#XFILE MOVIE REVIEW FULL#
#XFILE MOVIE REVIEW SERIES#

#XFILE MOVIE REVIEW FULL#

The show, after all, has to live down an ending that resolved little and a stand-alone movie, in 2008, that underperformed at the box office (it was overshadowed by a film that spoke far more strongly to the national mood at that time-Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.) And it exists in a TV ecosystem where everything from Full House to 24 and Prison Break is coming back, no matter their relevance to what TV viewing, or the cultural scene at large, is like now. That doesn’t stop The X-Files from trying. As evidenced in political polling, the current national mood is something less joyful and more fearful, and a show in which a can-do attitude can barrel through any mystery feels out-of-step with the times.

#XFILE MOVIE REVIEW SERIES#

2016 may be the worst possible time to attempt a reboot of a series whose point of view was that conspiracy theories are, above all else, fun. That’s an unforced error-no one was waiting for The X-Files’s take on the trans experience-but it speaks to the ways in which society has gotten too complicated for The X-Files to exist. The episode, even aside from its jokes about the transwoman’s drug use, plays things so slangily loose that it ended up inadvertently (or not) implying that trans people are, themselves, monsters. This time around, the big monster-of-the-week episode builds to a pretty predictable joke, buttressed with a weird motif involving a transgender prostitute who meets a monster. The “monster of the week” episodes of The X-Files were a major part of that show’s success, and were great fun.

Bush used to illustrate the ills of government-urged consumerism) and going off in a completely random direction. There’s no way for a show as pulpy and self-consciously fun as The X-Files to make hay out of what really feels awry about the contemporary world, so the writers alternately choose lecturing (and reaching back into the distant past, as with a cutaway to George W. The new episodes, racing to keep up with a reality in which anything seems possible, give Mulder the win each time without even token opposition. Scully, a skeptic, was the key that made the tension of old X-Files run she and Mulder would have it out over each new file. It’s a strange missed opportunity to fully use an actress who’s so able to sell bad material-her reply to the question “Do you miss it all… the X-Files?” is the new season’s most beautifully acted-but makes sense. It’s worth noting that while Duchovny is declaiming, Gillian Anderson, as Scully, is sidelined her plotline has her abandoning a new life as a surgeon to re-team with Mulder, but she feels less like the equal partner she always was than like an adjunct or occasional hang-out buddy. “They police us, and spy on us, and tell us that makes us safer,” Mulder announces at one point. A character in the season premiere played by Joel McHale draws Mulder and Scully into a new investigation simply by being himself-an Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorist whose line of work lends itself to trading long monologues with Mulder about the ills of the world. After all, motivated writing would get us to care about Mulder’s quest to find the truth without quite so much exposition.Īnd exposition is what the new X-Files does best.

The series begins with Mulder ( David Duchovny) reading a voice-over about everything that happened over the course of the series, which is not coincidentally the way that the Sex and the City movie began, too. That makes the new adventures of Mulder and Scully, a 6-episode miniseries airing Mondays after a launch Jan.

Xfile movie review