The X Files – Fight the Future (Directed by Rob Bowman. Starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau.)

From the start, I should confess to being one of the very few people on the Earth who has failed, on the couple of occassions I’ve tried, to sit through more than ten minutes of the X-Files on telly.

Not that I’m unsympathetic to conspiracy theories. It’s just if conspiracies and cover-ups do exist they are unlikely to involve sticky, lobstery creatures who have mutated from a virus and who live in ice fields underneath the earth.

And that is what we are asked to believe in this two-hour long, big screen X-Files, which opens in an ice-covered Texas in 35,000BC. A Neanderthal Texan (i.e. he doesn’t wear a stetson) kills a vicious alien but is infected when the alien’s black, gravy-like blood infects his body. Jump-edit to the present day and a local boy falls down a hole and dies when he is infected with the same strange, oozing liquid.

The X-Files having been closed, Mulder and Scully are working on an assignment involving searching for a bomb in a building in downtown Dallas. When the boy’s body is found in the rubble left after the explosion, they decide to defy the powers that be, and investigate.

The first half-hour or so is ripe with expertly created tension and brilliant special FX – the massive, Oklhoma-style bomb demolishing half a building, the virus-like demented insects crawling at top speed inside the boy’s skin. After that it gets too ridiculous – particularly for those who don’t get the in-jokes with which it seems the script is littered. There is a well-judged turn from Martin Landau – his huge features and fleshy jowls twitching with fear – and director Rob Bowman makes good use of the big screen and the big budget in a series of action sequences.

Apparently one of the things that attracts X-Philes is the inherent sexual tension between Mulder and Scully, surely

the two most boring characters in popular culture.

Even their names sound dull. This, an X-Phile friend assures me, is deliberate. “They’re supposed to be cardboard cut-outs.” Call me hopelessly unhip but I don’t see the point in making the heroes less emotional and less human than their alien enemies. Anyway my buddy informs me breezily that if the two ever kiss, that’ll be the end of the series.

Well, I’m not about to spoil it for those who care about a potential romance between two terminally dour people who never seem to eat or sleep, let alone have sex. Though it did seem weird to this newcomer that despite the X-Files’ 90s

zeitgeist credentials, and her own high-flying scientific qualifications, Scully ends up as just another damsel in distress

who has to be rescued by a man.

In short, then, ’Philes will love it, ’Phobes will be both entertained and exasperated. (CD)