I thought I Want to Believe was one of the best thrillers I've seen in a long, long time. I've got a review around here somewhere, let me see if I can dig it up.
Here it is:
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
(d. Chris Carter; scr. Frank Spotnitx, Chris Carter; ph. Bill Roe)
Admission -- I own seven season sets of the X-Files, and I'm talking the old, expensive sets, not the slimmed down budget releases. The seasons I own are the first seven -- I don't own seasons eight and nine because, well, to put it charitably, the show went to hell in a handbasket. I think the last complete episode of the X-Files I ever watched was an episode where supernatural-doubter Robert Patrick died from a gunshot wound...then a Native American shaman resurrected Robert Patrick by vomiting gallons of white goo into a pit. The vomit resolved itself into a new Robert Patrick, and this new body double then opened its eyes and amazingly had all the memory and age wrinkles of the original character. Including his disbelief in the supernatural.
That's some vomit.
But even more amazing was the conceit of the show returning to stasis after this incredible event. The man has just been resurrected thanks to mystical vomit, and he still doubts extreme possibilities because he has to, otherwise his new wisdom would conflict with next week's episode.
Well, I stopped watching the show. It had collapsed under the weight of its own mythology and convolutions.
In other words -- I don't like "The X-Files". I liked "The X-Files" when it was good.
So you may be surprised when I say that I thought the new X-Files movie I Want To Believe was fantastic. It's good X-Files. In tone and in maturity, it is the polar opposite of today's modern torture-porn horror films and modern thrillers, and therein lies the film's strength and weakness. If you appreciate quiet, intimate, measured and controlled thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter (both big influences on this film as they were the original series), then you're likely to appreciate I Want to Believe. If you don't like movies that are as interested in their character as they are in someone or something cutting up women and leaving body parts strewn about the frozen countryside...if you don't like movies that are quiet and measured in their pacing, if you don't like movies in which rapid-fire film edits and bombastic sound are absent...then you're not going to like The X-Files: I Want to Believe. This is an adult thriller about adults made by adults for other adults. And that probably explains the tepid box office.
For the first big-screen entry in the X-Files franchise (the disappointing Fight the Future), Chris Carter and company seem to have mistakenly believed they needed to crank up the violence and visuals and noise and spectacle to match other 90's films like Twister and Independence Day (interesting that the film shows Mulder urinating on a poster of ID4, yet the film in some ways is just as pandering and cynical). All the pointless chase sequences and explosions are gone this time out. Here, the filmmakers seem relaxed and freed from the concerns of trying to make a film that aped modern blockbuster spectaculars. I Want to Believe isn't a blockbuster, its a real, flesh and blood movie, and the best thing to come out of the X-Files franchise in nearly a decade.
There is one extra element to the movie that is terciary to all this in that it finally gives closure to the series. Without saying too much, the series ended with Mulder unjustly convicted of murder by a military Tribunal. He escaped and became a fugitive (I only saw the last hour of the series ending episode...but that was the gist of it). The film catches up with Mulder and Scully in the years since, and it isn't a pretty picture. They're fracturing. The events of this film give closure to their relationship and in a way, closure to the entire X-Files series. Sit through the closing credits for a surprising glimpse of a character (or characters, won't give it a way) at peace, and even breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge it to the audience.
So, if you're like me, and you like your thrillers more in the vein of Silence of the Lambs and Copycat than the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Saw films -- if you didn't like the X-Files in its last two seasons -- if you appreciate character-driven, intimate, quiet thrillers with an evil worthy of the struggles of the good...then you may fnd much in I Want to Believe worthy of your time.
Last edited by Ernest Rister; 10-14-2008 at 01:07 AM.
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