I Want to Believe

I want to believe that the new X-Files movie is as good as the tv show was, but alas, it isn't. We coughed up $17 for the privilege of watching it last night. The theater parking lot was really crowded, but customers weren't there to see X-Files, obviously, since we were the only ones in the room until right before the showtime. Finally half a dozen others joined us.

Mulder and Scully are a little older, a little saggier and grayer and wrinklier, as they should be. I enjoyed David Duchovny's and Gillian Anderson's performances (especially hers), but the plot was holier than a tea strainer. And no one is going to believe that West Virginia has that much ice and snow. Heck, here in Michigan, we don't see that much ice and snow. Clearly, the gang is again taking advantage of Canadian tax breaks.

Spoiler Alert: The romance between our protagonists isn't believable. No way would Scully live in that dump that Mulder called home. I have seldom seen more reluctant kissing in my whole life. And where did they film the hospital scenes? In an ancient asylum in Russia? I know some hospitals are bleak and dismal and depressing, but cinder-block walls? And what's with the little boy who is supposedly dying of this rare brain disease? He sounded more like a child who had been born deaf and had to learn to speak. Is that going to make parents of deaf children get all worried that maybe their children really have this incurable brain illness?

We'd gone to the bookstore before going to the movie, and I found myself eager to get home so I could pore over the books I'd gotten. As interesting as it was to revisit the good old days, when my boys were young and we all watched X-Files together, I wish the movie had had a better script. S.