It took six years from the end of the TV series and ten years from the first motion picture – far longer than anyone expected, due to legal hassles between Fox and series creator Chris Carter – for a second X-Files movie to be made, and unfortunately it was buried by its movie studio, which debuted it only one week after The Dark Knight opened to be one of the strongest movies since the release of The Titanic. Yet with its release on DVD and Blu-Ray, X-Files: I Want to Believe is finally available to long-suffering fans of the sci-fi hit, and beats most lame sports gifts you might name.
As promised, X-Files: I Want to Believe is not connected to the show’s traditional “alien mythology,” but offers up a chilling scenario with supernatural overtones that allows for thrills, suspense, and plenty of character development. The movie acknowledges that time has passed and our primary characters have moved in with their lives. Scully is now an accomplished surgeon, while Mulder’s a bit of a shut-in and neither of them have worked for the FBI’s X-Files division in years.
That changes when a new agent, played ably by Amanda Peet, calls both Mulder and Scully back into service to help out with a missing persons case that includes an abducted FBI agent. Currently relying on a supposedly-psychic pedophile priest (did we hit enough politically correct notes with that piece of villainy?) to lead them to clues, the actual need for Mulder and Scully’s expertise in the peculiar is never one hundred percent clear, but the resulting case does reignite the smoldering ember of chemistry between Mulder and Scully.
Long-time series fans will be disappointed to hear that the Lone Gunman and the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) are notably absent, although a cameo from Mitch Pileggi as Walter Skinner is welcome recompense. Yet the lack of fan-service cameos serves the movie itself quite well, leaving it room enough to focus on the essentials: a creepy main plot, and real movement in the long-stagnant relationship between Mulder and Scully.
As odd as it may sound, both X-Files movies were, at their core, a classic romance between Mulder and Scully, and what is admirable about the job done by Carter and company here is that even though the character’s relationship does move forward significantly in this movie, they both retain their core beliefs and principles – the differences of which has always sparked the chemistry between them.
Released on DVD in a special two-disc set, there are loads of extra features that ought to be enough to satisfy even the most demanding of special-feature freaks. And I count myself among that number. Although its poor box office performance may have killed any chances for a third movie down the road, at least X-Files: I Want to Believe provides an emotionally resonating and satisfying wrap on science fiction’s longest-running dynamic duo since Batman and Robin.
