Designed to fit between the end of one television series and the start of the
next; the film is not as bad as some of the worse episodes, but, on the other
hand, it is nowhere near as good as the best ones.
The preceding series have taken us through Mulder's crusade to find the truth
about Little Green Men, into Global Conspiracy territory and
finally combined the two. Those X-Files fans expecting this film to tie things
together in a coherent conclusion will be sorely disappointed and those who
haven't kept up with the recent plot will probably be bored stupid.
The film finally drives home the fact that there is a conspiracy and, yes,
there are some aliens.
We've been here before with the aliens, perhaps not quite so clearly, and
the conspiracy has long been suspected. The problem with the film is that
the conspiracy, superficially, no longer seems to be the same conspiracy that
has been played out in previous series. The aliens no longer seem to be the
aliens of the past.
The film is incredibly difficult to describe; firstly because of its change
in direction from previous X-Files and, secondly, because it doesn't really
have a very strong plot line.
Basically; some alien virus arrived on Earth a few tens of thousands of
years ago ( the Black Oil of pre-film episodes ), planted by some
alien race, and is planning to take over the world by mutating within
human hosts.
Our band of conspirators are happily going along with this scheme but are
trying to develop a vaccine to eventually crush the alien take-over [ we
presume ]. The inference here being that abductions have been carried out, by
governments, to help develop the vaccine, and the whole UFO myth
was created to cover up these, totally, earth-bound abductions - although
this is never really made clear as to whether or not this is the truth.
Mulder and Scully get caught up in the events. Scully is taken away. Mulder
discovers some more of the truth, saves Scully, and that's it.
As an X-Files episode; it was passable but a little long. As a feature film
it was particularly uninspiring. One of its biggest failures was the total
concentration on the role of Mulder and Scully to the near exclusion of all
the other familiar characters who were granted little but cameo roles.
The collapsing ice-pack near the end was an excellent piece of special
effects. That's the best that can be said.
The truth is out there. It hasn't arrived on the silver screen yet.
