The $9 X-Files episode

The more you think about the new X-Files movie the more your brain begins to swell. Five minutes after it ended I’m almost positive I was suffering an intracranial hematoma, a diagnosis I made from the same place Dr. Scully gets her medical information — Google.

Her non-traditional medical research made me curious how she ever became an FBI agent in the TV series. Yahoo or Wikipedia?

Scully’s search engine of choice aside, what a curious return to the X-Files saga. This new movie doesn’t even feel like an X-File. It feels like some random thriller that floated around Hollywood until someone thought it wise to superimpose agents Mulder and Scully into it.

Maybe “superimpose” is the wrong word. “Transplant” is more appropriate, only because the film goes completely bonkers on the subject. See, if you cut a man’s head off in West Virginia you can sew it back on another body and he’ll live to tap-dance another day. He needs new arms? No problemo, we’ll just pull the old ones off and pop some new ones on. This isn’t an X-File, it’s the design schematic for a Mr. Potato Head.

Former G-Men — because the politically correct G-People sounds stupid — Dana Scully and Fox Mulder have been out of the FBI since the conclusion of the show in 2002. Scully is a doctor at a Catholic hospital, where the priests hold lab results hostage until the Vatican can verify the DEFCON level. Mulder, all beardy and itchy, is hiding out in a place so secret it has a gate and quite possibly a locked doorknob on the front door. “I think the FBI is just glad you’re out of their hair, Fox,” Scully tells her former partner as he clips randomness from newspapers to decipher for alien code.

Scully and Mulder seem to have benefited with the time lapse on their stories; they’re more mature and focused now as wrinkles show on their edges. No word, though, on where they stand romantically. Yeah, they wake up in bed together, but don’t most co-ed FBI teams in the movies?

They’re summoned by a forgiving FBI out to the shady disappearance of an agent in a blanket of fresh West Virginian snow. Actually, the Feds only want Mulder since he’s the expert on the paranormal, but they get both as a package deal — Mulder, the true believer, and Scully, the doubtful skeptic. They’re brought in to interview a convicted pedophile who is somehow psychically connected to the agent’s abduction.

The psychic is a former Catholic priest named Father Joe (Billy Connolly), who wades into a field of snow and without hesitation plucks out a pair of severed arms. Later he cries tears of blood, which would be a pretty cool parlor trick if it didn't look completely satanic. Two field agents (played by Amanda Peet and rapper Xzibit) missed the Pedophile Visions 101 part of their training, thus Mulder is called upon for his expertise, part of which involves asking obvious questions and then listening to the answers.

Mulder is played by David Duchovny, whose face seems more tired and square than his TV version. Gillian Anderson plays Scully, who delivers many wise pieces of advice, but is still unsure of where she stands with Mulder. “I can’t look into the darkness with you anymore,” she tells him as he enters a dorm of sex offenders, definitely not a place to stop and use the bathroom. Later, though, she contradicts herself: “This stubbornness is why I fell in love with you.” Where do Scully and Mulder stand exactly? Only the people who know the show’s episode titles and numbers by heart will truly understand.

Like the show, the movie frequently sides with Scully, the more interesting character if only because she is not sure what to believe in. As if to magnify that theme, she works at the Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, where she fights a long battle to save a young boy with an untreatable brain condition. The medical dilemma parallels Mulder’s wrangling with Father Joe, who can psychically lead the FBI to various arms caches — and a few head caches, too — but not any living, intact people.

Mulder uncovers a sinister group of Russians who are selling body parts on the open market, or maybe they’re just using them in bizarre Mengele-like experiments. Although the Russians have nothing to do with aliens, Mulder, the ever vigilant UFO advocate, gravitates toward the mysterious disappearance of his kid sister, a thread the show never tied up, a thread X-Files creator Chris Carter is going keep pulling until the absolute last incarnation of the series.

X-Files: I Want to Believe is a mediocre thriller — nothing great, nothing horrible, just middle-of-the-road. Those who worshiped the show will be interested, but even they will question this return after six years. The snowy landscapes are fun, but too much time is spent poking around fields and digging in the ice. And like the show, it asks too many questions that it has no intention on answering. Even the action, of which there’s little of, seems noncommittal.

Overall, it did feel like a more complete story than the first movie (X-Files: Fight the Future, 1998), but because the scope was limited so was the mystery and complexity of the X-Files mythology.

Still, though, I’m not ready to give up on Mulder and Scully, and I hope if they do another film, they actually try to expand some of the threads the series developed instead of just skating around them.

***This review originally ran in the West Valley View July 25, 2008.***