Film There’s Something Wrong with the X-Files Movie
posted by July 28 at 11:35 AM
onAnd it isn’t Mulder’s beard or the bad dialogue or the getting-it-on. It’s just the wrong time for an X-Files movie. Annie Wagner, who can fit more ideas into a movie review than anyone, hits on the problem exactly:
The X-Files was, after all, unusually grounded in the psychological climate of its time. It’s fascinating to go back through the seasons now, in the wake of 9/11 and especially Hurricane Katrina, to see how the series—which went on the air in 1993, near the beginning of the Clinton administration—envisioned an American government so monolithic, so complacent in its power that one had to suspect things were more complicated than they seemed. In the 1990s, we were sufficiently bored with prosperity and globalization… that it was entertaining to imagine that an international cabal might be pulling the strings behind the scenes. The chasm between that way of thinking and the current political atmosphere became obvious to me only after I rewatched the last movie. Released in 1998, it went so far as to suggest that FEMA was a second shadow government, just waiting to take the reins after alien colonization. Thanks to Mike (“heckuva job”) Brown and the Bush administration, FEMA is an embarrassment now, not a fearsome symbol of government’s reach into the most obscure corners of our lives.
It’s easy to believe that post-9/11 patriotism killed The X-Files, that people couldn’t find pleasure in imagining a malevolent U.S. government when we’d been so rudely reintroduced to foreign malice. But I think it goes farther than that. Conservative governments love to hate themselves; so when the show’s suspicion that the federal government had too much power was co-opted by the Bush administration (albeit hypocritically), conspiracy theories lost some purchase. Then the bungled occupation of Iraq and the pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina made it clear that an effective federal government that isn’t afraid to exert soft power might not be such a bad thing after all. We might have to wait until a second Obama administration for people to ascribe such nefarious over-competence to government again.
(Why do you have to go off to law school, Annie? Can’t you just stay?)
X-Files movie times are here.
Comments
I'm a big fan of the series, Fight The Future movie, and DID enjoy 'I Want To Believe'. Go see it.
Saw it last night and was very disappointed. As my friend and I both noted, it just seemed like an overly long episode. **spoiler alert** I knew there was going to be trouble when Scully decides to Google a controversial surgery, and then performs said surgery THE NEXT DAY.
Gee Odrama is now the presumptive POTUS now ? Get a fuking grip!
in other unnecessary, too little too late sequel news, McG is doing a new Terminator movie, Tron sequel footage premiered at the Comicon (with Bridges looking like The Dude, wandering around in Tronworld), and there's word of a sequel to Wargames...
Yeah, Annie, stay. Your posts are the best.
Annie is totes brill and part of my Stranger Dream Team along with Amy Jenniges, Schmader, Feit, Muedede, Savage, Frizzelle, Holden, Graves, Kiley, 'O, Matisse, Garbes, and Nancy Dru!
I knew there was something wrong with the movie when I heard they made another movie of a series that has long since proved to be relevant anymore.
Big powerful government my ass, our government so inept it would be lucky to find it's own ass in a hurricane. Oh wait, they showed they cann't do that.
We'll miss you, Annie!
That said, excessive paranoia seems like a reasonable reaction when you have to live with Incompetence for eight years ...
*SPOILER ALERT*
Did anyone else think it was severly fucked up that the gay (bad) guy wanted to have his head surgically attached to a woman's body...? (Because that's what all gay guys want, right? A woman with a man's head attached?)
Or how about a Catholic Hospital not batting an eyelash at Scully injecting a kid with Stem cells? (Or the fact that she found said procedure on Google?)
And don't get me started on the pedophile as hero/martyr, pedophile's victim as the villain thing they had going on... This movie was just beyond retarded.
Hey, thanks for the unmarked getting-it-on spoiler, Frizzelle.
The phenomenon that Annie talks about -- call it post-9/11 societal dysphoria -- is a common response to cultural artifacts from the '90s. I noodled around this idea in one of my old blogs a back in 2003:
yeah it's pretty lame. everything everyone already said here and more.
best two scenes of the movie:
-mulder and scully snuggling in bed
-mulder and scully making out
@9 - Totally.
...because if we let the gays get married, next thing we know they'll be illegally harvesting human organs.
It's simple cause-and-effect, people.
Hey, not fair! I can illegally harvest internal organs already!
What's all this we shit. During the original X-Files run, I knew it was conspiratorial bullshit- I used to say to "i believe" assholes that the government can't deliver the mail half the time, much less operate shadow governments and breed transhumans with alien DNA. I never understood the fantasy quite frankly; I always saw it as a product of the paranoid right and the "black helicopter" militia movement. My nineties malaise was closer to Seinfeld than anything the X-Files offered.
Now it all makes sense! FEMA didn't react to the New Orleans crisis because they were too busy with the aliens at Roswell!
Wheels within wheeeels, maaan!
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