Follow here: the TV show ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the FBI and the aliens and perhaps also the Flukeman. The movie begins with Scully working in a hospital run by Catholics, treating a boy named Christian for an incurable disease. Mulder has been hiding out in a house in the middle of nowhere, cutting out newspaper articles which hint at the fantastical events, and pinning them on the walls, ceiling, and floor of his study. He may be investigating these mysterious events, but that's left vague. He's called back to work for the FBI by a special agent played by Amanda Peet, an actress who's been nearly famous for almost a decade now. (Her partner is played by Xzibit, who shouldn't even keep his day job.)
The reason that he's called back - the reason why the FBI is willing to pardon him for crimes which are left vague in the movie, partially so franchise newcomers won't be confused, but also because those crimes were vague to begin with - is that one of their agents has been abducted in Virginia, and a local man claims to be having visions of said woman. That's it: some guy in Virginia says he's a telepath, and the FBI has no one to turn to but Fox Mulder. Movie, Go!
I should point out that said telepath is a former Catholic priest who's also a convicted pedophile. This is potentially interesting, but the movie obscures his crime behind a PG-13 veil of moral indignation and murky plotting. Everything about the movie is vague. In the middle of the movie, Scully and Mulder are lying in bed together - are they sleeping together, or living together, or what? Their relationship used to be predicated on will-they-or-won't-they; now, it's more like are-they-or-aren't-they, which would be an interesting tone if the creators even realized it existed.
Nothing about this fucking movie makes even shitty sense. People appear randomly in countryside that might be Virginia, in a city that might be Washington DC, and in other settings which all look like Canada. I'm not downing the fact that they shot in Vancouver - in fact, everything that's memorable with the movie has to do with the exteriors, with people walking and driving through gigantic snow drifts. You begin to wonder what could be buried under the snow, and what it might dig up.
The problem is that everything ABOUT this movie is snow. After 90 minutes, I still don't really know much more than I knew from watching the trailer. There's a character who's obviously the villain, because he's played by Leoben from "Battlestar Galactica" and is the kind of guy who hangs around pools and grins at pretty girls while holding his breath under water. Because this is "The X-Files," you're waiting to find out something cool about this guy - is he a ghost? A merman? A werewolf? A Wendigo? None of the above - not even close. The reveal is so anticlimactic as to make you doubt whether this movie actually happened.
How can I put this? No one involved in this movie understands how to write a screenplay or how to film a movie - yet, even worse, no one seems to understand what made "The X-Files" such a great show. There's not one single moment in the entire movie which comes close to capturing the magic of an episode from the show's boom years. There is a strange and utterly non sequitur moment early in the film - Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI Headquarters, and while they stand in the hallway, they notice a picture of George W. Bush. The camera lingers on him, and the theme music - not even the theme music, just the little whistle - sounds on the soundtrack. The camera moves right, and lingers on another picture - that of J. Edgar Hoover.
It's a silly moment - so ambiguous that it's not really offensive to anyone - but it reminds you that the "X-Files" was, above all, a funny show, built less on the two leads' eventual romance than on their simple exasperation with each other. Neither of them were really noble - Mulder was a closet psycho more concerned with proving aliens exist than saving people from them, and Scully was officially trying to get Mulder fired and unofficially trying to talk some sense into him. The movie buys Mulder's argument hook, line, and sinker. It's right there in the title: "I Want To Believe." That's not the theme - that's the whole entire thesis.
Belief is an interesting idea, but the way that the movie plays it is farcical. Part of belief - particularly Christian belief, and particularly Catholic belief, and this movie is so Catholic you'd think the Reformation never happened - comes from faith in something that can't be proved - "Blessed are they who believe and have not seen," the Messiah told Doubting Thomas. Well, in this movie, some random guy manages to track down bodies and limbs buried in the middle of the Virginia/Vancouver Icecap using nothing but vibes; he also cries blood, and does a few other things outside the ken of reality, also. What's not to believe in? The show was mysterious; the movie is just purposefully undefined, and by the end you're demanding a huge twist just as an explanation for why nothing makes any sense.
I was thinking about this awful movie while I watched a movie from the 1960s, "The Train," a trim little actioner by John Frankenheimer which has the distinction (according to Frankenheimer, at least) of being the last action movie filmed in Black and White. (I'm not counting "Sin City," because a) it had color, and b) I remain unconvinced that it's not just a fancy star-ridden screensaver.) "The Train" is not great. It's set towards the end of World War II, and features characters who are French and German, but everyone speaks English, especially Burt Lancaster, who doesn't even bother to affect a French accent in his leading role. The film moves slowly and deliberately - it takes awhile for the central plot to kick in, and even then, you're not totally convinced that you're not watching a B-grade heist movie with a semi-serious theme (towards the middle of the movie, one character even says, "This is the last job.")
Yet "The Train" is a movie - you get absorbed by the shots even when you're watching it on a TV screen, whereas most of the shots in "The X-Files" movie are so dull and rote and chopped together as to make you stare directly the ceiling of the movie theater. There's a weird magic to the way that Frankenheimer shoots actors - it's the black and white, it's the wide angle lenses with deep focus backgrounds, but it's also how effectively he hints at the turbulent emotions going on behind their brows.
Frankenheimer had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood history, but for about two decades there, he was making eye-popping little films with bigtime stars who were neverbetter. Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," Lancaster here, Rock Hudson in "Seconds," Gene Hackman in "French Connection II" - all of these roles are, in one way or another, about men trying to figure themselves out. Sinatra is brainwashed; Rock Hudson is an old man in a young man's body; Hackman is a celebrity cop who turns into a junkie; and, most subtly yet perhaps most effectively, Lancaster in "The Train" is a man who's just trying to do his awful, awful job, and somehow that job turns him into a hero.
Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.
More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.
The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")
The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.
It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.
What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?
Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.
More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.
The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")
The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.
It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.
What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?
In "The Train," characters rarely talk about anything but how much they want to survive, and the movie somehow feels filled with ideas. In "the X-Files," characters rarely talk about anything but ideas, and the movie somehow feels emptied of everything. Why is that?
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