X-Files: Fight The Future
The movie! So this is what they were shooting in LA whilst also shooting S5 in Vancouver and it slots in chronologically between S5 & S6. I definitely would have gone to see it at the theater, but I also definitely don’t have any memory about it. Financially, it did pretty well, making $189m on a budget of $66m, but it didn’t transition the franchise off TV and into movies, like Chris Carter had hoped.
We start in a frozen wilderness, with a couple of cavemen. A monster from the shadows gets them, and I guess it was a prehistoric alien because uh oh the black oil! We skip ahead to present day (turns out it was North Texas, not Antarctica) with some kid falling down a hole in the same spot and also getting infected with the black oil, although before that at least he has a grand old time playing with the human skull and bones he finds. The firefighters arrive to help out but oh damn now the black oil gets them too! Finally we get some dudes in hazmat suits to clean up. Fortunately we don’t THEN get some other dudes to take out the hazmat suits guys, they seem to finally have it sorted.
Table setting done, we get to M & S up to some non XF, actual real FBI business for once. There’s a bomb threat in a federal building in Dallas. S is up on the rooftop of the opposite building where M is yapping away to her on her giant cell phone about the REAL issue and ha, he’s on the rooftop already. M is bored of this assignment (which actually seems like a pretty big deal) and gets in a fight with the coke machine, leading him to find it’s unplugged and yup the bomb is in the coke machine. John Locke from Lost is there to disarm the bomb, only nope he just sits and watches it blow up and we get a destroyed building that looks very reminiscent of OKC (which only happened 3 years earlier IRL) to which M makes a crack about how S has to get the soda next time. Funny! Too bad about all the dead people.
At the hearing when M & S are getting told off, turns out M wasn’t quite as insensitive as he appeared since they’d been told the building was totally clear. But now the lady in charge is saying nope there was a boy and a bunch of firefighters inside and AHA of course ‘they’ did some sort of false flag thing where ‘they’ dumped the alien virus bodies inside the building to cover it up, making the FBI take the blame for the whole thing. Damn this is really playing into what would these days be some pretty wacky internet people’s wet dreams here. Net result: for the 57th time the XF is getting SHUT DOWN and M & S are to be reassigned. S seems pissed about the whole thing and says if she gets shipped to Omaha or whatever, she’s fucking done.
Just when all hope is lost, here’s some lunatic doctor (Martin Landau!) to tell (a pretty drunk) M that the whole thing was a setup! M accepts this info straightaway and barges into S’s place to convince her to fly to Texas, which S seems in on, since she does an autopsy on one of the bodies and finds evidence! Already, CSM and his cronies are busy with the coverup and other assorted evil deeds, spouting off about colonization and alien invasions and life in the shadows. You know, the usual.
At the site of the whole there’s a shiny new playground and nothing to see here folks! That trickery can’t fool M though, he knows something is afoot, and follows some tanker trucks to a railroad crossing, to some weird domes, which turn out to be full of (killer?) bees! Which, of course. M &S escape the bees and black helicopters and S heads home for her performance review, which, perhaps not ideal prep. S claims to have new evidence but shockingly the panel is not super interested in this and instead is like ‘again with this Dallas shit!?’ and they’re reassign S to Salt Lake City, so now she’s going to quit.
M is super sad to hear the news and they have a touching (romantic?) moment where he pleads for her not to quit, and that he can’t do it without her, and they cry and hug and it seems like ohhh maybe they might kiss but a bee comes out from somewhere on S’s clothes somehow. She hadn’t changed since the day before? The bee stings S and she’s in bad shape because the bees carry the secret virus and the ambulance comes but that ain’t no real ambulance! The fake paramedic shoots M and the real ambulance shows up and he’s OK after being shot (in the head?) from about two feet away.
TLG are here to help, they have tracked what happened to S and Skinman is here too and they’re all going to work together as a super white guy team! But they they all go away and we never see them again. Instead, M runs into the well dressed Syndicate guy who tells him all about the pathogen which has laid dormant for millions of years which is going to be used when the aliens come back to take over the planet or whatever. Not super clear to me why the well dressed dude is betraying the Syndicate, but betray he does, giving M the vaccine and S’s location before blowing himself up. Yikes.
M follows the direction to Antarctica, driving himself in some snow machine (not clear where he rented that or if he expenses the private charter to Antarctica) and when that runs out, he climbs a mountain in just a nice jacket, no hat or anything needed for this. Over the mountain he spots some snowy domes and perhaps S and the whole bad guy gang. It almost feels like a western, how he looks through the bino’s at the bad guys. If not for you know, all the snow and lack of horses and six shooters. M walks towards the domes, just in full plain sight against the vast white tundra, and this genius plan works for about five seconds until he falls down a massive fucking hole in the ice.
Somehow this leads him directly to the underground chamber where S and a bunch of other folks are frozen in icy chambers, which looks cool and is also pretty weird. Like they’re frozen into actual giant blocks of ice, Han Solo style? And the chamber itself is beyond huge, it’s sort of like The Matrix. The idea that they (they being CSM and his Syndicate goons) made this in the ice, is bananas. This would have taken hundreds of workers, years of work and billions of dollars to construct, especially if it was a government project. Anyway, M finds S right away and un-thaws her and gets her the vaccine.
But, downside of this, the Predator looking alien hybrids now also start waking up and CSM gets the hell out of there on the fastest slow snow machine he can find. Perhaps M might have thought through his plan. Sure he wants to save S but is it worth it, if it, you know, maybe destroys life on earth?
Not too worry, as they sprint out of there, a giant ass alien spaceship busts out of the ice (cool effect with the ice collapsing as they run) and is suspended above them but alas, S is passed out and eyes closed probably doesn’t see it. But hey, M has to feel good that everything he always believed and was mocked for is in fact true. Seems like maybe S does see it, as she’s awake now with M passed out and the ship is gone but they’re together and safe. Phew!
In a twist that surprises not a soul, the committee immediately dismisses all of S’s claims, since there’s no evidence and the sworn testimony of federal agents apparently means absolutely nothing, Besides, Antarctica is really far away, bees aren’t domestic terrorists, so the whole report needs to just be deleted and let’s forget the whole thing. Sure!
M wants to quit but S has now decided not to and is like, ‘come on bud, let’s give it another go, together!’ On the plus side, guess what, the XF is reopened baby! We’re back! What a relief! Why? Unclear!
Kind of a strange idea nowadays, that you’d have to make a movie in order to tell a bigger story of a TV show, since budgets, reach and scope of shows now often surpass movies. Usually creators want the luxury of the time you get to world build across many episodes vs 120 mins of movie time. Seems like they could just have taken all the money from the movie and made the next season even better? But that wasn’t the model in the 90’s, pre-streaming, when TV was very much the minor leagues for the big league movies.
Still, it was a fun enough movie, like 6/10. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t a fan already would become one from watching it. I also didn’t really feel like the scope was bigger, since we’ve covered this very ground already in the show, colonization, hybrids, all that. There was also very little brevity, which is something that makes the pairing of M & S so great, here it was pretty much 100% earnest. So yeah, not even crucial to watch if you’re watching all of the series, more a piece purely for completionists.
