The X-Files: Fight the
Future
Director: Rob Bowman. Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, William B.
Davis, John Neville, Blythe Danner, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Terry O'Quinn, Jeffrey DeMunn.
Screenplay: Chris Carter (based on a story by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz).
After Godzilla failed to breathe box-office fire, many pundits forecasted that "X" would mark the
spot for the next sure-fire summer blockbuster. Whatever its commercial success, however, there isn't
much treasure to be found in The X-Files: Fight the Future, which comes across as dull and
derivative as its television source is intelligent and innovative. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson
gamely reprise their roles as FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, but their admirably relaxed,
flexible performances are stuck in a rigid, plodding Frankenstein monster of a movie, a stiff
amalgamation of scenes from legions of other films that never satisfactorily unites into a functional new
entity.
I realize that my credibility in writing this may be wholly contingent for some readers on how familiar I
am with the premise of the show. I confess that I have only seen two episodes of Chris Carter's paean to
the paranormal, though both of the hour-long dramas were satisfyingly ghostly and unapologetically
perverse, willing to shuck the bounds of credibility and the limits of the grotesque to achieve Carter's
unique, paranoid vision. In fact, one of these episodes co-starred Peter Boyle in a viral-epidemic
storyline that was far more coherent and economical, not to mention scarier, than the one we get in
Fight the Future.
To make a long story short—though making it coherent is well beyond my capabilities—a young Texan kid
(Lucas Black, of Sling Blade) falls into a hole one day while playing with his buddies. He finds a
skull in what appears to be a hollowed-out cave or dried-up groundwater reservoir, but no sooner has he
happened upon the relic than a puddle of viscous black fluid forms underneath his feet and a brigade of
what look like sub-epidermal worms are dashing like lightning up his legs and trunk, all until an inky
blackness floods and obliterates his eyes.
That's about it for ol' Lucas, but it's just the beginning for us, drawn in as we are by a regional
investigator's phone call to an anonymous party stating that, "You know that impossible scenario we never
planned for? . . . We better start thinking of a plan." It's a hokey and agreeable little way to fire us
off into AdventureLand—why in movies do the most exacting and powerful groups never consider that their
plans might go wrong?—and for a moment it seems that The X-Files will smartly tip its hat to the
Ed Wood epics of papier-mâché that clearly inspired Carter's alienfests. The casting in a pivotal role of
Martin Landau, so freshly and powerfully known to us as Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, only
reinforces our expectation that The X-Files will lace its creditable heebie-jeebies with some
knowing winks at its own lunacy.
All too soon, however, The X-Files dons a robe of shadowy over-seriousness that starts squeezing
the fun out of the whole project. We first see Mulder and Scully, their investigations into the
paranormal having temporarily been shelved , joining other feds in checking out a bomb-threat to a
federal building in Dallas. It was during this sequence that I began my long slide into disappointment at
Carter and director Rob Bowman's shockingly low-level creativity: when Mulder finds the bomb, he also
happens upon one of the Great, Tired Movie Devices, the explosive device with the red digital
minute/second read-out. We also get the expected close-up of that counter hitting "00:02" and "00:01,"
and the inevitable dog-whistle beep when the damn thing's ready to rumble. I expected The X-Files
to breathe some new life, or at least some eerie new fog, into the summer action-movie genre . . . so
what was it doing slumming around with the most over-used device in any Simpson-Bruckheimer
trashfest?
Before the film is over, we also see a series of human incubuses straight out of the Alien series;
a subterranean creature encounter that traces exactly the Return of the Jedi Rancor Pit sequence;
the crop-duster/enemy-attack helicopter from North By Northwest; and even a reprise of the
"creatures beneath the ice!" idea from Smilla's Sense of Snow, pilfered I assume from the novel
since no one in the natural or supernatural worlds seems to have seen that film. What's with all the
hodge-podging? Given the extreme pressure on the X-Files group to deliver a hit and enable a
franchise, coupled with the need to dilute the show's insistent originality for a more mass-market
audience, perhaps it is unfair of me to rake the film so much across the coals of uninspiredness. Still,
for a show that bases itself entirely on the idea of an Unknown, the appropriation of the most-overused
warhorses of the whole action-suspense section of the local video rental is a particularly and poignantly
dispiriting spectacle.
I don't want to spend too much time on the plot of the film, but the real conflict begins once a federal
investigative board (led by the always welcome but under-used Blythe Danner) decides to pin the blame for
the Dallas building's explosion on Mulder and Scully. The reasons for this are never convincingly
articulated, nor do they seem to gel with the image Bowman gave us early on of Scully and Mulder's
participation in the bomb search. The very arbitrariness of this initial gesture, then, gives no hope
that the rest of The X-Files' plot twists will be any less random, and soon we are following
Duchovny and Anderson into cornfields, alleys, and other barely-lit locales with no real reason for why
we're going there, or even how we got there. Such carelessness to geographical detail severely hurts the
film during an escape sequence late in the picture, when we realize that the entire structure that Scully
and Mulder are trying to flee has been so poorly laid out to our eyes that we have no idea where they
are, nor of the comparative distance between them, their exit points, and the Sinister Threat that chases
them. By that point, though, the film is about as blank and flaccid as the human bodies taken by the
alien invaders as incubators for their young.
It's not pretty, particularly because The X-Files: Fight the Future, even with that dopey
subtitle, could have amounted to a great deal more, at the very least a reasonably entertaining ride.
Much in the film is done well, such as the perpetual nerviness fostered by Bowman's decision to have
every character running as much as possible—I don't just mean during major action sequences, I mean that
every FBI Agent or lab researcher or bomb technician seems more inclined to run even the smallest
distance of a few feet than they are to walk or, God forbid, to stand still. The overall effect of all
this rushing about is a sustained air of agitation, as if the entire world were united in a mission to
beat some invisible clock, or escape some common predator.
I also found interesting the fact that Carter never stages any direct contact between his protagonists
and his strongest embodiments of evil (one of whom is played by Shine's
tyrannical papa, Armin Mueller Stahl). Most thrillers build to a climax where the hero takes on Evil
face-to-face; the fact that such a moment never occurs here suggests that the evil against which Mulder
and Scully are combatting is either a) so pervasive or totalized that it's impossible to isolate, or b)
chimerical and imagined, and our heroes are two cuckoos. Either possibility is fascinating. Bowman would
have done well to unpack that mystery further rather than throw in gratuitous sequences like a four-door
car's midnight pursuit of a speeding train carrying...well, I'm not sure what.
Whatever the ancestors of its specific scenes, the film that The X-Files ultimately recalled the
most for me was last year's The Fifth Element. That film, for all its sloppiness and nonsense,
remained adequate entertainment on the sole basis of its energy and verve, its delirious compendium of
insensible ingredients like a blue tentacled opera singer, an outfit made of band-aids, and a spaceship
shaped like a seahorse. By contrast, and unfavorably so, The X-Files also goes for mood more than
content, but the result is more solemn and self-important than sensational, and it doesn't even provide many
memorable set-pieces to extract from the unquestionably ill-conceived plot. Who would have thought that The
X-Files wouldn't be any more fun than
Duchovny's twitty dramatic outings like 1991's The Rapture?
The whole concept of "fighting the future" will make a lot more sense once Carter and Co. commit
themselves to staging original, well-connected, and forward-moving scenes. For now, the film should be
called The X-Files: Plundering the Past. Grade: C–