The X-Files: The Movie

In going to see this movie, what exactly are you getting for $7.50 that you couldn't have possibly gotten for an hour of your time for three consecutive Sundays?

• Mulder cursing
• Some truly stunning and expensive-looking visuals
• A lot more jokes being tossed back and forth between the two principals
• Enormous, probably unncessary explosions
• More violent deaths which are partially shown on camera and which thus do not enter our consciousness only when Sculley autopsies the bodies
• A movie that was on the cover of Newsweek (wielding the word "smart" like a talisman against the rest of the movies this summer, just like with "The Truman Show"), which the TV show never was
• Those two chaste lovebirds allllllmost hook up

In other words, the X-Files has been transformed into...a summer movie. Given that I saw it in a movie theater on June 19, this was not exactly an enormous surprise to me. Is it a good summer movie? Any movie that actually delivers on all of the above would have to be, wouldn't it?

Certainly this movie is smarter than *most* summer movies, with helpful little touches like Mulder urinating on a poster of "ID4" and a complete ripoff of planes menacing James Stewart in "North by Northwest." (Where does "homage" turn into "ripoff," BTW? No one has ever made this clear to me.) I mean, it's not much of a stretch to be smarter than "Eraser" (the prototypical useless summer movie). But the series is pretty well written and well-executed, too, and so what you come away with is more like wonder at how much they're joking. I admit, much of the laughter this movie inspired may have been due to being in a poorly air-conditioned, incredibly crowded theater on opening night at midnight at AMC City Place, which sort of makes things funny that once were not. But there are a number of straight jokes here, out-and-out jokes made by the principals (well, made by Mulder), and they're pretty funny but it's sort of like Huey Newton telling a real thigh-slapper during a speech; you're laughing but wondering "why"? It distracts from the ambience that was such a draw for me when I used to watch the X-Files.

In addition, the movie adaptation of the X-Files involves a lot more scurrying around than the show did, which further distracts from said ambience (although this scurrying-around is more atmospheric than the fighting in most movies). With virtually no interviews with vaguely frightened people and creepy music in the background (the only interview, in fact, is with some kids and is handled in disappointingly standard cop-movie fashion), most plot movement here is not through knowledge gathering per se but through getting shot at while attempting to attain knowledge. The score is splendid, but does not have the intimacy that the show's does (nor should the estimable Mark Snow have tried to create it; it wouldn't have fit). It seems that in making the X-Files into a movie, we have jettisoned moody dialogue, unobtrusive scene-setting, the quieter tensions, and in general most evidences of subtlety that distinguish the show in favor of enormous explosives, big guns, massive and forbidding enemy fortresses and sexual tension heightened almost to the breaking point between two attractive co-stars.

Hey. Welcome to summer!

Believability: I personally have very little trouble believing that white men with enormous jowls are attempting to control our fates, basically because at least it's a plausible ethnic group. It's not another unreconstructed-insane-Russian-general or mad-dog-Arab-terrorist or slimy-Asian-mob movie. I'm sick of those. I'm sure we all know at least one white man with enormous jowls - in your life, in my life - who has some sort of basically undeserved control over you and people you know. Now expand it to planet form. By contrast, I don't know any Russian generals. One quick note here is that everyone seems to think aliens are like, well, "Aliens." I would like to enter into the record my objection that absolutely no one knows that any individual alien is capable of physcially kicking our soft pink (in my case) monkey-descended asses.

Tension: As I noted, somewhat (but certainly, far from totally) jettisoned in favor of

Action: where Gillian Anderson and David "Hunk of Burning Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist" Duchovny comport themselves well. Note that I didn't say anywhere in the review that the action was bad per se. I just said it was different.

Attractive Woman Count: Gillian Anderson wears a business suit better than any other screen actress I've ever seen. 1.

Attractive Man Count: An obvious 1, and the parade of men with jowls doesn't get anything here.

Overall Grade: A-. For those who love the show: Welcome to summer!

ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN IT'S OKAY TO TALK DURING THE MOVIE

At one point, Mulder and Sculley are driving from Dupont Circle to the Bethesda Naval Hospital at NIH (where I work, sort of), and they have apparently taken Connecticut Avenue north to the Beltway, because they briefly show the stretch of I-495 in between the two I-270 spurs, and do you know what the place caption says? "Montgomery County, Maryland." I started and led the clapping. We're famous! AMC City Place, represent.

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