The X-Files: Fight the Future (PG-13, 1998)

Fans of TV's The X-Files are the main audience for this theater-screen extrapolation of the paranormal-paranoia one-hour chiller. Dovetailing with a long, complicated saga threading in and out of TV episodes, THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE finds FBI investigators Fox Mulder (David Duchovney) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), formerly running a special branch devoted to the weird and supernatural, now demoted to "routine" police work -- like a mammoth terrorist explosion leveling a government building in Dallas. Mulder, however, learns the bombing was a diversion, to destroy evidence that an extraterrestrial virus had been unearthed from its Ice Age cave nearby and is infecting humans. Apparently space beings, aided by a worldwide conspiracy of elite human traitors, have been slowly colonizing Earth for many years. But thanks to the vicious monsters produced by the virus, the process now looks less like a peaceful Invasion of the Body Snatchers infiltration and more of a grisly Alien massacre -- unless Mulder and a slightly disbelieving Scully can expose the plot before it's too late.

Though one might expect an X-Files-based feature to take the series and its themes into fresh directions, this UFO-show doesn't gain much more altitude. The cast has the privilege of swearing, and the special effects and sets are more expensive. One very minor character held over from the TV show dies (or...does he?); others make brief fan-pleasing cameos. That's pretty much it.

As with the small-screen scripts, we get a tantalizing sci-fi plotline, full of questions, maddeningly unresolved by the finale, with shadowy villains still gloating that Mulder (who pops up mysteriously in Arctic for an especially farfetched and mystifying climax) still don't know what's really going on. If he doesn't, neither do we, and the show's repeated message to "trust no one," especially government authorities, starts to seem a little stale and lazy. When a drunken Mulder urinates on an alley poster for Independence Day, it may be a clue to what the filmmakers here thought of that simple-minded blockbuster. At least it had a storyline any average viewer could follow.

Studio: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment
Director: Rob Bowman
Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau
Genre: Science Fiction
Run time: 122 minutes
Theatrical release: June 19, 1998
DVD release: January 23, 2001
MPAA Rating: PG-13
MPAA explanation: some intense violence and gore.