Comments on There's Something Wrong with the X-Files Movie

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:

And that's the part where somebody who's pretending to be interested would go, "What's a Clinton era novel?" I'll use Tyler Durden's famous Fight Club soliloquy to illustrate: "I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, and slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes; working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars -- but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

So, you see the fundamental problem here, right?

The anxiety that Tyler Durden is talking about is basically the anxiety of an American man, who's been told his whole life that the best kind of American, and the best kind of man, is one who succeeds by overcoming meaningful adversity. The anxiety Tyler Durden (or rather Chuck Palahniuk) is addressing is the anxiety of a man socialized for conflict, living in a prosperous and generally peaceful nation, the ruling nation of a vast global empire. You'll see a lot of this in Victorian speculative fiction too: the future world of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, with its Morlocks and Eloi is essentially a variation on this theme. Likewise Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Fight Club, like The Matrix is about a world where you're kept comfortably. Where you have a place to live, and plenty to eat, and you don't have to worry about your future But you also have no meaningful self-determination. It's a fairly abstract anxiety. It asks a very philosophical question: what is freedom worth? When Neo escapes the Matrix, he lands in a filthy dangerous uncomfortable world where everyone is dressed like they're homeless, people sleep on slabs instead of mattresses, and the food tastes like shit. What's freedom worth if it's only the freedom to live in poverty and carry on an imbalanced struggle against a superior force with the goal of making everyone else as uncomfortable as you are?

That's what a lot of us were thinking about in 1999 and 2000. But of course, a lot has changed in the last three years.

Our great war isn't spiritual anymore. Every morning my clock radio goes off and the first thing I hear on NPR is a casualty report from Iraq. You listen to a news report from 1967, you'll hear pretty much the same thing. And, contrary to what the authorities keep telling us, we are at the beginning of a great depression, and not just an existential one. Fewer and fewer of us have to worry about the monotony of pumping gas, waiting tables or putting on a white collar: unemployment's at almost 7.5% You thought your dead-end job was stressful? Try applying for a dozen jobs you're not going to get and selling your CD collection to buy groceries.

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!