The X-Files: I Want To Believe

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 clich√© 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.