Director: Rob Bowman
Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, Blythe Danner
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I think we’d struggle to find a movie in the summer of ‘98 that I didn’t see. The movie also coincided with the briefest of moments where I was super into the TV show while it was still airing.
Did I Like It: And my memory was that being completely immersed in the (ultimately filled with dead ends) mythology of the show was about the only way that this film would make any degree of sense. But after watching it again after all of these years, I’m struck by just how much the film does work on its own merits. Maybe I’m even more steeped in the lore of the show during this viewing, and all the little nods connect more than they did in the past. Perhaps this is a byproduct of living in an era where the predominant cinematic genre is the Marvel movie and their imitators.
I think its more likely that at its core, the film strives to be like Three Days of the Condor (1975) or The Parallax View (1974). The same might be said (and in fact, has probably been said with an almost nauseating frequency) about Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)>, but here the need to pay off the churning miasma of mythology is largely thrown away in favor of the chase.
Now, the more, I think about it, the reality is that since Chris Carter had no real sense with where he was going with his larger story, this is free to be a medium-impact late-90s thriller, which is precisely what the film needed to be. The Truth (or, at least, the full truth) was never out there, as it turned out, but the more self-contained an X-File is, the more enjoyable it is, and this film contains itself largely despite what one might expect.
Both of my seemingly conflicting thoughts are somehow true. See? Now I’m all turned around. Thanks, Chris Carter.