The X-Files movie review & film summary (1998)
The story involves, of course, Mulder and Scully, who call each other “Mulder!” and “Scully!” so often they must be paid by the word. FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been investigating a cover-up of aliens among us. Yanked off their X-files and assigned to an anti-terrorism unit, they get involved in the explosion of a Dallas high-rise.
The alien conspiracy theorist Kurtzweil (Martin Landau) tells Mulder some of the bombing victims were already dead, and the blast was a plot to account for their bodies. (There is a shot of the ruined building, its front blasted away, that evokes disturbing memories of the Oklahoma City tragedy; that shot could have been removed from the film with absolutely no loss.) We already know something about the dead bodies. The film opens in “North Texas, 35,000 B.C.” (a long time before it was North Texas), with prehistoric men encountering violent, creepy, leaky beings in a cave. In “Present Day: North Texas,” a kid falls into the same cave, and slug-like beings slither into his nose and eye sockets. What are these? “The original inhabitant of this planet,” we eventually learn, and a mighty patient inhabitant, too, if it had to wait for us to evolve. The alien creatures are a “virus,” and yet they also seem to have bodily form, unless they inhabit hijacked bodies, which they can indeed do, although that begs the question of what they were to begin with, who built the large object we see in the final scenes, etc.
It's tricky work, not giving away the plot of a movie you don't understand. The story is less concerned with the aliens than with the cover-up, and there are several scenes (maybe one too many) of agents Scully and Mulder being grilled by an FBI panel about their misdeeds. I can't fault the FBI here. If I were investigating unreliable field agents and they told me they spent the weekend in Antarctica, I'd want to know what they were smoking.
Speaking of smoking, the Cigarette-Smoking Man (known on the Web as the Cancer Man) is in the movie, of course. Has there ever been a more thankless role? William B. Davis, who plays him, has to inhale, exhale, or light up every time we see him. The Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) has more to do, as does Director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), but the best supporting performance is by Landau, as a desperate man who lurks in the back booths of shady bars, passing info to the X-agents.
What does he know? What's being covered up? Why are all the powerful men having the secret meeting in London? If you watch the show you will guess it has something to do with covering up the Aliens Among Us. What are they doing here? What are their hopes and plans? There's dialogue in which we get the answers to these questions, I guess, but they didn't fit together for me. And when the large unnamed object appears at the end, I wanted to know where it came from, where it was going, what it was leaving behind, and why. I also wanted a better look at it (the special effects are too cloudy).
