Nelson Galaxy

********** SPOILER ALERT / SPOILER ALERT / SPOILER ALERT **********

Everything was in place; an eager fan base who have been waiting for six years, returning characters who really wanted to reprise their roles, a director/writer who knew what he was doing because he created the characters and a proper film budget. So why does The X-Files: I Want to Believe fail so badly?

Women are being abducted in the hills of Virginia and the only clues to their disappearances are human remains that are turning up by the side of the highway. The FBI are at a loss and call in a priest who claims to be psychic but is also a convicted paedophile. Former X-Files investigators Dr. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are bought on board to help find the answers. They are unwilling to visit their dark past but Mulder’s persistence uncovers a bizarre secret medical experiment.

Does this plot sounds like an exciting cinematic adventure in the alien conspiracy world of the X-Files, or does it sound like an average television episode? The first movie was brilliant, with aliens, cavemen, conspiracy, spaceships, bombs, shootings and Martin Landau – it was big and bold and exciting. Not this new outing – it is average, spectacularly so.

Both the central characters have changed radically and the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ aspect has been removed. It feels as if the emotional heart of the X-Files has been cut out in an illegal transplant theft. Scully’s sweet-sickly patient is just embarrassing. The whole thing just feels like it has missed its chance by not coming back sooner and by being such a low key affair.

That is not to say it is a bad film, it works as a good police/serial killer drama. The chilly, snowbound setting is ideal, even if it is obviously Canada. The film has some great moments; Mulder’s humour, the chase on the construction site, Skinner, Scully’s reaction to a known paedophile and Mulder’s beard (what is it with Duchovny’s face? He looks like he’s wearing a Mulder mask – really odd).

There is plenty in there for proper X-o-philes; the reuse of local Canadian actors that had appeared in the television series, the Nutter feed store, Mulder’s mobile phone address book and his wall of cuttings and Chris Carter’s cameo. When Mulder and Scully enter FBI Headquarters, they stop in front of a picture of President Bush, as they look at it the X-Files theme plays - spooky.

This film tanked in the US and there were only three other people in the cinema with me so this pretty much means the end of Mulder and Scully. Maybe they should investigate how they go killed by something so mundane.

“Don’t give up.”