X-Files: Fighting the past, present and future

Sestra Amateur: 

In 1998, X-Philes only had to wait one month for answers since this movie was released on June 21. You lucky readers only had to wait one week. Of course, the answers have nothing to do with the Season 5 finale, as Sestra Pro pointed out last time. But the storyline does relate to the ongoing mythology, so expect an abundance of sinister old men and black oil. But you’re also going to see just how lucky Sculder can be. Get comfortable folks, because this two-hour long movie is almost the equivalent of three episodes, and we’ve all seen how long-winded I can get. 

In North Texas (which, no surprise, looks like Vancouver in winter), two men run through the snow and go cave exploring. They find a couple of frozen buddies, then get attacked by an unknown creature. One of the men soldiers onward and stabs the creature which bleeds black ooze. Unfortunately, the ooze seems intelligent and envelops the man. Did I fail to mention the year is 35,000 B.C.? Maybe this is a prequel.

In the present, a boy falls through a hole into a cave … the cave. He finds a skull, and some bones … and the black oil, which enters his body under the skin like little CGI leeches. His friends go for help and the fire department comes to the rescue. An added bonus to the larger budget of a movie release -- interesting casting options. Two firemen don’t return, but shadowy government agents like Bronschweig – played by character actor Jeffrey DeMunn -- show up in a helicopter. They remove the boy and quarantine him because of the black eyes. Bronschweig calls to warn … someone. Considering the tanker trucks on scene, it seems like they did have some type of scenario planned.

One week later, FBI Special Agent in Charge Michaud – a cameo appearance by The Stepfather himself Terry O’Quinn (“Wait a minute, who am I here?”) -- is hanging out on Dallas rooftops with other feds looking for bombs. Sculder are in another building in the vicinity acting like normal FBI agents when Mulder accidentally (or on a hunch, you decide) finds the bomb inside a soda machine. Our dynamic duo evacuates the building and luckily (yep, the string of good luck begins here) they barely make it before the bomb goes off. Michaud chooses to go down with the ship – I mean building. Why would he just sit there and wait to die instead of trying to disarm the bomb? Back in D.C., Assistant Director Skinner and Cassidy, played by Blythe Danner, are looking to blame someone for the deaths, which included Michaud, the firemen and the boy. I guess Bronschweig’s peeps came up with a workable scenario. 

Sculder try to protect each other, but they are the scapegoats du jour. Scully chooses quitting over reassignment to Omaha. (To paraphrase Metatron in Dogma, is Nebraska really that bad?) Luckily, she has that medical career to fall back on. Drunk Mulder spills his paranoid (and probably accurate) guts to a bartender played by Glenne Headly (Dick Tracy’s Tess Trueheart), who promptly cuts him off. Fox goes outside to pee in the alley and gets approached by a strange old man who talks about Mulder’s wiener. No, it’s not a pickup line, just Martin Landau -- so iconic it’s too hard to narrow him down to one character -- having fun as Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil. He claims to have worked with Bill Mulder and gives up information pretty freely. He knew Michaud did not try to disarm the bomb, that the FEMA medical quarantine office was there (the one housing the pit peeps) and that the pit peeps were already dead. Mulder ain’t buying it and, thanks to the PG-13 rating, he gets to curse about it.

Fox goes to Dana's apartment, not for a booty call, but because he’s caught his second wind, X-Files style. Back in North Texas, Cancer Man arrives at the black ooze site to get updates from Bronschweig. They suit up and check a quarantined patient who has something gestating in his body. Mulder talks his way into a military morgue to look at the body of one of the bombing victims. The autopsy report nowhere near matches the condition of the body. Scully is intrigued, especially since there was clearly no autopsy performed. 

Then Fox moves on to Kurtzweil’s apartment, which is an active crime scene for local cyber police. Apparently the good doctor has been falsely accused in the past for kiddie porn and sexually assaulting patients. You know, instead of falsifying charges, police could have just followed him to the bar and arrested him for indecent exposure and public urination with his new friend, Mulder. Kurtzweil tells Fox about the plague to end all plagues and how FEMA is the true government agency to fear. (I’m not seeing a lot of blue tarps in your D.C. neighborhood, Kurtzy.) Mulder calls a spooked Scully, who says the body shows signs of an unknown infection. She hears a noise, hangs up on her partner and hides. Luckily, she doesn’t get caught.

Fox returns back to Dallas to obtain some evidence, any evidence. He learns about recovered fossils, and after being pleasantly surprised to see Dana also made the trek, arranges for her to analyze them. Scully spends a whole four seconds looking through the microscope (yes, I counted) and looks stunned. Maybe “I am an alien bone” was tattooed on it or something. (OK, she later claims it is evidence of the same virus she saw on the infected body autopsied in the military morgue.) 

Back at the original site, Bronschweig was keeping a tight rein on his guinea pig humans, but one gets away. Instead of escaping the cave, he tries to drug it. Gotta give him points for not bailing when he had the chance, but the alien creature with the Freddy Krueger retractable nails attacks him. Schweigy actually manages to inject it, but the wise cowards above him lock him in with the creature, essentially burying Bronschweig alive. Don’t worry, he won’t smother or starve to death; the creature kills him first.

Looks like things are brighter on the other side of the pond where the Well-Manicured Man is having a relaxing cup of tea and spending quality time with his family. Of course, The Syndicate (and Cigarette Smoking Man) ruin his peaceful moment and schedule a meeting. Because of the increased budget, the group now includes Armin Mueller-Stahl as a German member named Strughold. Cancer Man reveals Kurtzweil is likely Mulder’s contact so they discuss how to handle Mulder. Strughold’s suggestion? Take away what Fox cannot live without. (Air? Food? Water? Nah, the scene cuts to Scully, of course.) 

Sculder end up at the Texas dig site, or what used to be the dig site. It’s now a neighborhood park with cheap sod. Remember the boys from the beginning of the movie? The ones who called for help when their friend fell into the hole? Well, they approach the agents on their shiny new bicycles and point our intrepid heroes in the direction of the tanker trucks to get some answers. Sculder continue until they reach a literal crossroads. He wants left, she wants right, so they go straight for hours until they reach a dead end. Dana’s about to lose it because she is supposed to be facing the FBI firing squad in D.C. the next morning. Luckily (see what I mean?), a train rolls by at that exact moment carrying the very same tankers. They follow the train to a set of giant illuminated boobs in a cornfield. (Yeah, I know, that’s so weird ... a cornfield?) 

Sculder enter the sterilized facility and get attacked by a swarm of bees. Luckily (it's definitely a theme here), they make it outside without getting stung. Then they get chased by a swarm of helicopters. Just kidding, it was only two. They managed to get away from the copters and make it back to their car. And somehow, luckily (yep, again ... and we’re only halfway through the movie), Scully makes it to her hearing in D.C. with the bone fragment evidence and concerns of SAC Michaud’s possible involvement. At the same time, Mulder meets with Kurtzweil and describes what happened. He believes the bees are being genetically altered to carry viruses. That doesn’t bode well for Dana, who unknowingly (unluckily?) has a bee hiding in her suit. Guess she should have changed clothes before the hearing. Fox doubts Kurtzweil’s history with his father, but later finds a picture of Kurtzweil in the Mulder family photo album. 

Scully arrives with more bad news. She’s been transferred to Salt Lake City, so she's choosing resignation over relocation. Fox won’t accept it and puts himself out there to the point at which Dana starts to cry. They lean in for a kiss. (Hey, remember that Africanized honeybee that hitched a ride to D.C. under Dana’s collar? Well, clearly it is not a shipper and I’ll bet after Apis Interruptus, the shippers killed every bee they came across for years afterward.) Scully gets stung and has an immediate reaction. Fox calls 911, paramedics arrive, load Dana into the ambulance … and shoot Mulder in the head. Wow, the things people will do to avoid Salt Lake City. CSM watches as Popsicle Scully is loaded onto a cargo plane. And knowing what we now know about Cancer Man’s intentions toward Dana, who knows what he might have done to her while she was alone, unconscious and vulnerable. But that’s a story for a future blog.

The Lone Gunmen visit Mulder in the hospital. Luckily -- man, this is starting to get too far-fetched even for The X-Files -- it’s just a flesh wound and Fox runs off to save Scully. The Syndicate captures Dr. Kurtzweil. Mulder arrives a moment too late, but finds WMM instead. Fox makes a deal with the devil and goes along for the ride. WMM gives Mulder the vaccine and tries to explain how the alien virus arrived on Earth before the dinosaurs. He kills his driver, implies Kurtzy is also dead, then releases Mulder before blowing up his car. I doubt he’s still well-manicured after that.

Two days later, Fox is trucking through Antarctica using WMM’s coordinates. He finds another sterilized government facility and digs his way in through the snow. Mulder finds alien-looking creatures in pods similar to the one keeping Scully on ice … then he finds thousands more. Luckily (OK, I’m officially going on record about how annoyed I am about all the luck that’s been needed to move the story forward), he finds the pod that held Dana. How do we know? It’s got her gold cross in it. He finds her new pod, one in which she looks like Luke Skywalker in the Bacta tank after he was rescued after nearly freezing to death on Hoth. Mulder breaks into the pod and gives her WMM’s injection. It wakes her up but unfortunately (luckily? I can’t tell anymore) it sets off a chain reaction to the other pods. 

Fox heroically carries Scully upwards to safety while CSM and his lackeys make a break for it. The original alien creatures are attacking Mulder while he’s trying to revive Scully, who stopped breathing. (No, shippers, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation does not count as a kiss!) Sculder make it out of the facility alive, but the ice breaks beneath them. We can’t blame this one on global warming; it’s the government’s fault. Actually, it’s a UFO that catches our heroes as they fall and deposits them cleanly on the ice. Too bad Scully is too out of it to also witness the UFO. I’ll bet Mulder puts in for overtime and expenses for this one. He’s so exhausted, Dana just cradles him.

Back in D.C., Scully is again called back before the committee. On the record, Cassidy doubts everything that happened while we see scenes of the government cleaning up its mess. Or does she? Maybe it’s just her role to play. Luckily (yep, it applies to Scully too), Dana has the Africanized honeybee with her to be analyzed. Assistant Director Skinner, who had way too little to do in this movie, looks smug and stalwart at the same time. I wonder whether he takes credit for Agent Scully’s evolution over the years. Afterward, Mulder tries to put Dana’s career and life first, but she won’t bail on him. And in a cornfield in Tunisia – this series is big on extremes – CSM meets with Strughold, who points out, “One man alone cannot fight the future.” And the X-files have been reopened, luckily…

Sestra Pro, promise me we’re not doing a review of the corresponding video game?! I’m ready for Season Six!

Sestra Professional:

Fight the Future was such an event for me. I prepared for its 1998 summer release by going to the X-Files Expo and rewatching episodes over and over on VHS. (Back then, they didn't give us a whole season, just a couple of the better offerings on VHS at a time.) The Friday it opened, my X-Philes friends and I drove to a neighboring town to see it. We hung on every word, every image and then mulled them over immediately afterward over pizza. The hallway scene was the biggest point of discussion. In the ensuing weeks, we went to see it a couple more times while it was still in theaters.

And we did all that despite the fact it was a little disappointing to us. We were promised big revelations and/or resolutions. We didn't get too much of that. Most of what we did see was a retread of the plotlines we had become familiar with, just with bigger action sequences and movie stars. But as fans, that was enough for us to like it too. What it didn't give us in the way of answers, it made up for with vigor. I remember interviews with executive producer Chris Carter in which he said he didn't want only to appeal to the X-Philes, but to bring in new fans. It seemed a little preposterous at the time -- why would people who wouldn't watch the show for free on TV drag themselves into a movie theater to become familiar with it? But in the ensuing years, as message boards and daily email digests became Facebook pages and podcasts, I've learned that many people's first taste of The X-Files indeed was Fight the Future. Maybe not in June 1998, but eventually they saw it the way the show's creator envisioned it.

Fight the Future really wasn't called Fight the Future upon its release. It was merely named The X-Files, and the tagline on the posters read "Fight the Future." But everyone started calling it that and that's why it's more commonly known by that label. X-Philes can't go around calling The X-Files movie The X-Files, right? I suppose "the first feature film" would be OK, but that's a little dry. Fight the Future is a perfect moniker.

So we were promised some history on the aliens after references to that fact in the earlier seasons. The movie starts by rolling all the way back to 35,000 B.C., when some caveman were more ill-prepared to deal with aliens on the planet than Mulder and Scully were in the 1990s. Yeah, "fire good" and all, but not really the proper weapon against a screeching monster and old black oil. OK, we get it, the aliens were on the planet since long before Cigarette Smoking Man was a young non-smoker. I remember the intro felt kinda dopey in 1998, and it feels even lamer now. 

If Mulder and Scully had been on top of the building in Dallas for two hours quipping and riffing, it would have been more interesting than the Captain Caveman opening that segues into a stereotypical Texas kid falling into the hole and finding remains from almost 37K years prior. During the ensuing rescue operation, we still don't recognize anyone from our favorite serial. Unless the fire chief (Gary Grubbs, who was the sheriff in Season 2 Episode 24's "Our Town") or Special Agent in Charge Michaud (Terry O'Quinn, already starring in sister show Millennium) can be counted. 

Boom!: But finally, 12 minutes into the movie -- we first view our flame-haired heroine. It's music to our ears when the first words we hear from Dana are the immortal "Mulder, it's me." That's something that the first-timers wouldn't get the way X-Files faithful in the theater did. But I didn't find Fox sneaking up behind her as scary as she apparently did, and Scully wasn't a known practical joker. The fact that she spouts the stiff line, "I had you big time," after the locked-door trick seems to be evidence of that.

And to pick up on Sestra Am's "lucky" thread, I get that Mulder is an unconventional thinker, playing a hunch so that the good guys aren't at the mercy of anyone "who can't be programmed, categorized or easily referenced." Point taken. But still, why did he choose that particular building? He didn't know about FEMA's office until Kurtzweil told him later on. But what's really unthinkable is considering what would have went down had he not had that ridiculous hunch. Everyone in that building would have died, including the children's tour group the agents bump into while continuing to banter about Fox's panic face -- now that particular line and look are gold. Maybe Mulder has a better grasp on the supernatural than we give him credit for. 

Don't think, just pick up that phone and make it happen: We get a nice look at take-charge Scully as she gets the building evacuated in 10 minutes. The entire segment is an excellent set piece and the forte of the show's then-prolific adventure director, Rob Bowman, who got the nod to helm Fight the Future. Obviously, he couldn't have done something of that magnitude in the course of a regular episode. 

Some of the guest roles feel a bit stilted, but Blythe Danner fits right in. Not sure why Sculder take the fall. They saved all those lives. They just can't win, maybe they're not lucky after all. Perhaps it's an aftereffect of our jumping-off point, the fact that the X-files had been closed. Now the government wants to separate one of its most consistent teams, that could just be The Syndicate making use of what's put right into its collective lap.

I would say that about does it, Spooky: Glenne Headley breathes some life into her thankless cameo as the barkeep. Basically, she gets to hear Mulder's woe-is-me recap for all the new fans joining our show already in progress. Martin Landau fares much, much better. His character is a true mystery. Kurtzweil has got a lot of good information -- he always reminded me of Donald Sutherland laying out the facts for Kevin Costner in JFK -- but the good doctor seems to be rather seamy. I'm not so sure the kiddie porn charges were trumped up. But there's some intriguing information imparted there. FEMA can enable the White House to declare a state of emergency, to work around the government's checks and balances. That's downright scary. 

Until her untimely disappearance from the action for about half an hour, Scully's the strong role model we all want her to be. She's finding evidence of massive infection and  thusly concerned about an extreme health threat. That keeps her involved in the proceedings far beyond serving as Mulder's foil and/or sounding board. 

Kill Mulder and we take the risk of turning one man's quest into a crusade: I suppose we should have seen the handwriting on the wall when it came to the Well-Manicured Man. (That bit about him being late because his grandson broke his leg was extremely clunky.) But we've seen his dissatisfaction with The Syndicate during the fifth season and the fact that the virus has mutated into a whole new entity rips him away from the clan like a screeching alien with unmanicured claws. Why don't they see that he's right? The aliens have used the group all along. I guess the members think they will be safe while the rest of the world isn't. He knows they can't win, and he's right. So he basically had to go. Kurtzweil later claims "these people don't make mistakes," but if you ask me, they make nothing but mistakes.

Fox's flair for the supernatural helps again when Sculder literally gets to the crossroads in their trek to follow the tanker trucks. There's 100 miles of nothing in either direction? So no train tracks on the map Scully is using to chart their course? Fox thinks they should go left, Dana thinks right, so he goes straight? Why wasn't straight one of the options since it was an actual road? As Sestra Am pointed out, it was a very fortuitous passing of the train while they were at the dead end. Good thing there wasn't a Stuckey's for them to stop at, they might have missed it.

Those could be giant Jiffy Pop poppers: The corn crops and the venting of the bees provide another burst of excitement in the middle of the film. When the helicopters approach, the oncoming lights probably made Fox wonder whether he was going to see a UFO then and there. But alas, it was just a couple of choppers chasing the children through the corn. I haven't heard this much calling of a character's name since Kate Winslet was looking for Leonardo DiCaprio on the sinking Titanic. But overall, didn't that scene feel reminiscent of Landau's film North by Northwest?

Eventually, we get to the money scene. Mulder says he needs Scully. She thinks she's only held him back, but he admits her rationalism and science saved him a thousand times over. "You made me a whole person. I owe you everything, Scully, and you owe me nothing," he says. It doesn't matter whether you're a shipper or not, their relationship is still at the crux of everything we watch. It's a scene of immense power befitting of a movie and not just an episode. If you needed to see to the kiss to completion, there's always the gag reel or the alternate take.

As previously mentioned, Skinner's contribution to the proceedings is minimal. The Lone Gunmen's are even more so during their appearance at the hospital. Good thing they had the foresight to hold on to the bee. Um, but how did they know that was part of what happened to Dana and not just a household pest in the building?

Survival is the ultimate ideology: It was a shame to lose Kurtzweil and WMM within minutes of each other. We weren't too invested in the good/bad doctor, but I always appreciated WMM's presence in the series. John Neville gave The Syndicate a dignity it went without afterward. Even though he no longer agrees with his compatriots, he does understand why they chose to stay the course. WMM also does some Donald Sutherland/JFK work on Fox before going up in flames, particularly when he posits that Mulder's sister was sent to the cloning program so Samantha would survive as a genetic clone. If Bill Mulder was concerned about the parentage of his son, he might have wanted his true heir to go on. And Sestra Am pointed out something I never ever considered ... WMM blowing himself up. Yeah, he knew he was toast. I just thought The Syndicate had caught up to him. 

Most of the last half hour is Mulder racing to save Scully in Antarctica. It's probably too long a sequence. On more than one occasion, I've fallen asleep as Fox works his way underground. It does build to not only the showing of a UFO, but the near-unconscious Dana claiming she pulled yet another uncharacteristic practical joke on Mulder. It's pretty striking to see naked Scully suspended in liquid in the pod. I've always found it a little difficult to believe that the small amount of cure Fox injected into her pod would make the entire spaceship malfunction. But the ensuing scene in which Mulder tries to hoist out of there is pretty dramatic. I appreciate that they don't quite make it before falling onto and then off of the spaceship. 

I saw it. I saw it ... too: Too bad Sestra Am didn't have close captioning for this one, 'cause Scully does admit she sees the alien ship moving off in the distance. You have to have the captioning function on, though, because otherwise Mark Snow's dynamic score is kind of drowning out that important little tidbit. And one last bit of luck for our intrepid heroes, near-death Dana has regained consciousness to the point that when Fox drifts off, she's able to help him. Maybe he's just so grateful to hear that she finally believes that he can rest. By the way, how exactly do they get back when Mulder's snowmobile had run out of gas? (That's a thread that will be picked up at a later date.)

So Scully's back on board. She knows the virus that she was infected with has a cure, so she's not going to just go off to Salt Lake City or completely change her profession, even with Mulder actually trying to push her in that direction. They walk off hand in hand, but our last shot of the movie is CSM with Strughold, who we won't see again, and new Jiffy Poppers in Tunisia? Meh.

Twenty-one years later, my opinion of the movie remains about the same, it's a good episode blown up large enough to be on the silver screen. Speaking of lucky, sure glad Diana Fowley -- who was introduced in the Season 5 finale -- is not even mentioned here. But no Krycek? There was definitely something missing on the bad guy front. But having said that, he might have gone kablooey had he still been doing WMM's driving. 

Movie meta: Chris Carter, who wrote the story with the show's co-executive producer Frank Spotnitz, reportedly originally wanted to end the series after five seasons and continue the story just in feature films. But the FOX network didn't take to the idea, and so Fight the Future wound up being a bridge between the show's seasons. ...  Fox pees against an Independence Day poster. Not sure of the relevance there, it wasn't like Fight the Future competed against the Will Smith flick for summer dollars. Independence Day came out two years prior. Maybe it was a (lame) dig at a film that covered similar terrain. ... The final scene filmed in Tunisia also serves as Tatooine in the Star Wars movies. The place is called Foum Tatouine, so not to hard to figure out where George Lucas got that name from. ... Speaking of naming conventions, Strughold was also the name of a Nazi scientist who conducted experiments on prisoners in World War II. ... According to The Complete X-Files, the movie earned $186 million worldwide during its run in theaters.

Guest star of the week: So many options to choose from -- Blythe Danner and Armin Mueller-Stahl are formidable performers who raised the level of the game. But there's only one choice, the late, great Martin Landau. He once told me at a pop-culture convention that there wasn't much of an outline for Kurtzweil beyond a general description that he needed to seem sane and insane. "I created a character out of nothing, so it was great fun," he said. For us too, Mr. Landau.