Rambunctious teens are the stars in Super 8

Popcorn has never tasted this good. Not real popcorn, mind you, but the popcorn-movie variety. The genre has been increasingly stale in recent summers. Not this time.

Super 8 is a perfect summer movie. It comes from the guy who invented the summer movie — Steven Spielberg — which means that Super 8 comes from a stately pedigree: Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. It’s a mixture of all those, and also the kid-classic The Goonies, from which Super 8 mines its spontaneous energy and wonder.

We can talk comparisons all day, but really this is a wholly original movie, a fantastically nostalgic romp with some pre-teens as they discover their own voices and the alien that terrorizes their small Ohio town. Set inside the framework of Super 8 is a movie within a movie, which is where our young stars make their entrance.

The year is 1979 and Joe (Joel Courtney) is the makeup man on an 8mm movie project called The Case, a zombie film written and directed by his best friend Charles, a lovable tyrant of a director who might be a Francis Ford Coppola facsimile. Cary, with a wild smile full of braces, is the film’s special effects wiz and pyromaniac. Martin, who throws up whenever he’s nervous, is the zombie flick’s star. The boys are in high school — based on their plucky attitudes, probably freshman.

These youngsters are authentic boys in every way: they like baseball and model kits, they ride their bikes everywhere, they bicker and argue in rowdy overlapping bursts, and they swear like little pirates. The big F word is mostly off limits; just the nickel-and-dime swears — shit, hell, damn — the ones that every kid in America knows and uses because it’s rebellious and fun. Remember when Elliott said "penis breath" in E.T.? It didn't inflict any damage on my young mind, and neither will these swear words so don't be afraid to take your children.

Swearing or not, I loved these kids. They make the movie. Each has their own quirks and interests, which gives them personality and spunk. I liked the Charles kid, who lives in one of those big houses with a gaggle of brothers and sisters who terrorize their parents at every dinner table gathering — in every shot someone is getting walloped repeatedly with a plastic bat. It reminded me of Ned Beatty’s house in 1941, the one with the kids who bounce off the walls as Beatty’s ack-ack gun is driven through the living room.

While Joe and the rest of the film crew shoot a late-night scene at a train station, they witness a horrific train crash that turns loose a captured alien, a massive beast that disappears into the brush and quietly escalates a campaign of terror on the town: Electricity flickers. The local dogs flee for neighboring communities. Engines from cars at a car dealership are stolen: “How do I explain this to my insurance company?” the lot owner screeches. Joe’s dad, the town’s ranking deputy after the sheriff turns up missing or eaten, tries to piece everything together to no avail. The deputy is played by Kyle Chandler, who was in another perfect popcorn movie about a monster and a movie within a movie — Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake.

There’s only one female character, Alice, played by Elle Fanning (Somewhere), Dakota’s little sister. She’s taller and slightly more developed than the boys because that’s the way it is; girls mature faster than boys. She has several great scenes, including one where she wows the film crew with her acting. Her careful performance provides a tender contrast to the film’s other sides: the action-heavy bombast, the witty banter with the boys, and the sci-fi thrills.

With the thrills, there are many. And they aren’t just gotcha moments, where the soundtrack volume jumps to illicit cheap shocks. Super 8 works — and works hard — for its electric jolts. I liked one scene with an electrician who hears strange noises while suspended high up above a utility truck. He goes higher and higher until the bucket he’s riding in tops out at the perfect chomping height for space aliens.

Action and thrills are prominent in Super 8, but the film never panders to the lowest common denominator. It’s fun and exciting, but also incredibly intuitive about filmgoers’ tastes. There’s a generally accepted misconception that some audiences want “mindless entertainment” — that they “don’t want to think, but just enjoy a movie.” (I get emails like this every time I pan a blockbuster movie.) This idea perpetuates movies by Michael Bay and others who feel obligated to create explosion after explosion for no other reasons than just because. Or it “looks cool.” Considering the horribleness of the last Transformers movie, this film philosophy doesn’t hold much water.

Here’s a test: go on YouTube and watch videos of building demolitions. Time yourself. If you can do this for more than two hours then you’re in a rather small minority I would not admit to in public. Most people want substance, whether they realize it or not. They want the plot, and the characters within it, to make sense. Here’s a movie that combines all the popcorny elements — gunfights, explosions, aliens, chases — into a coherent plot that will impress the hell out of you with its keen eye for detail, sharp sense of humor and its irreverent journey into the life of boys.

What begins as an adventure, quickly veers into science-fiction, mystery, action and lots of human dramas, including a half-expected romance and a painful revelation about Joe's deceased mother who may have had something to do with Alice's dad and why he's such a grump. The military also makes an appearance, as does a barking colonel who turns the Ohio town into a warzone as soldiers criss-cross the streets searching for their escaped extraterrestrial. The movie excels with each new addition to the plot. Each new layer adds to the whole, and the young actors adapt with ease. I fear that some will find the finale implausible and silly, but I saw it as a natural progression to its end. (Speaking of ends, stay for the credits to watch The Case in its entirety.)

It’s no surprise that Steven Spielberg is producing this film. He was a boy himself when he began filming his own Super 8 movies. I’ve mentioned Spielberg several times before this, but he’s not the director. J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, TV’s Alias) has that job, and he does it well. I just see more of Spielberg in this than of Abrams. Super 8 feels like a splendid mixture of E.T. and Goonies, two classic Spielberg projects that understood what it meant to be young and to seek out that one great adventure before a boy became a man, uncoiled from his imagination and entered adulthood. This is one of those rare movies that makes me want to be a kid again.

Bible 2: Denzel as Scripture

The Book of Eli is completely and utterly preposterous. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Nevermind that one of the last men on earth knows kung-fu like he’s in a John Woo movie. Nevermind that he can shoot a moving target at 100 yards with a pistol or a bow and arrow. Nevermind that the three most complex technologies still on the planet are, in this order, an iPod, the internal combustion engine and a shopping cart.

And since we’re neverminding things, just nevermind the outrageous ending that will fry your brain if you try to think about it any longer than is required — and all that’s required is about 3 minutes. More on that later.

Ignore all the outrageous stuff you’re supposed to accept as believable in The Book of Eli and it’s still an invigorating and nail-biting, if also disposable, movie, the kind that’s usually reserved for the popcorn haze of summer. But here it’s released in January, which means I can safely say it is the best film of 2010 thus far.

The film, directed by the talented Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Menace II Society) — and based, not on a book, but a screenplay by Gary Whitta — stars Denzel Washington as a lone wanderer, probably named Eli, as he walks west to the sea across a dying earth. Cities are gone, plants are grey and ashy, and human skulls are bleached white where they fell after a nuclear holocaust that killed nearly all of humanity. Those that survived the blinding light of extinction now face a harsh new reality: bandits on the roads, cannibalism, the crumbling of morality and the never-ending search for drinkable water.

On the outside, The Book of Eli — a perpendicular offshoot of last year’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Road — is a violent and reprehensible action flick, with Denzel frequently eviscerating road warrior baddies with a perforated blade in silhouette under freeway overpasses with blood spurting in inky black fountains. This happens several times, another time in a dusty cantina, where the blood’s crimson hue marks one of the only visible colors in Eli’s washed-out, oversaturated world. But on a deeper level, if only in microscopic amounts, Eli is a parable about religion. And I don’t think it intends to blaspheme when it compares itself to actual scripture.

There are many secrets that will go unspoiled here, but one secret I won’t deprive you of is the book that Eli totes around: it’s the last copy of the Bible in existence. It’s one of those old antique editions with the leather cover and the metal lock on the front. It’s also a King James Version, which means Moses actually saves his people from Egypt as opposed to sending them a Facebook event invite. By the end of the film it’s safe to assume that on the shelf next to the Bible will be a biblical sequel of sorts, the first book of which will be called the Book of Eli and it will tell this story.

Using that framework — the film as Bible allegory — it’s easier to downplay some of the preposterous events that take place in this quasi-western, especially the ending, which is ridiculous on too many levels to count. No, the ending doesn’t make any damned sense, but I loved it and all the implications it brought with it.

Do my vague recommendations of the film’s ending intrigue you? They should, which will hopefully get you in the door. You’ll go for that brain-busting secret at the finale, but you’ll end up staying for and enjoying the rest of the film for a variety of other reasons. One of them is Denzel Washington, an expert actor who plays a man who could be a biblical prophet if he weren’t so violent in his quest for the rescue of his book at the sea. Another is Gary Oldman, who plays one of those big, bad Gary Oldman villains. Here Oldman is Carnegie, a (waste)land baron who wants to use the Bible to unite his town in fear.

I must agree with Manohla Dargis, though, when it comes to the casting of actress Mila Kunis as Carnegie's bar vixen. She's far too pretty and manicured for a movie about the end of the world. As is Jennifer Beals, who plays Kunis' mother, a blind woman whose delicate smile (after receiving the last bottle of shampoo in existence) lights up an otherwise grim landscape.

Whether you’re religious or not, Christian or not, The Book of Eli teaches a valuable lesson: religious texts like the Bible are not meant to be used as weapons to slay those that oppose them. They’re books of peace and compassion. And like many parts of Bible, The Book of Eli teaches this Sunday school lesson with the occasional act of violence. The Bible had spears, nails in crosses and David’s sling, and Eli has swords, chainguns and hand grenades. But really, is there a difference?

Take my daughter, please

Taken is a how-to on knocking people out. In most circumstances it only requires the butt of a pistol; in others a stale fart will do just fine. I’m reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s entire career: he could snap necks like they were glass pretzels. As brittle as the bad guys’ spines were it’s amazing they didn’t kill themselves putting their shirts on in the morning. The baddies in Taken apparently come from the same weak-neck gene pool.



Liam Neeson, who plays Taken’s knocker-outer, has a daughter who jets off to Europe to follow U2 on tour. Three minutes in Paris and she’s kidnapped to be sold on the black market as an unspoiled American teenager — they fetch a high price apparently. During the abduction she’s able to phone daddy, an ex-CIA operative named Bryan Mills, who gets some important clues from the hectic phone call. The movie provides us the villains’ names, although I’m sure it was fudging a little because the clues weren’t that specific.



Mills feeds off the Jack Bauer/Jason Statham adrenaline rush that most action movies are plugging into these days. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. In fact, the short attention span feeds into Taken rather smoothly — it’s a movie that is best not left to dawdle. It helps that Neeson, a gifted actor, can play the maniacal father with a deep-seated rage that makes his avenging angel terrifying and also cathartic. In one sequence he massacres an entire house of teen smugglers, a scene that in another movie would have seemed cruel and vicious — in Taken it feels necessary. Mostly, though, Mills just knocks people out on his daughter’s zig-zagging trail into the underworld of human smuggling; after all, Taken’s PG-13. The same film with an R rating would be kinda interesting.



Taken, which moves fast enough to feel like a cardio routine, paints Paris worse than most movies paint Tijuana or Fallujah. Paris apparently is the scum-bag capital of the entire northern hemisphere: hunky spotters stalk the airports, dirty cops lead the police force, and coked-out prostitutes are chained to every radiator in Paris. They’re also in the break room at a 24-hour construction site, where foreigners toil through the night producing mud pits, showers of sparks and fire drums that people can warm their hands over — the perfect setting for an action scene. And these aren’t just prostitutes: they’re kidnapped tourists, often Americans like Mills’ daughter, who’s played by Maggie Grace (Lost), a 25-year-old actress who conveys a 17-year-old by running everywhere giggling and/or sobbing.



Taken is not the smartest thriller made, nor is it the most comprehensible, but it makes up for its failures with pure neck-snapping adrenaline. So much so that it should come with a chiropractor.

Red Vines have better twists

The Uninvited manipulates its audience for no reason other than because it can. It sets up one story only to swap in another later, it bludgeons the soundtrack with ominous rattling and volume spikes, it shows us dreams that are blatant lies, and then, in the throes of desperation, it cheats one ending with another. Abuse like this hasn’t been dealt to punching bags.

No wonder studios stopped screening horror movies for critics: modern horrors are visual cons intended for teens with disposable allowances, not critics who can see through the wafer-thin plot devices and petty manipulation. Strangely enough, though, The Uninvited was screened for critics, which means someone at Dreamworks didn’t get a memo or the studio actually believes in its film. Or a third choice: no one at Dreamworks even cares anymore.

The Uninvited is a remake of the Korean movie A Tale of Two Sisters. Both movies were released after The Sixth Sense, which is a critical piece of trivia you’d look up on your own after viewing Uninvited. I’ve saved you a Google search, and maybe by the end of this review, a trip to the theater.

A lot can be diagnosed about a movie by its first line. I’m reminded of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, in which Martin Sheen begins his descent into madness with this: “I’ll give you a dollar to eat that collie.” In Uninvited, two teens are making out. He sits up: “I love you … and I have a condom.” Nothing says “welcome to our movie” better than empty proclamations and safe sex.

He is random dude at party. She is Anna (Emily Browning) and she’s dreaming of the night her mother died under mysterious circumstances. She wakes in therapy, her shrink telling her, “Sometimes we survive by remembering. Sometimes by forgetting.” He doesn't know it, but he just gave away the ending of the movie. It's Anna's last day in a psych ward; the camera cleverly shows us the scars on her wrists and then the loony neighbors in robes. Daddy, an author of books better than this screenplay, takes her home to a sprawling mansion on a lake. The boathouse, where mom died, has been rebuilt and dad (David Strathairn) has a new girlfriend, a too-young-for-him babe named Rachael (Elizabeth Banks). Rachael, realizing she's in a film, commits various acts of step-momery: shadowy eavesdropping, kitchen renovation, heavy-handed requests for grocery assistance and sexy workouts in stretch pants and nipple-accenting sports bras.

Anna, modest and wholesome, cavorts around the lake with her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), whose wardrobes consist of bikinis for all occasions. Based on increasingly deranged dreams — dead bodies in plastic bags, twisted corpses with broken backs, catatonic, pale-faced children — Anna and Alex come to the conclusion that Rachael was responsible for their mother’s death. So Rachael, the bimbo, has to go.

Meanwhile, their father is oblivious, the film’s most aggravating flaw. Strathairn, who was recently Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, plays his author as a practical guy, but so clueless it’s amazing he could even conceive children, let alone raise them past their terrible twos. He never notices their cries for attention, the daggers shooting from his new girlfriend’s eyes, the manipulation of Anna’s moods by Rachael’s snotty attitude. Later, when the rules have changed and the father’s role has been reversed, his actions still seem cold and distanced. If there’s ever a sequel (The Re-Invited maybe) it should be about Anna’s legal emancipation from her dad, the heartless jerk.

Poor Anna. She’s the film’s scapegoat, and it all seems too cruel to young actress Emily Browning, the teen version of Angelina Jolie who gave an energetic performance in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Anna’s perception is shaped by her dreams, which is Uninvited’s most manipulative cheat. If dreams are absolute truths, then the movie shouldn’t be able to swap them in and out like socks. As we’re beaten over the head with these subjective plot-altering dreams, we’re distanced from the one character we’ve come to like in a film that’s not all that likeable.

Anna’s whole messy affair — none of which is very scary, I should add — ends with a twist that redefines everything that happens before it. I’m convinced these endings were designed to create repeat business for movies that most people will have regretted seeing once, nevermind twice.

Another reason not to use Windows Vista

Eagle Eye asks audiences to suspend disbelief to an unfathomable level. It might preface the request with this: “Don’t most thrillers, though?” Yes, but this one deserves some kind of special plaque, a pat on the head or maybe just a footnote in cinema history for plotting impossible developments and then asking us to believe them without chuckling.

But go ahead and chuckle, because on a deeper level Eagle Eye has to know it’s ridiculous. And if it doesn’t, then the fact that it takes itself so seriously could easily be just as funny.

The movie is one of those robots-become-aware science-fiction movies. It’s less sci-fi than say The Matrix or the Terminator movies, but it involves the same concept: a computer given artificial intelligence will start to make decisions it was never intended to make, including the elimination of the human element that created it. The genre, hardly a fresh one, was probably kick-started in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 refused to open the pod bay doors for poor Dave Bowman. Here, the computer is Eagle Eye and its purpose is to use advanced algorithms to protect the United States from terrorism. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The plot settles on Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a perpetual loser who works at a copy store in a bad part of town. One day his normally empty bank account is overloaded with funds and his usually bare apartment is overloaded with military hardware, including weapons, all of which are iron-clad proof of terrorist activity when the FBI arrives in door-smashing mode. Of course, Jerry is framed, but the hows and whys elude him until he starts getting phone calls from an icy-cold OnStar voice that tells him when to jump, duck and get on trains.

The voice — which can contact Jerry through hijacked cell phones, electronic billboards and anything slightly less illogical than biplanes writing in smoke in the sky — guides Jerry away from capture and deeper into trouble on a mission that is never clear until he arrives at the Pentagon the evening of the State of the Union. All along the route, he meets other victims of the voice who are given equally perplexing tasks that somehow fit into a larger plot that may involve explosive crystals, a trumpet and a computer named Aria. One of the victims, and Jerry’s travel companion, is Rachel (Michelle Monaghan, Made of Honor), whose son, a young and white version of Morgan Freeman, is threatened with train derailment should she not help Jerry on his thrill-a-minute quest.

Eagle Eye reminds me a great deal of North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic adventure about an innocent man who gets wrapped up in an international espionage scandal. The man (Cary Grant), some desk jockey at an ad agency, is forced to become a spy to prove he’s not a spy, which confirmed Hitchcock’s theory that regular people are far more interesting than action heroes. LaBeouf is no Cary Grant, but he plays the character with an invigorating zeal. He did an equally commendable job last summer when he played a Jimmy Stewart role in Disturbia, which was a loose copy of Hitchcock’s Rear Window — all LaBeouf’s missing now is a horror movie at a hotel (Psycho) and detective-thriller in San Francisco (Vertigo) to complete his neo-Hitchcock canon.

What a likeable guy Shia is. I’ve interviewed him twice and both times he was so wired with energy — naturally or chemically, I don’t know — it was infectious. He seems ambitious and that oozes from his roles. He sometimes seems like a punk, but he’s a punk with depth to his performances, even if they involve talking transforming robots. There’s a moment toward the end of Eagle Eye, with LaBeouf in a police officer’s uniform running around the catacombs of the Library of Congress, when I realized LaBeouf is one of the most consistently entertaining young actors working now, and this role is no exception. Although, I would have appreciated a better ending, one that didn't use the Shoulder Wound Rule.

LaBeouf’s character is chased by some other great actors, including Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator and Billy Bob Thornton as a G-man who does a Hollywood first: he has an air-to-ground battle with an unmanned Predator drone in a traffic-jammed tunnel. (On a side note, Live Free or Die Hard featured almost the same idea but spread out over three different sequences.)

In terms of plausibility, Eagle Eye starts to go haywire right at the beginning when military special forces deploy a modified paper airplane to track a terrorist. Later, when Eagle Eye goes online it seems to alter everything in the known universe to get Jerry to go where it wants. How can this be when at any given time 97 percent of the world’s computers aren’t communicating properly with the printers they’re hooked up next to? So yes, this is a very smart computer. Too smart, in fact, which is why it can control buses, traffic lights, sprinkler systems, military cargo planes, automated junkyard claws and every cell phone regardless of provider or minutes of use. In terms of functionality, it even tops the intelligent jet in Stealth, which, in an effort to learn, “downloaded the Internet … all of it.”

The actual hardware of Eagle Eye is housed 36 floors beneath the Pentagon in what looks like one of Tesla’s electric current experiments. Inexplicably, it’s stored over a lake of water, which makes me question its intelligence, but nevermind. It freely quotes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, yet somehow still justifies killing people with high-voltage lines and 18-wheelers. Once the film establishes the power and the reach of the all-knowing computer, I found myself longing for a human villain instead of this floating computer orb.

But see, therein lies the dilemma with computer villains: they are flawed, often more so, than human characters. I have one of those GPS navigation systems in my car. It’s ingenious: it can not only tell me how to get somewhere and by what route, but also the arrival time within a couple of minutes. It maps any road in the United States, even some outback goat paths, and it can talk to me in 15 different languages including Suomi, which is the official language of Finland. But as clever as it is, sometimes the damn thing tells me to drive around a city block when I’m 30 yards from my destination. Sometimes, when at red lights, it shows that I’m parked past the intersection or at the next light. No computer system will be perfect, yet Eagle Eye’s is perfection personified, a technological marvel of the ages, which is why it doesn't work — it's too unrealistic.

As dopey-smart as Eagle Eye’s villain is, though, the movie has some killer stunts, a fast-moving pace and relentless action. Some of the chase sequences feature that Bourne Ultimatum hyper-editing style that’s likely to cause a seizure; I hate that style, but I’m in the minority ever since Bourne won an editing Oscar back in March. I’ve really railed on some of the plot elements, but I had a good time and found LaBeouf’s presence amid the mayhem an enjoyable factor. Just don’t go into Eagle Eye expecting to come out any smarter.

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.***