Critique positive 3.5/5 d' IGN Australia, July 23rd/2008
[spoiler]**Come for the weird; stay for the characters**
- The Hollywood machine does not know how to let sleeping dogs lie. We see it all the time, to varying degrees of success – 'The Dukes of Hazzard' at one end and something like 'Serenity' at the other – though, the value of remakes and adaptations is really up to the viewer.
Then there's a dark horse like Chris Carter's 'The X-Files'; a series fondly remembered by many viewers for resetting the TV horror genre and breathing some innovation into the formula. However, after nine seasons, a film spinoff and the almost-total departure of lead actor David Duchovny, the final bell tolled and The X-Files casebook was closed, filed and fondly recalled.
Rumours of another film resurfaced shortly thereafter and the project simmered in the background, on and off, for six years. And here we are – one more instalment, one more investigation – and a tale aimed squarely at fans.
The one thing that The X-Files: I Want to Believe has going for it, more than anything else, is the romanticism generated by being a treasured fan-favourite. It joins the ranks of shows like Firefly and Futurama in its ability to generate passionate discourse and support for 'more of the same please' – and it seems that production companies are increasingly receptive to this viewer demand.
To that end, The X-Files: I Want to Believe delivers completely. It is unapologetically X-Files-esque in flavour and direction, and it rarely breaks into 'summer blockbuster' mode. It's a surprisingly intimate story that places equal emphasis on character development, punctuated by murky, often disturbing, horror thrills.
It's the television show with increased scope, but never to the degree of The X-Files: Fight the Future – and frankly, that's the right move.
I Want to Believe does indeed hinge on a supernatural angle, taking place in snowy, isolated hills of West Virginia that conjure memories of John Carpenter's seminal Antarctic horror movie, 'The Thing'. The hook centres around religion versus science – and the ongoing believer/sceptic and 'lovers or friends?' relationship between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
If it sounds like this review is dancing around the raw details of I Want to Believe, you'd be spot-on. This is because the story is very easily broken by editorial missteps; plus, context is absolutely critical to why this film succeeds, and we think it's important that you have the background.
Soft-spoken Duchovny's return to the role of 'believer' Mulder is as smooth and believable a transition as you could hope for; six years of absence is mostly explained away with some vaguely pubic-like facial hair and a lot of pencils tossed into the plasterboard ceiling above his desk. Gillian Anderson, however, is actually afforded proper back-story treatment. In a lot of ways, I Want to Believe is Scully's story, as you'll realise by the end credits. Her character has moved in a different career direction in the six years post-series, and her separate plot thread actually ends up taking precedence during the closing of the film.
Billy Connolly joins the cast as a shut-in priest with some serious skeletons in his closet. Connolly was an interesting choice on the part of Carter and co-producer Frank Spotnitz; the role does indeed suit the typically bombastic comedian's knack for the occasional low-key dramatic role. He certainly has screen presence – though, a mad scientist's head of hair and tremendous accent no doubt helps. His character provides a great ethical and moral hinge for Scully's routine doubting and, as fans will remember, a timely reminder of Scully's dissolving faith in religion.
Peet, Duchovny and Xzibit looking at something we don't want to spoil for you.
More importantly though, the trailers might have led you to believe that the script was lacking ("It's here! It's here! It's here. ...It's here!"); a heartbreaking conclusion to draw for a series that generally sat on the better end of scriptwriting. Fears can be abated, thankfully. The trailers really only outline the first 15 minutes or so of the film – and again, context and surrounding dialogue contribute so much to these scenes. Connolly actually steals a few of his scenes with understated but charismatic and impassioned delivery.
This flawed character delivers a solid portion of authenticity to the film; the other slice is surely reserved for the horrors at play under the ice and in darkened corners of the rural setting. While Dana Scully and Fox Mulder do round out the character-driven portion of I Want to Believe with their romantic subplot and some nudge-nudge, wink-wink references, the film is nearly trademark-Carter in how it handles the supernatural elements of the story.
There are victims, claustrophobic extreme close-ups, angry dogs and things that lurk in shadows. Snowfields, street chases, tussling cars and conspiracies of a timely and original nature all lend themselves to setting up an interesting investigation with twists you'd be hard-pressed to guess. It's all handled with Chris Carter's knack for making the mundane parts of life into horror story playfields.
His flair extends to the black humour and sly nods to camera about George W. Bush and J. Edgar Hoover portraits in the FBI hallway, capped by the iconic X-Files chime. There are knowing looks, moments of exchanged silence between our greying heroes and most scenes of this nature are handled deftly – even if it lacks subtlety at times. No complaints could be heard from fans that I Want to Believe doesn't segue with the feel of the series.
There are some notable issues that pull the production down, however. Clearly, the smaller production scale wasn't purely a voluntary move. While snowfields, grim lighting and prosthetics carry the cold, bleak atmosphere along, there are a handful of roughshod effects moments that stick out badly.
Opposites attract.
Support characters ASAC Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and Agent Mosley Drummy (Alvin 'Xzibit' Joiner) are predictably undefined and mostly token. Peet spends most of her time in monotone recitation mode, trying her best to play 'hardened' when, at best, she comes across as 'Law and Order side character'. Xzibit just comes across as inexplicably angry and sour – though, this is a script issue. He's not fleshed out in any meaningful way; just another burly fellow who ticks the anti-Mulder box for no particular reason.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the production is how Carter and company handle the ending. There's a throwaway cameo, some silly and unlikely coincidences and, sadly, a pace to the edit that completely strips away the tension that steadily builds and – in one shocking cut – completely glosses over the resolution of the crime at hand. You'll see.
The jump in end sequence is a baffling move for a film that gets most of it so right. We're hurried along with a quick 'alright, nothing to see here' from director to audience. Suddenly we're tossed back into an epilogue – strictly Scully's subplot – and that's that. The X-Files: I Want to Believe is over. There's just not enough closure.
But again, for fans of the series, that's almost an X-Files series trademark in itself.
Being potentially the last time that Chris Carter and his X-Files ensemble are cast to celluloid, he goes for broke during the credits sequence and provides the happy-fan-ending that'll make you cringe, but that we all secretly wanted to see. It's a movie for the die-hards, in the end – though, to Carter and Spotnitz's credit, you can drag non-fans along and they will draw just enough from the surface coat of thriller-horror to justify the ticket price.
Is it still niche? Still a tiny bit cornball? Yeah - but so was most of the original series. The difference is, as always, the Duchovny/Anderson cocktail, which hits all the right notes. Come for the weird; stay for the characters. It's a formula that carried the series through six of its nine seasons and a six-year absence, and it's this bond that ultimately redeems the film, too.[/spoiler]
http://movies.ign.com/articles/893/893269p1.html
Positive de Fort Worth Business Press
[spoiler]**New ‘X-Files’ ranks among year’s better films**
“Our job, as actors specializing in bizarre fantasy, is to take the unbelievable — and make it seem believable,” as Vincent Price often said. “This, as opposed to the purported realists and the method-actor types, who often take the believable and make it unbelievable.
“This is why I tend to believe that fantasy is, perhaps secretly, the truer realism,” Price added. “If we do our job correctly, we leave the viewer with a desire to believe in our stories.”
Seldom has the role of the fabulist, the generously extravagant storyteller, been so succinctly described. And had he lived into the decade of Chris Carter’s television series The X-Files — Price died shortly after the program’s launch in 1993 — I imagine that the long-running program would have registered as well with Vincent Price as it did with a mass audience. The willingness to make the unbelievable seem plausible is a factor, here.
The X-Files helped to define its times, after all, addressing but never exploiting or abusing a popular distrust of Big Government and a generally perceived connection between spiritual concerns and the secrets and revelations of Big Science. “I Want To Believe,” reads a poster adorning the office of Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny). And maverick investigator Mulder’s willingness to believe in otherwordly phenomena helped to keep the teleseries perking along into the new century, with a big-screen movie spinoff in 1998.
Six years after The X-Files lapsed from view, droll believer Mulder and open-minded skeptic Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) make a welcome return in The X-Files: I Want To Believe. The new film has a built-in audience, of course — and how better to explain all those X-Files fan-sites that persist on the Internet? — but it succeeds on a larger scale in its appealing accessibility to a broader audience unaccustomed to the original series.
The long-delayed film, first plotted in the immediate wake of the Fox Network series and originally intended for completion in 2005, is not only an improvement upon the 1998 X-Files movie, which played out in its day as something of an afterthought to the small-screen serial.
No, Chris Carter’s The X-Files: I Want To Believe is as ambitious and formidable an allegorical epic of science-fantasy as Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) — with the bonus of reuniting the enthusiasts with some fondly remembered characters. The new film requires no prefabricated familiarity, however. It may prove most inviting to those customers who wouldn’t know X-Files from Ex-Lax.
Nor does director Carter’s collaborative screenplay delve into the complicated mythology of the series itself. Apart from its general storyline, the teleseries occasionally would offer a stand-alone episode — a “monster of the week” yarn, to use Carter’s terminology — and that is essentially what the new film delivers. The story hinges largely upon professional and romantic tensions between Mulder and Scully, complicated by the presence of a fallen priest, the Rev. Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly), and a sequence of kidnappings — abductions might be a better term, here — that suggest a larger central menace. The sense of lurking peril plays out with a greater intimacy than the overriding conspiracy angle of 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, and the conflicts derive more from character-driven momentum.
Scots-born Billy Connolly plays Father Crissman with a smart combination of rancor and earnestly soulful appeal, presenting an easy-to-dislike character of nonetheless sympathetic conflict. Connolly’s edgy exchanges with Duchovny are as unnerving as many of the film’s more overt moments of unease and terror.
Gillian Anderson’s Agent Scully remains a figure of mixed reluctance and determination — as heroically appealing as when last seen on television but with a more assertive manner and, at length, the dominant presence in the relationship with Mulder. Duchovny’s Mulder remains an endearing outsider, as determined as ever to find a factual basis for his more outlandish beliefs. Backup agents are ably well portrayed by Amanda Peet and Alvin Joiner, billed here under his nom-de-rap, Xzibit.
Yes, and the fans will enjoy the film’s array of inside-jokes and self-references, which never encumber the larger story. The richness of characterization, a compelling situation torn between impossibility and plausibility, and an unpredictable chain of thought-provoking thrills — all combine to make this new X-Files excursion one of the year’s more rewarding movies. Believe it.[/spoiler]
http://www.fwbusinesspress.com/display.php?id=8042
Positive de " The Courier Mail Australia"
[spoiler]**Yes, it's been worth the wait**
--The X-Files: I Want To Believe
*** 1/2
THE hush-hush production of the new X-Files reunion, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back as the (now former) FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, has meant the new film's storyline has been kept under wraps.
To preserve the movie's twists, there won't be detailed revelations about the plot here.
But the ploy of top-level secrecy (even restricting copies of the script to only a few members of the cast), did not make it any easier to disguise the disappointment left by the original 1998 film based on the series.
So has the 10-year gap between the original X-Files film and this new instalment been long enough for fans to forgive the series creators, Chris Carter and Frank Spotniz, for the routine movie they offered in 1998?
The answer should be yes. While the new film The X-Files: I Want To Believe (directed by Carter) does not involve Mulder and Scully chasing extra terrestrials, which might disappoint X-Files purists, they are engaged in a chilling investigation closer in style to a Dr Frankenstein mystery or as stomach-churning as The Silence of the Lambs.
It's something quite different from a standard hour of the TV series which ended its long run in 2002.
Older and perhaps wiser, Duchovny and Anderson impress with the sincerity they bring to their roles, and their relationship still provides opportunities for intensely personal exchanges (with Scully, beautifully acted by Anderson, to the fore).
The retired Mulder and Dr Scully are drawn into an FBI missing persons investigation, headed by Whitney (Amanda Peet) and Drummy (an impressive debut from rapper Alvin ``Xzibit'' Joiner).
A disgraced Catholic priest, Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly, in a straight role free of intentional laughs) who has been convicted of abusing 37 altar boys, claims to have psychic powers that can lead the investigators to a woman believed to have been abducted.
(Hint for the Queensland authorities pondering where to house pedophiles. Father Crissman lives in a dormitory built exclusively for such offenders who monitor each other's behaviour).
Being an expert in phenomena, Mulder is called back to duty to test the priest's psychic abilities, viewed cynically by the God-fearing Scully.
Things turn nasty when severed human limbs are found buried in the snow, and the reason for the abductions -- involving human body organs -- is revealed.
It's all very dark, although Carter does pause for a joke or two (one at the expense of the incumbent US President).
Cinematographer Bill Roe (who filmed many episodes of the series) uses dark interiors, fierce canines, and wintry landscapes to effect in this intriguing addition to The X-Files lore. (104 min)[/spoiler]
Positive du "From The Daily Telegraph Australia"
[spoiler]**THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE**
Scully and Mulder's new, stand-alone X-Files movie surprisingly arrives with such little fanfare, it's almost tempting to think in terms of paranoid conspiracy theories.
Either the extraordinary lengths creator Chris Carter went to in keeping the project under wraps succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Or nobody, including the film's distributor - 20th Century Fox-- is particularly interested in what has happened to the two FBI agents in the six years since the series finale.
Whatever the actual cause, the lack of pre-publicity might well have done the film a favour - ensuring it was neither sunk by the weight of advance expectations or knobbled by nostalgia.
Aiding and abetting the process is the extended gap between screen outings - only the most avid of fans will still be able to recall the intricacies of Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder's (David Duchovny) relationship - with each other and the world at large.
In contrast to the first X-Files film, released in 1998, audiences don't need to be familiar with the complex mythology of the TV series to follow what's going on here.
There are no alien invasions in I Want To Believe.
Even the supernatural elements are surprisingly underplayed - and at times perhaps underexplored.
But there are still plenty of existential conundrums to explore - not the least of which being the question:
What is Mulder doing in bed with Scully?
With its severed body parts, tough female FBI agents, and icy, white-outed backdrop, the film is at times almost reminiscent of a Patricia Cornwell novel.
Amanda Peet is well cast as Dakota Whitney, the agent in charge of the investigation who goes out on a limb to bring Mulder back from a long stint in the wilderness.
And Billy Connolly is convincingly creepy as Father Joe, the paedophile priest who starts having visions about the kidnapped victims.
But the relationship between Scully and Mulder is at the heart of The X-Files.
And it has lost none of its spark in the intervening years.
Anderson effortlessly steals the screen as the cool-as-a-cucumber physician, who has now left the FBI and is working at a Catholic hospital.
Duchovny's older and slightly more mellow Mulder hasn't been hurt at all by the association with his recent success, Californication.
I Want To Believe holds up well as a workman-like thriller that continues the series' ongoing faith versus science debate.
It's a debate mirrored in the subplot that focuses on Scully's terminally ill patient and the difficult decision about whether the young boy's fate should now be left in God's hands - or whether a gamble should be taken at the riskier, extreme fringe of medicine.
This subplot links nicely back to the main forensic narrative involving ethics and stem cell research.
A solid genre piece with two charismatic, tried-and tested leads.[/spoiler]
