| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
|
 Posted - 08/03/2008 : 19:51:45
|
The X-Files: I Want To Believe ... yep, look to the title to find out what this cinematic mess is supposed to be about. Believe. In an era of doubt and confusion meanced by the same old same old, it all comes down to matters of faith.
Do you WANT to believe this film will be good? Well, that's gonna take more faith than I've got, I'll tell ya! When my attention pounces on the fleeting glimpse of Mulder's mobile phone address book to catch the name Gillian just above Dana ... well, hurrah for trivia, but somehow I don't believe I'm caught up in the story.
Oh, yeah ... about the story. Cheese with a double side order of cheese. There were some tasty tales over the years of the series. I always preferred the sci-fi ones rather than the horror ones, but hey, that's me.
My least fav were those, you know --- well, we don't really think these are X-file kind of cases, but it was a slow week and we're running out of ideas. This script, sadly, is one of those.
Reprising their original roles [who would DARE recast], both Duchovny and Anderson are bearing up well after their strange careers with that woo-woo soundtrack. He's grubbing out an existence keeping up with the agency via news clippings, and she's a surgeon at a Catholic hospital and still wearing that cross around her neck.
They're both roped into a case of a missing agent which local defrocked priest and psychic Billy Connolly seems to be getting visions about. Father Joe was defrocked for a reason that you either know already from all the publicity, or you can probably guess, and there are chunks of this past that become relevant to the reason why the FBI agent is missing. Does he experience a crisis of faith? What do you think?
Once the reluctant Mulder and Scully agree to help, turns out they each have their own belief-related demons. And this is why the film has no chance of working - because it just has no focus, and it forgets that features have different structural demands from tv.
A series with running characters must keep each episode about the relationship of the characters, which develop slowly drip by drop by drip. Each case engages, but what keeps you tuning in are the headliners.
A feature needs to have those engaging characters, of course, but its dynamic is driven by the conviction of the story.
I just lost faith in this story almost as soon as it began.
|
|
|
MisterBadIdea 
"PLZ GET MILK, KTHXBYE"
|
Posted - 08/03/2008 : 23:26:41
|
| A true tragedy, and one of the worst movies I've seen this year. Before they hooked up (which they did long after I stopped caring about X-Files), Mulder and Scully had some of the hottest chemistry in the history of television. Hell, they were more known for that than they were for investigating monsters. To see them degenerate into this boring, sexless couple is just heartbreaking -- it's like seeing Superman in a nursing home. |
 |
|
|
Wheelz 
"FWFR%u2019ing like it%u2019s 1999"
|
Posted - 08/04/2008 : 12:25:20
|
I've never been the biggest fan of the X-files, but I was certainly aware of what a huge cultural phenomenon the show once was.
That's why I was very surprised by the utter lack of buzz surrounding this film. I didn't even know there was a new X-files movie until about a week before it opened. Nobody seemed to be anticipating this release or talking about it at all. Where did all those die-hard fans go?
I guess either nobody cares anymore, or the filmmakers knew they had a turkey on their hands and took great pains to release it as quietly as they could. I suspect both. |
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
The X-Files: I Want To Believe
