The X Files (1998)

User Rating:

6.8/10   

Director:

Rob Bowman

Writers (WGA):

Chris Carter (story) and
Frank Spotnitz (story) ...

Release Date:

19 June 1998 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Horror | Mystery | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

Fight the Future

Plot:

Mulder and Scully must fight the government in a conspiracy and find the truth about an alien colonization of Earth.

Plot Keywords:

Agent | FBI | Texas | Bomb | Government

Awards:

3 wins & 7 nominations

Cast

David Duchovny	...	Special Agent Fox Mulder
Gillian Anderson	...	Special Agent Dana Scully
John Neville	...	The Well-Manicured Man
William B. Davis	...	Cigarette Smoking Man / CGB Spender
Martin Landau	...	Alvin Kurtzweil, MD
Mitch Pileggi	...	Assistant Director Walter Skinner
Jeffrey DeMunn	...	Ben Bronschweig, M.D. (as Jeffrey De Munn)
Blythe Danner	...	Jana Cassidy
Terry O'Quinn	...	Darius Michaud
Armin Mueller-Stahl	...	Conrad Strughold
Lucas Black	...	Stevie
Christopher Fennell	...	Boy #2 (as Chris Fennell)
Cody Newton	...	Boy #3
Blake Stokes	...	Boy #4
Dean Haglund	...	Richard 'Ringo' Langly

Also Known As:

Aux frontières du réel (Canada: French title)
Blackwood (USA) (working title)
Fight the Future (USA) (working title)
The X Files Movie (Australia)
The X Files: Fight the Future (USA) (working title)
The X-Files (USA) (closing credits title)
X-Files: Blackwood (USA) (working title)
X-Files: The Movie (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for some intense violence and gore.

Runtime:

121 min

Country:

Canada | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Iceland:12 (original rating) | Iceland:16 (video rating) | South Korea:12 | New Zealand:M | Argentina:13 | Australia:M | Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:14A (British Columbia) | Canada:14 (Nova Scotia) | Canada:AA (Ontario) | Canada:PA (Manitoba) | Canada:PG (Alberta) | Chile:14 | Finland:K-16 | France:U | Germany:12 (w) | Hong Kong:IIA | Netherlands:12 | Norway:15 | Peru:14 | Poland:15 | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:PG | Spain:T | Sweden:11 | UK:15 | USA:PG-13

Filming Locations:

Bakersfield, California, USA

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

The final scene takes place in Foum Tatouine, which is an actual place, used for filming the scenes on the planet Tatooine in Star Wars (1977) and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983).

Goofs:

Factual errors: The movie takes place in July but during the sequence in Antarctica the Sun is up (fairly high). During July, the Sun never rises in Antartica (at least not at the coordinates given by the Well Manicured Man).

Quotes:

Cigarette Smoking Man: Everybody down below. We may have a security breach. If you're not armed, arm yourselves.

Movie Connections:

References Independence Day (1996)

Soundtrack:

Invisible Sun

As good as it possibly could be

The X-Files movie really is as good a big screen adaptation as you could possibly hope for.

It helps that it's entirely controlled by the people behind the series, and that the programme had cinematic qualities in the first place. On repeat viewings, however, the story is revealed to be thin, and lacking in incident. Its need to tie into events of the series makes it not wholly satisfying as a stand-alone vehicle, though it should still be understandable to those that have never seen an episode.

David Duchovny as Mulder seems surprisingly at ease in his limited way, while Martin Landau is good as far as plot devices go. Gillian Anderson is unfortunately encouraged to overstate her lines, particularly in the beginning, while a cameo by The Lone Gunmen is perhaps the only indulgence that would be lost on non-fans.

There are inevitable concessions to the cinema format, of course. Not the touted mild use of expletives, which happened from time to time on TV anyway. But the alien presence that mutates to owe a debt to Ridley Scott's Alien, or the near-kiss between the two leads. Thankfully, the first point actually makes a logical sense and carries the story forward. The second is something that was also long overdue, and silly that it took so long. For two people who obviously feel about each other the way Mulder and Scully do, to go five years without even kissing is stretching credulity.

Ultimately, though, it lacks any clear focus for a casual film audience, and flits repetitively from action sequence to sloppy exposition and back again throughout its duration. Creator Chris Carter, like Gene Roddenberry with Star Trek before him, is not the smoothest writer of his own series, though he does adequately most of the time. Worst example is the opening Mulder/Scully scene which is laughably trite, and there are plenty more examples of Carter's trademark purple prose. Yet it does have a beginning, middle and end, and can be watched back-to-back with a TV episode with no noticeable jumps in style. In that sense, then, it is a most successful big-screen adaptation of a television series.

Hard-core X-File fans will be inclined to award an extra mark to the total, then. But for a non-committal audience, this is a "6" as they would have no idea from watching this that the frail, fag-smoking pensioner is the series' major villain.