The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)

While this movie will not please casual theater-goers looking for mindless entertainment, exploding buildings and high speed car chases, it is an excellent and long-awaited episode in the classic X-Files television series. Fans of the series will enjoy it as an extended "monster of the week" episode, but people who aren't familiar with the show can still enjoy this work on its own merits - though only if they're prepared to go a bit outside their comfort zone. There is nothing comforting or even comfortable about this movie.

In grand X-Files tradition, the movie raises as many questions as it answers, and it asks some very disturbing and thought provoking questions. Can God truly speak for good through a disgraced and defrocked priest? Does his counsel actually save a sick child, or only cause needless suffering? Is the advice meant to apply to Scully's situation at all, or Mulder's, or to both of them? As usual, the answers are left for the fans to think about. And it does make you think. That apparently isn't an easy or comfortable exercise for critics, which is unfortunate as I think many of the negative reviews have entirely missed the point.

Mulder and Scully are unrelieved grim and gloomy throughout, preoccupied with the sad and sometimes truly horrific events happening all around them. This shouldn't surprise X-Files fans any, but it was undoubtedly a factor in the critics panning the movie. As always, Mulder and Scully can still depend on each other, though the tensions between them threaten to pull them apart. I would have liked to see even a few brief moments of Scully's satisfaction at accomplishing something for good with her current situation, but even that was denied in favor of a despairing vision of the darkness surrounding them. In fairness, there is a ray of light at the end of that tunnel, though it takes quite awhile for the movie to get there.

The only really atrocious flaw I found in the movie was having a presumably highly skilled professional sit down to research a complex and advanced operation on Google the night before performing it. Granted, showing Google is big screen shorthand for "this person is doing research online", but that's definitely the wrong place to do it.

This said, the movie was greatly enjoyable. It was a thinker's movie, a cop crime drama with a gritty real-world feel that asks uncomfortable and provoking questions about the nature of God and man. It would make an excellent book with some real literary merit, which is not something that can be said about very many movies. I give it a big thumbs-up and recommend it to people who want some serious thinking with their crime drama.