“The X-Files,” a popular TV show that ran for several seasons in the ’90s, featured David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI agents who investigated mysterious phenomena. In 1998, a film version of the show was made by director Chris Carpenter. Ten years later comes its sequel: “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” a highly anticipated, shabbily conceived and unevenly crafted sci-fi thriller.
The first film’s plot revolved around a cabal formed to secure Earth’s safety from impending alien domination. It ended with Dana Scully resigning from the Bureau and Fox Mulder on the run.
In this film, an FBI agent is kidnapped from her rural home in West Virginia. Scully and Mulder are then invited from retirement to crack the case. Helping them uncover clues hidden in fields of snow is a pedophilic priest whose eyes drip blood.
Apparently, there is still life in the alien genre. Even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Oblong Skull” added an element of the outerworld to its murky adventure theme. Since inexplicable phenomena – those ones balancing reality and fantasy – appeared to be the métier of the show, it is disappointing to see that in the hands of Carpenter, the themes and plot of the film wilt away to reveal a boring phantasm held together by threads of nostalgia. “I Want to Believe” fails not only in its pacing, it fails also in its dull photography and its piddling, distracting politics.
In television shows where an hour-length runs for about 45 minutes, it is easier to create the proper timing for action onscreen. All components of the story residing in the mind of the screenwriter can be easily arranged to fall in place at just the right moment. This sometimes becomes a source of difficulty for erstwhile TV directors who discover that the expansion of time in moving from small screen to big can be daunting. A recent example is “Sex and the City.” Director Michael Patrick King, suddenly freed from the taut format of the series, delivered four episodes pressed end-to-end and voilà: a film.
“I Want to Believe” is oblivious to tempo. It begins with some cross-cutting between a female agent being assaulted and the priest leading an FBI team including Amanda Peet and Xzibit – taking time off from pimping cars. Subsequent scenes slow to a crawl before action is racheted up again for the predictable climax. But no, the film does not rest on that note – instead, it proceeds on a detour which serves as lengthy exposition, a telltale sign that a filmmaker was incapable of making a story sufficiently cinematic.
The cinematography is dismal – especially the action scenes, which are shot in low light. Apart from a couple of location shots involving snow-ridden backgrounds, the camera work does not rise above the pedestrian.
The real problem, though, with “I Want to Believe” was an inability to hone in on any particular thought and stick with it. Its stream-of-consciousness approach resembled the work of an unattended toddler with a remote control. From what I could glean there were hints of transhumanism, theodicy, gay marriage, priests and pedophilia, stem cell research and determinism.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong in tackling politics through film; what is unconscionable is having it done in so banal and furtive a manner. Its banality shortchanges the audience’s attention; the film’s furtiveness offends the audience’s intelligence.
When Mulder waits outside an FBI office before a briefing, there is a continuous shot that glides from a framed photograph of President George Bush to a framed one of Edgar Hoover. The camera action is supposed to create a relationship between the two men, a possible correlation could be that Bush’s wiretapping escapade is equivalent to Hoover’s surveillance mania. Even if that is the case, what is the point? This under-the-belt political baiting is worthy of schlockmeisters like Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, but in a film such as this it comes off as clumsy.
This is not the only instance Carpenter stacks the cards for a side. So we reserve our ire for the priest’s sexual acts, while leaving the transhumanist undertones unexplored; we get to ask why a loving God could permit suffering, but do not stick around for any answers. His world is a dour one peopled by religious bigots and political nincompoops.
For a film that purports to ponder faith, “I Want to Believe” could use a little more humility and doubt, and a little less certainty and spite.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]