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Okay, so Greg and I just got back from I Want to Believe, and I there’s already a lot of hating going on about the movie. So I thought I’d be a voice of reason among the kerfuffle. I’m not claiming to be objective by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I can write a minimally biased review. Maybe.

The Good

• Um, it’s an X-FILES MOVIE. Need I say more? I’ve been waiting a damn decade for another movie, so I was just glad that it finally existed.
• There was a hilarious Dubya reference.
• Xzibit? Really a pretty good actor.
• Mulder and Scully were in bed together! And they kissed! And they had this cute lovey relationship! I’m sorry for getting all shippery and fangirl, but I missed the Mulder-Scully chemistry. The reason the show didn’t work after Duchovny left (well… kinda left) is that Mulder and Scully ARE the X-Files. Doggett and Reyes never could have carried the show. I love them as characters, and they served their purpose in the plot, but… no. They are not Mulder and Scully.
• Awesome references to the show: sunflower seeds, pencils in the ceiling, The Poster, mentioning William, having Skinner make an appearance. Very cool.
• The overall theme of the story, about passions for people and passions for work and how they can conflict and interact and compliment one another, was great.

However, the movie was not without its share of problems.

The Bad

• I like Scully better with shorter hair. Not that I don’t still think Gillian is absolutely gorgey, because I do, but Scully needs the bob. And not that craptastic big-bangs thing she had going on in season one. We (the collective fandom) pretend that didn’t happen.
• As my good pal SoldOutActivist also mentioned, Cancer Boy could have been left out of the story, and it really wouldn’t have hurt the plot any. That whole substory was kinda sentimental and cheeseball, if you ask me, and it felt like it had been added in just to reference and address the William issue.
• Nobody brought up the fact that we’re supposed to be taken over by the aliens in four years. I know this wasn’t a mytharc story, but… helloooo? Impending colonization? Enslavement of the human race? Not even a mention.
• I thought that the creepy head-transplant scenes could have been… well, creepier. I would have liked to have seen more of the laboratory, and more scenes demonstrating the surgical process. And more of the blinking, disembodied head. (Maybe in a pan of neck juice, to pay homage to The Brain/Head that Wouldn’t Die.)
• The score was… off. Mark Snow did the score, but it just didn’t feel very… X-Files-y. I dunno. If I hadn’t known it was Snow conducting, I certainly couldn’t have said, “Oh, this is Mark Snow’s music.” It wasn’t his signature X-Files style, and it kinda threw me off.
• I liked Billy Connolly’s character a lot, but I was kinda surprised about the whole Father Badtouch angle. It just seemed kinda… played out. He could have been tied to the case in any number of ways, but they picked that one? Meh.
• It didn’t really feel like a MOTW episode, which was what they were supposedly going for. When I think of a MOTW episode, I think of the creatures– Flukeman and Jersey Devil and the creepy invisible forest people in Detour– or of particularly scary humans, like Robert Patrick Modell in Pusher. So I guess I was expecting something more… paranormal. What we got is a priest claiming to be psychic (which I suppose was likely, but for all we know, he really could have been helping the killers) and some crazy-ass Russian Dr. Frankenstein. And really… maybe I’m desensitized, but even that whole thing wasn’t really scary. Kinda gross and twisted, but, like I said earlier, not creepy enough.
• Chris Carter is a great director and a freaking genius for coming up with the stories he has, but… not the greatest writer. Some of the dialogue, and some of the plot here… well, it just could have been better. Spotnitz should have done the writing, Carter should have done the directing.

The Other Stuff

• If Agent Whitney had gotten any more flirty with Mulder, I was gonna jump through the screen and push her down an elevator shaft myself. Seriously. I celebrated her death. Ask Greg.
• I really think the fans would have been happier with a story that was made just for us. Yes, they had to make money; I understand that it’s a business, but I think that by trying to produce a movie that would satisfy both the fans and the non-fans, they ended up with a movie that disappointed us all a little.
• If I see one more person complaining about the lack of shippery scenes in this movie, I am going to punch them. THERE WAS MORE IN THIS MOVIE THAN IN ANY EPISODE WE HAD IN THE 9 SEASONS THE SHOW WAS ON! They were in bed together. They kissed. A couple of times. They lived together, for Christ’s sake. Short of seeing them have hot, sweaty sex, we saw it all. And if THAT is what you people were hoping for… y’all need to get a life.
• When you get down to it, it’s not about the case, or the plot. It’s about Mulder and Scully. We know that they are still together, that they’re still in love, and that they are in it for the long haul. They told us in the interviews that it wasn’t some big blockbuster movie. It’s a reunion. We’re trying to force it to be something it’s not, and that’s not fair to all the people who worked so hard to bring us this film. It was what we wanted, and it was what we were promised. So quit bitching.

Overall, I loved the movie, despite its flaws. Because, like I said, X-FILES MOVIE.

Thumbs up, four stars.

Gillian thirst satiated.

Now all we need is our third movie, with all the X-Files-y goodness. We need mytharc, we need aliens, we need more Skinner, we need to see what happened to John and Monica, we need CGB Spender to pop in for a visit (nobody’s ever really dead on this show, you know that, right?), we need Scully’s eyebrow, and we need to hear them yell:

“Mulderrrrrrrrr!”

“Scullaaaaay!”