I couldn't help myself; the biggest treat I could think of after finishing the final for my Intro to Physiological Psychology was to see where Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz had taken the story of Mulder and Scully. Nathan wanted to join me, so we saw the flick at a Sunday matinée (first time I've seen a show on opening weekend since, well, probably since we all went out to see Harry Potter together back in college!).
An early review from "Cinematical".
Perhaps because I was a fan who let the series go when Duchovny did, basically only tuning in again for the season & series finales after he left as a regular, I really enjoyed watching the leads negotiate the character-driven impediments to a romance that had only ever been implied between them before this film.
I hate to give away too much, but, as I had imagined before sitting down in the cinema, the story is set in modern day. It is six years since the series finale that saw the two agents leaving the FBI for good. They have resumed their lives very much in keeping with their personalities; Scully attempting to give something back to an imperfect society and the powerless & impotent Mulder retreating into a hermit-like existence, his room papered with news clippings that seem to tell him "the truth" he looks for. Much of the plot is engineered to subvert these opening portraits of the characters, to confuse who is doing what "right," a device that has always served the series well.
I was a perfectionistic high-school student with a 4.0 gpa when I became captivated by the relationship between these two fictional American workaholics, both named after baseball announcers. Here was the intelligent & judgmental Dana Scully, trying to do "the right thing" yet also struggling with an uncertain faith in Catholicism. And some-times beside her, the older and even-less stable personality of Fox Mulder, undeniably attractive in his burning curiosity about the heart of the mystery. In reflection, I suppose I saw two routes for my intelligence (as I was so often informed that I had intelligence back then) to take, two kinds of people that I could become. I think I took the show as a way to learn what behaviors were and were not socially acceptable, and for a socially inept teenager it wasn't that bad a guide! Though cynical & often frustrated with the dead-ends it entails, I've remained largely a Mulderist to this day.
As much as I enjoyed seeing the continuing evolution of the Mulder-Scully relationship, as well as the odes to various episodes that gave me wide grins as I recognized them, I have serious bones to pick with the writers about the film's demonization of gays and Russians. While having a sex-offending ex-priest psychic was good for a few jokes upon introduction of the character, it made for a bleak connection to the perpetrators as the plot unrolled. The stem-cell issue was a timely one to include, but it turned this film into a weird-science episode when it seems many (including Nathan and myself) would have preferred a story with fewer bodily fluids.
Still, I did leave the cinema quite pleased to have seen it; it felt almost like checking-in with an old friend you didn't mean to have neglected for such a long time. What I have always enjoyed about the X-Files is the attempt that the writers almost always make to help the viewer find meaning in the events that occur. This story certainly delivered on that, attempting to show how so many of the things that happen around and within humanity are ambiguous stimuli, ink-blots on the tapestry of our lives. Powerfully, we get to choose what "it" means and how we reach to "it."
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