I think I would have enjoyed this had it been an extended episode, but it definitely didn’t work as a film. Also, Mulder and Scully seem to have lost any chemistry they once had.

As a die hard X-Phile I HAD to see the movie no matter how bad it was, that’s what I told everyone, and I reasoned that no matter how terrible, at least I’d see Mulder and Scully again, that had to be worth a few points, right? So I showed up at my local theater for the very first showing on the very first day… and left in a sulky rage. It was like a very long boring episode that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to on tv (okay, can we all admit that there have been some REALLY boring episodes of our favorite show? This would have been the single worst episode and it was extra long). There were few redeeming qualities to the movie, all of which were too short, too little, and for most of them, far too late in the movie. I’ve actually recommended everyone wait til the DVD to come out — even to my crazy X-Phile friends who were of the same mindset I was, the “I HAVE to see it in the theater, I just HAVE to… it’s THE X-FILES, I HAVE TO!” mindset. To them I said, “Wait for the DVD… and even then maybe don’t even bother.”

I WANTED to like this movie. I wanted it to be great, and my expectations weren’t even very high to start with. But it was lazily written with none of the scariness, none of the wit, none of the dark mood, none of the unexpected and weird the X-Files used to pony up. I wish they hadn’t made this movie at all, it’s like a belated, undeserved black mark on the record of one of the greatest tv shows of all time.

I was this close to marking this as ‘not worth consuming’ – it’s… not good. The only thing pulling that mark up to wishy-washy was the fuzzy-jumper familiarity of seeing Mulder and Scully, and the sort of tying up of some loose ends in their relationship, which was kind of nice after years of torment.

However, the rest of the movie was a bit painful. I’d read that it was like a long episode – cool, that can work. Only, while this might have worked as a tv episode (they could probably have squidged it into the hour, too), it would have been one of the weird, off-the-wall, not very memorable ones. As a movie, though – argh! Billy Connolly was a strange choice of cast, the two leads look markedly older (actually, that’s fine. Mulder’s sill hot with his shirt off, if you ignore the facial hair), but most of all the whole plot was just daft daft daft.

As I said, you might have shrugged it off as a tv episode, but I couldn’t forgive the denouement as something to have hung a whole movie on.

Sob.

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…