I wanted to believe this movie would be good, despite what my friends were telling me. I tried really hard, but feel pretty let down. This is nowhere near a worthy sequel to the over-the-top kitchen-sink goodness of Fight the Future; it’s more a middle-of-the-road episode of the TV show, i.e. if the show had been allowed to plod on for three or four more years, slowly diminishing, its late episodes would have very strongly resembled this film.

That said, there was some good stuff. The whole film is set in West Virginia in deep winter, so there’s lots of great moonlit snow cinematography. There’s a pretty sickening premise they run with. And the supporting cast is pretty amazing, especially Billy Connolly as the psychic priest and the always-fantastic Callum Keith Rennie (one of my favorite character actors, though just once I’d like to see him as a good guy) as one of the abductors (not an alien, though, just a Russian).

As for the lead cast… their hearts didn’t seem to be in it at all. Gillian Anderson is always pretty understated but here she just seems as sick of her role as her character is of the X-Files. Duchovny is still Duchovny, quirky as ever and looking strangely right with a scraggly hermit-beard. Puzzlingly, actually kind of annoyingly, Mitch Pileggi is withheld until the film is almost over, almost as if the filmmakers knew they were kind of flailing and needed to shoot something in quick to save the project.

So, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t walk out of there raving about it either.

Sigh. I did so want to believe…