The X-Files (1998)

Revisiting the 1998 feature expansion of The X-Files, the one subtitled Fight the Future, with the cold eye of a classifier, we find a film that wants nothing more than to be a larger version of its television self. Mulder and Scully, stripped of their X-Files, chase a staged bombing in Dallas, a black oil infection, a swarm of bees, and a government syndicate negotiating with forces from elsewhere. Rob Bowman directs with efficiency. The cornfields and the Antarctic facility hold up. The film was a commercial success and later earned a sequel, which tells us the audience wanted more of the same.

Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully remains the most interesting figure on screen: an FBI agent and a medical doctor whose competence the script never questions. That is a quiet achievement of casting and writing. It is also the ceiling of the film's social ambition. The supporting cast is white throughout, and the movie never glances at that fact. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no environmental anxiety beneath the alien threat, and no revision of actual history, since the 35,000 BC prologue is invention. The conspiracy is governmental and cosmic. Wall Street goes unmentioned. Mulder's fixation functions as plot machinery, not as a portrait of a mind that works differently.

The film does lecture. It lectures about colonization, vaccination, and the reliability of institutions, which is its own genre of sermon. It never lectures about how we should live. That restraint was worth something in 1998, and it remains worth something now, even if the restraint comes less from principle than from a simple desire to frighten us in the dark.