*Note: this is a massive spoiler for the movie so if you hate this sort of thing than you shouldn't be here. Go back.* 

The X-files: the Movie

Well, I've seen the movie, and now I can say that I'm glad I'm not the only one who has read those old sci-fi stories by C. L. Moore involving aliens who turn into oozing black oil when holes are poked in them. Chris Carter is about my age, so it's no surprise that he and I have obviously read the same sci-fi books and seen the same sci-fi movies. It was fun listing the literary and filmic works Mr. Carter plundered, or in some cases just seemed to have channeled straight into his word-processor: the incubating aliens out of Aliens; the box Scully get popped into and frozen after being infected with the alien virus was (I and my companions swore) the same box George Lucas used to stick a frozen Han Solo in in the Empire Strikes Back (and there was even a blatant Star Wars homage in the last scene in the Tunisian desert); the plot element of the aliens-as-original-inhabitants-of-earth-coming-back-after-millions-of-years is straight out of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos; the Cigarette- Smoking Man is beginning to remind me of a villain from Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series -- the Old Man Without a Name ("there was always some kind of mist or smoke wherever he was"); and the cabal of Evil White Men, many with German surnames, was straight out of many an Evil-Nazi-Conspiracy movie and novel. The beginning scene might have been lopped out of Quest For Fire. The scene inside the giant buried spaceship (Stephen King's Tommyknockers) was very much like the scenes of the inside of the ancient, comet-following spaceship in Lifeforce. 

This was basically an X-Files episode transferred to the big screen. We hardly got to see the indoor sets in much more detail than we do on TV (there was maybe a clearer view of Mulder's tacky rug in his apartment), and most of the outdoor scenes just looked like bigger, more elaborate TV-episode sets. There was a driving scene that was only missing Jonathan Pryce's voice to be an Infinity commercial. All this was not necessarily a bad thing. Many of the scenes were filmed in murk or near-total darkness, which was an even better thing, since the alien monsters were obviously men in rubber suits. Half-seen scary things are much scarier than full-on, filmed in gory technicolor scary things. (Especially when they might actually provoke as much laughter as shrieks.) 

The characters all seemed to tranfer from TV to film without noticeable trouble. Mulder was still ironic and obsessed, the Lone Gunmen were their usual wacky selves (their scene was way too brief -- more Lone Gunmen!), Scully was still scientific and obsessed, the Cigarette- Smoking Man was still evil and obsessed, and so on. The peripheral characters were not given much to do besides die. Mr. Carter still needs to go to Plot Detail class: several scenes are left hanging, and any number of thrilling escape-from-tight-spot scenes were left out. I didn't mind so much that Scully got out of the lab in which she had to hide without any but the most cursory explanation, but I was more than troubled that no one bothered to explain how the pair got off of the middle of Antarctica and back to Washington when the previous scenes had established that a) Mulder's snow-going truck had run out of gas just outside the secret alien establishment, b) the secret alien establishment had been abandoned by the humans guarding it and had been destroyed by the taking off of the alien spaceship (a scene resembling the final scenes of the Rocky Horror Picture Show), and c) Mulder and Scully were both quite inadequately clothed for the Antarctic climate. Scully, in fact, was both stark naked and dripping wet (don't get excited people; we only see her shoulders). It would not have made the movie too much longer for Mulder to at least say, "Well, I had fortunately brought an extra snow-suit and a spare tank of gas." 

By A. Harris 

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