI, that I think this movie lost a lot of people. I’ll be honest, and I am not the only one, but if I were in the presence of such a person, someone would have to restrain me from killing him. I don’t believe such people ever change, reform, or cure, and on our worst days, we’re tempted with simply exterminating them all like cockroaches. Scully is our proxy, greatly disgusted with such a creep praying for forgiveness from God, and we’re thinking: “No asshole, you’re gonna burn in hell.“
Here though is the dilemma clutch: If his visions are legit, then why is God helping a man with bleeding tears that we see as an evil irredeemable monster? Why does God let a terminally ill child suffer while the wicked breath free in the wild? They tie into the movie’s central thematic quest, which seems jarring at first but absolutely does tie into the very heart of THE X-FILES….faith. Think about it, what is the difference between the belief in UFOs and God? Neither have scientific empirical proof yet billions of people take them for granted, some even spending their entire lives in the search for them, and why? Because we want to believe in them…but why exactly? What do we hope for ourselves from such devotion?
Thus the conflict we have here, between our faith in the extraordinary existing and our emotions about the bearer of such powers. I think the tense highlight of I WANT TO BELIEVE is when you have a stern Anderson confronting Connolly alone, trying to get him to admit that he’s a fraud or an explanation for his foresight, and gets neither. There will be no external resolution for her, and she’ll have to decide the answer for herself.
But would you like this movie? I don’t know. If what I’ve just typed doesn’t intrigue you….then I say probably not. I’ve been reading negative reviews from both on-line and print, and I’m sure most people aren’t interested in such things. People complain about how the movie is too dark, too muddled, too boring, the hospital subplot being soap opera filler fluff, of how for a X-FILES picture the revelatory punch line is rather underwhelming, and my favorite attack, that this is a film is pointless.
See, I would say that last criticism is true about the last X-FILES movie we got a decade ago in FIGHT THE FUTURE. That one had extra-terrestrials, explosions, gunfire, a giant landscape of an epic cinema scale, cavemen and even goddamn killer plague bees…and I just didn’t give a damn because underneath the fireworks, I felt that story ultimately was about nothing. At least with I WANT TO BELIEVE, it is about something.
As for what the unveiled mystery…. why not? I mean this aint THE DARK KNIGHT where it’s about two equally intelligent and psychotic Ubermensch fighting for a landscape that only one can occupy. I admit when the clues started coming together, I assumed it would be heading around something fantastical like say werewolves, as early production rumors suggested. But if anything, I admire that co-writer/director Chris Carter for the most part tried to shoot a down to Earth thriller, which we haven’t had in a good while from Hollywood, even if at its worst it’s a glorified extended episode — like FIGHT THE FUTURE, if not quite as unhealthy.
But three things in BELIEVE did incredibly bug me. One, BELIEVE suffers if simply from the fact that it concentrates greatly on the relationship between Anderson and Duchovny, neither simply friendship or dyadic, and even as a fan of X-FILES back in the day, I never really cared about it. Then again, I guess it is a nice resolution after all for the original source of nerd-penned “shipping” fiction on the Internet. Two, can the movies quit having characters learning essential vital knowledge by Googling? That cliché is beginning to annoy me, and makes a certain Doctor look idiotic and careless. Third, while I sort of dug the angle around the married villains, which unless someone cares to correct me, is unique for BELIEVE, I really wished Carter didn’t have to insist on the connection between them with the supposed prophet. If BELEIVE was shot in 1978, I guess I could glance over such stereotypical nonsense, but this is 2008, and quite frankly (Spoiler!) I’m surprised G.L.A.D. hasn’t exploded over this yet.
Speaking of which, but if you ever watch FIGHT THE FUTURE again, it has a serious scene where F.E.M.A. is revealed to be the monolithic swift efficient “shadow government” waiting to take over. After Katrina, this is a good laugh. Makes one want to believe in hope for our future after all.
14 Responses for "The X-Files: I Want To Believe"
As a non “X-phile”, I found this – as a movie – to be incredibly underwhelming. Decent acting, decent directing, it’s just “CSI” meets “Turistas” to me, which is hardly praise.
Gillian Anderson is superb in this.
The movie is mildly entertaining….it’s like a good x-files TV episode.
I think Stephanie Zacharek’s take is right ON THE MONEY.
Haven’t seen XF2 yet, so I had to read this with one eye closed in case of spoilers. Should’ve known there was no need for concern, with RRA skillfully managing to give us his impressions without reducing the movie to Cliffs Notes, like so many other critics like to do.
(Plot summaries are fine, until it becomes clear the writer thinks his/her review is the Big Event, so we can just skip the movie and get to the important thing: namely, his/her review.)
This kind of coverage is everything I want from an “alt media” review. It’s personal. It’s not cookie-cutter “journalism” format. It’s got style without letting that style take center stage. It’s not dismissive — even as it’s not overly-excited. It lets me know whether the movie is worth a ticket purchase, based on how my own taste meshes or clashes with the writer I’m getting to know.
Great job, RRA. (as was your take on The Incredible Hulk last month.)
Funny, some of the things you weren’t too wild about are the same things that make me more interested in seeing it. (The relationship between characters I like is really more important to me than whatever “case” has been concocted to bring them together again.)
And that’s another thing I like about this style of review: It’s able to raise issues and express qualms in a way that avoids harsh judgments — so instead of provoking a defensive reaction, it invites a friendly debate.
I looked at the movie in a completely different way. I think it is pointless in the context of the TV series. Why bring it back to put out a “monster of the week” episode? 1998’s movie expanded the show onto a larger scale, doing things that simply couldn’t be done on a weekly show with limited funds. I think what happened here was Carter was given a very strict budget by Fox and so he decided to just put together a 105 minute episode. (I don’t really watch the series, but I’ve seen enough to know what it’s like).
Sure, there’s a nice little undercurrent of “faith” through the film, but it all boils down to a boring mystery in the last 30 minutes that I could have seen on CBS that night for free…
This is a very good review, however, regardless of how much I disagree. Good Job.
I loved the XF movie. I want to see it again in fact. Look forward to reading your review, rra!
Thanks Ryan. You just inflated my ego into the size of Kansas now!
Chase Kahn – Well I guess that is the best compliment, to like something even if one disagrees with it. I think the same way with my criticism heroes Roger Ebert* and the Outlaw Vern.
Initially I planned to review BELIEVE because of my background and well, I had a feeling that it might be another summer winner for me. But after it got murdered at the box-office over the weekend this side of DOOMSDAY, I felt the urge to at least try to give a decent reason why people should perhaps check it out.
It’s one of those movies that when you watch it, you just know not everyone is going to like it. This review was more of a rolling of the dice than it is a recommendation, you know?
Funny enough, someone who saw it a week before me at a press screening described it as “the best cult horror movie in years”….which of course baffled me. But now, I actually understood totally what he was talking about.
Because a true cult movie is one that people either admire/love, or despise. There is no middle ground.
*=Who btw, quite liked BELIEVE himself, so it’s not just me.
Great review as usual RRA, perhaps I’ll see this after all.
can you believe…..i don’t know who RRA is….
Great review rra. I felt the same way about a lot of the meat and gristle in the movie, but I loved the “shipper” aspect, always have. I think the masses’ disappointment with I Want to Believe was that they wanted a bigger conspiracy, but this felt- just as you say – as a path to more of the kind of closure TXF needed rather than the fireworks of Fight the Future. I think it’s a great, misunderstood movie, maybe made only for the die hards than general auds, but I did love it and want to see it again. Probably my favorite movie of the year so far, if you can believe that.
I’ll just add to the praise that your review made me evoke the times of the TV series. Good times when TV made me stay stuck to the couch until the show was over.
(Btw, I always found any kind of romantic relation between Mulder and Scully was completely out of question, though I can’t tell why.)
Nice work, RRA. Shall we assume that you’ll once again be donning your Sultan mantle come February 2009?
Definitely a top-drawer essay. I have so far avoided this film, after being underwhelmed by the first film, but I did appreciate a number of the original series episodes like the horrifying HOME, with the depraved Peacock family.
RRA, kidos to you for this passionate treatment. I will have to give the film a shot.
Bebe – Thanks, but I can’t really blame people who wanted more. X-FILES is a brand-name, and expectations come along with it. With a new 007 picture, you expect babes, action, gunfire, ass-kicking, etc. With STAR TREK, you expect a pulpy sci-fi adventure. With DIE HARD you expect Bruce Willis to get the bloody shit beaten out of him as he beats the bad guys, you get my point.
Iggy – Probably because unlike every other TV show, the male/female lead in X-FILES didn’t elope by series end? More like friends, only two survivors with that much emotional baggage and history with crazy shit, and unless I’m mistaken, they didn’t become “two peas in a pod” technically until BELIEVE. It could also be the MOONLIGHTING Rule, which is that part of a show’s success is the tension between a male/female lead, and to pull the trigger on that means no more Show. Notice how even with the FUTURAMA TV movies, they’re trying their best to avoid that storytelling corner.
Pierre – Of course! Who else will nominate DOOMSDAY for Best Decapitation?
Sam J – Thanks
I can’t believe Ryan said plot summaries are just fine in reviews. Am I the only one who doesn’t want to know 3/4 of the storyline going in? Or are people not smart enough to figure out the plots without advance assistance? I generally zone out during the previews and could well wish a return to the old days when newspapers listed both showtimes and feature times. At least then I could avoid what I didn’t want to see. I am fairly certain I could review a film intelligently and thoughtfully without revealing too much.
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