Disbelief

July 28th, 2008Blog2 comments

Sam wanted to check out the new X-Files movie; I was all for this since I liked the last one and I haven’t been keeping up with current events.

I don’t know if you’re planning on seeing it, but I think there’s a lesson to be learned there in terms of scope. As in make sure that the scope warrants the film. SPOILERS FOLLOW, but if you don’t intend to see the movie, please keep reading.

At the beginning of the movie we have Mulder and Scully called back to the FBI to track down a missing agent. All well and good. A helicopter picks them up, lands them on a rooftop. A figure in the shadows steps forward to greet them. The way that it’s played visually, you think that it’s AD Skinner.

But it’s not. It’s Some Other Dude. And that’s where things start to collapse.

You see, if it was Skinner, the movie would have started off big. This is the guy who allowed Mulder to get drummed out of the FBI. They have history and tension. And if he’s there, you know things are serious. The stakes are high.

But NO — instead you get Some Other Dude meeting them, telling them about an agent that they don’t know (and who we barely meet, and thus don’t care that much about) that has gone missing. She’s the Quest Object. These are the stakes.

Dude: In the last movie Mulder rescued Scully from a fucking ALIEN SPACE SHIP in the ARCTIC. How does missing agent lady compare to that? To being rescued from a SPACE SHIP? It’s like going from steak and eggs to a PB&J. What is the point?

OKAY — the story can be simple. It can be about a missing agent, it can be about greater themes that surround that simple story. I feel like they were attempting that. Here we have a subplot with a convicted pedophile psychic priest that tests Scully’s Catholic convictions. But there wasn’t enough digging there — he merely tells her to keep going, have faith, but WHY DOES SHE? Why does she allow herself to trust him? Why doesn’t the story dig into the fact that she can never be a mother due to alien tampering, something that she can’t explain? Why doesn’t it shake her core beliefs?

So the problem here is a stakes issue. It’s also a scope issue. This movie felt like a very long episode of the TV series, and not a particularly good one. The scope of the story was not cinematic.

I’ve read a few scripts that had this scope problem — either nothing happens that warrants a cinematic storytelling, or the scope and stakes are so small that no one would bother throwing money at the project. However, none of these scripts were actually made into a big-budget movie. So it’s kind of bizarre that this has actually happened.

I got to eat a lot of popcorn though. That was cool.