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| Tuesday, January 6, 2009 12:35 PM |
| On the Viewer - The X-Files: I Want to Believe |
 by Fëanor |
Wow, was this disappointing. I mean, I didn't expect all that much from a long-overdue sequel to a mediocre original film, itself a follow-up to a TV series whose best days were long over by the time it finally came to its embarrassing end in one of the worst episodes of a TV show I've ever seen. Plus, the reviews had been mediocre at best. But as a long-suffering X-Files fan, I had to see it anyway. Especially since the subtitle was one of my favorite phrases from the series.
The film opens with Scully now working as a regular old medical doctor, and no longer a weird-corpse-dissecting doctor. She's approached at work by Xzibit, who oddly is not there to tell her that her ride is about to be pimped, but to ask her if she can put him in contact with Mulder, because the FBI needs his help. Turns out Xzibit (whose name in the film is the perhaps even more unlikely Mosley Drummy) and his partner, Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), are looking for a missing FBI agent and the only lead they've had so far is from a psychic named Father Joe, who's also a convicted child abuser. But the lead wasn't particularly helpful, and now they're stumped again. They're hoping that Mulder, whom they know is familiar with psychics and things of that nature, will have some kind of insight. To entice him into coming back, the FBI is willing to pardon him for past crimes.
So Scully drives out to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, which is where Mulder hangs out now, and tries to talk him into going back. He's against the idea pretty strongly - there's no love lost between him and the FBI - but Scully is pretty persuasive, and then he looks at a picture of his sister (it always comes back to his sister, doesn't it?) and finally gives in. But of course he insists that Scully come with him. They're getting the band back together!
(From this point on, spoilers abound. Beware!)
Once they get to the FBI, Dakota flirts with Mulder a bit, and Mulder is of course more than ready to believe in Father Joe's psychic powers. But Scully is sickened by Father Joe's past indulgences with choir boys and wants no part of him. Even Dakota and Drummy, who believed in Joe enough to call in a bunch of agents to follow-up on his visions, and to bring Mulder in to help further, suddenly make an about-face and decide they don't believe in him, either, apparently just to give Mulder lots of people to disagree with. It doesn't make a lot of sense, especially since Father Joe's vision is the only thing that's given them any results on the case. Plus, he wept blood! He's gotta get some points for that.
Late that night/next morning, we see Scully in bed, unable to sleep. Suddenly, Mulder's head rises up from behind her, and we realize he's in bed with her! There's even a rather risque little exchange between them that makes it clear they've been together for some time and are comfortable with each other. I wasn't sure until that moment what the exact nature of their relationship was; I had kind of assumed Mulder was living in this house by himself, but no, apparently the two of them are a real couple now.
Anyway, after this slightly disturbing sequence, Mulder and the gang discover the FBI agent wasn't the only woman abducted. Father Joe has another vision (of a woman's face behind dirty glass) that leads them out into the snow, but their search is proving fruitless. Everybody wants to give up - on the search, and on Father Joe. Except Mulder, of course! He keeps the search going, and makes the obvious assumption that the dirty glass is ice (c'mon, who didn't know he was talking about ice as soon as he mentioned dirty glass?). And in fact they soon find a bunch of body parts frozen under the ice. Scully, despite the fact that she's the one who talked Mulder into doing this in the first place, is now frustrated with him for being so passionate about finding the abducted women. Father Joe tells her, "Don't give up." It doesn't seem like a particularly unlikely or strange thing for him to say to her, given the circumstances, but this line will be treated as incredibly important and meaningful later on in the film.
Analysis of all the body parts found under the ice finally leads the gang to their first suspect: an organ transporter named Janke Dacyshyn. Thing is, the guy is married to Franz Tomczeszyn, who just happens to have been one of the altar boys Father Joe abused. The other agents take this as proof that Joe's "visions" were nothing of the kind, and that if anything he's probably involved with the abductions somehow. Mulder still believes in him, though.
The FBI raids Dacyshyn's office and Mulder and Dakota end up chasing Dacyshyn across town into a half-constructed building where Dacyshyn shoves Dakota down an elevator shaft, killing her. Then he gets away. Ouch!
Meanwhile, Scully has her own issues at work; she's obsessed with saving her young patient, despite the fact that he has a disease that most experts agree is untreatable. There is a new experimental treatment for it, but it might not work, and it's extremely painful. The hospital is a religious hospital, and the head of the hospital, a priest named Father Ybarra, wants to give up on the kid and send him to another facility where he can die in peace. The kid's name, btw, is Christian. Symbolic much?
Scully is torn as to what to do, and haunted by Father Joe's words to her, so she goes to his apartment alone to talk to him, perhaps hoping for some hint from him as to what to do. It's an unsettling scene, as he gets a bit sleazy with her (complimenting her on her appearance, and insisting she sit down in his bedroom - possibly even on his bed, I can't remember), they get into a big argument, he reveals he castrated himself years ago, quotes the Bible to her, and then falls over in a seizure. Turns out he's got lung cancer and is on his last legs.
Despite the fact that everybody else has apparently given up on the case, and despite the fact that Scully gives Mulder a tough ultimatum about it - give up on the case or I leave you, because I can't be with you if you're going to get sucked into "the darkness" again - he goes on. But he does so in his own reckless, dumbass fashion, and ends up getting himself captured by the bad guys. Dacyshyn sees Mulder following him in Scully's car and forces him off the road. Mulder is able to climb out of the wrecked car, but instead of going for help, he stumbles toward the bad guys' hideout armed only with a tire iron he found in Dacyshyn's abandoned truck. He is easily subdued and sedated, and then Dacyshyn drags him out to the woodshed to be decapitated.
Meanwhile, we've finally found out what's really been going on: Tomczeszyn is dying of lung cancer, so Dacyshyn has been searching for a body to transplant his lover's head onto. Apparently he's bi, as he's been selecting pretty much exclusively female bodies. This reminds me quite a bit of the plot of the terrible B horror movie, and MST3K victim, The Brain That Wouldn't Die. And as in that film, there's a psychic connection between the head and someone else. Although in this case the someone else is not a monster in the closet, but Father Joe. In fact, Father Joe's psychic connection with his former choir boy is so intense that they both have the same disease, and die at the same moment.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. As Mulder is getting captured, Scully is randomly stumbling upon information about the transplanting techniques the bad guys are using, and figures out what's been going on. But she's unable to contact Mulder because he lost his cell phone in the car crash. Freaking out, Scully calls Xzibit, but the X man apparently has no time to help the guy who's doing his job for him (when she calls him, he's just moving boxes around instead of out trying to find his partner's killer - pretty lame), so she has to go over his head to Skinner. (Yep, they really are getting the band back together!) Skinner and Scully find the car wreck, then go driving around trying to find some trace of Mulder. They drive past some mailboxes and Scully asks Skinner to back up. Somehow she noticed - in the dark of night as they were driving by at a not inconsiderable rate of speed - that one of the mailboxes bears the same number as the verse of the Bible that Father Joe quoted to her earlier. She opens the mailbox, flicks through the mail, and finds an envelope with the address to the bad guys' hideout on it (although sadly it is not labeled "Bad Guys' Hideout" on the envelope). They head there, and Scully is just in time to knock out Dacyshyn before he chops Mulder's head off. They've also arrived just in time to stop the doctors from chopping the kidnapped agent's head off. Tomczeszyn's head is already sitting off to the side ready to be transplanted, however, so when they disconnect it, he dies. They learn later that Father Joe died at the same moment. Mulder sees this as absolute proof of the psychic connection and wants to bring it to the FBI so he can get Father Joe exonerated (Father Joe is officially being considered an accomplice to the kidnappings and killings). Scully does the equivalent of rolling her eyes at him - and so did I. He really is so irritating when he gets all earnest and crusading like that. I mean, how is that "proof" of anything, that two guys died at the same moment? He's so delusional.
Anyway, we still need to resolve Scully's subplot with the kid. She's still feeling some doubts about the procedure, and is still haunted by Father Joe's statement to her: "Don't give up." Mulder tells her to think why he might have said that to her at that moment. (Which annoyed me because there are all kinds of perfectly normal reasons he might have said that to her. He might have just been telling her not to give up on him, not to give up on the search for the kidnapped girl, not to give up on Mulder.) Then Mulder goes on to tell her that if she has any doubts she should call off the surgery and the two of them can leave together, and run far away from "the darkness" (even if it's likely to come and find them again). But when Scully gets to the operating room and is asked if she's ready to begin, she looks around and says, "Yes." And it's clear that she has no doubts and she's sure it's going to turn out well. After the credits, there's a quick shot of Mulder and Scully in a rowboat, with Mulder rowing them out into a beautiful blue sea from a tropical coastline. Clearly he made good on his promise.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a movie subtitled "I Want to Believe," the film is mostly about belief and faith. The first half of the film I thought was disappointing and mediocre, but no worse than an average episode of the show. In the second half, however, the film took a bit of a nosedive. The dialogue, which was pretty corny, cheesy, and unrealistic throughout, just got really awful near the end, especially in the scenes between Mulder and Scully. Mulder's earnest speeches were always the worst thing about the show, and they continue to be awful here. It would be pleasantly nostalgic if it weren't so terrible.
The characters are also ridiculous and wooden. In many cases they seem to do and say things, not because it would make sense for a human being to do or say those things in the context, but simply because that's what they need to do to move the plot forward. Drummy and Dakota are particularly bad in this regard; they're not fleshed out at all, they're just puppets who exist to provide a reason for Mulder to come back, and then to act as the skeptics to his believer. And they're not even very good at the former; why would the FBI agree to pardon Mulder so he can come back to help on some random missing persons case that happens to involve a psychic? It doesn't even make sense. If the case involved a guy who was running around eating people's livers, okay, but it's just a psychic. Cops work with psychics all the time. Why is Mulder needed?
I also found myself vaguely disturbed by the storyline. Not the decapitation and so forth; I'm talking about the child abuse and the sexuality. Father Joe has a psychic link with another man apparently because he'd previously abused him; the victim of said abuse is now gay; the victim's husband wants him to have a woman's body; a big deal is made of the fact that the film's villains are men and married to each other. It all feels a little... wrong to me somehow. I don't know much about Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz's political beliefs, or their positions on homosexuality, but I get the uneasy feeling they're trying to make some subtle and rather hateful statements in this film. Maybe I'm reading too much into things and I'm way off-base, but regardless these vague feelings of unease certainly didn't make me like the film any more.
The movie has its moments. I remained interested in the story all the way to the end. It was great to see all these characters again and learn what had happened to them. It was funny and cute to see Skinner swaddling a freezing, drugged Mulder in his coat and shushing him. And although pretty much all the rest of the characters in the movie are stereotypes or puppets, Mulder and Scully do get to develop a little bit, and Scully's subplot with her child patient, while a bit clumsily handled, is still effective at times.
But overall, it's really a pretty bad movie. In its best moments, The X-Files the TV show managed to present insane, imaginative ideas in a clever, eerie, funny, and even vaguely believable fashion. Sadly, this film fails to be imaginative, clever, eerie, funny, or believable. My hope is that the franchise will either end here, or that someone other than Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz will take it over and do something more interesting with it. |
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