07.26.2008
My friend Mark and I went to see The X-Files last night. I'm going to talk about it here because this discussion is very much about characters and story structure. But to sum it all up, the movie was very disappointing.
The thing that made The X-Files back in the day was the tight scripting of suspenseful stories when there was really nothing like it on TV back in the day. The formula seemed rather simple: A person runs through the dark, something chasing them. They turn left, they turn right, they think they've escaped. Except that something strange, creepy, unnatural attacks them from above, below, or behind. Cue credits and enter the FBI.
Now, we were let down on September 11th by the FBI but, let's face it, prior to that, they were more of a law enforcement agency than a terrorist hunting organization. These are the people that brought down the mob, Richard Nixon, and the people you want on your side if someone gets kidnapped. They are the elite law enforcement agency, maybe a few thousand agents in a country that at the time had two hundred and seventy million people, and now they're off to investigate the Loch Ness Monster.
What's even better was that the people investigating these crimes, the ever popular Mulder and Scully, were not particularly popular even within the FBI. The other agents saw themselves as the elite. The elite with limited resources and two agents are wasting those resources by hunting for Bigfoot.
So there's tension in the FBI and there's tension between Mulder and Scully. Mulder wants to believe. He's willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the idea that aliens, monsters, psychics, and boogie men exist. But he's not just a crazy guy with a badge and a gun. He's an Oxford trained criminologist who's done some quality work before going off on his own personal crusade.
On the other side, there's Scully. She's a medical doctor, new to the FBI but young, smart, and logical. She doesn't believe in any of that shit Mulder's always on about. She's Catholic but if she has a true religion it's science and science says Mulder's a nut job.
So off the two of them go. And some how they manage to solve these crimes, finding whatever it was that caused the mayhem by never quite leaving the viewer sure whether it was Mulder or Scully who was really correct. Was it the Loch Ness Monster or was it an unusually large, accidentally mutated fish? They didn't know and neither did you.
Mulder and Scully also had a nice tension between them. It could have been sexual. We see through the series that Scully has a thing for older guys, so why wouldn't Mulder be her cup of tea? But, for the first six years nothing is acted upon and the tension builds and feels real and is exciting.
In short, for the first few years, The X-Files may have been the most perfect television show on the air.
But then the writers got all caught up in their shorts. I can't think of another way to put it. They just lost something. The plots became less tight. Mulder actually goes fucking nuts. And somewhere along the line, the two of them hook up, destroying the years of interesting tension.
Why the character summary? Why the plot summary of a show that captured the zeitgeist of the mid-90's? Because the problems with the last few seasons were exactly the same problems with this latest movie, The X-Files: I Want To Believe. In fact, the subtitle is more apropos than I figured it would be.
The movie starts with the attack of a woman--a very, very ugly woman, help me jesus--that we discover is an FBI agent. It's inter-cut with a search party of agents poking at the snow looking for something. Back to the agent under attack, we see her get in swipe with a garden tool scratching someone's arm. Then back to the search party, we find that arm but without the rest of whoever.
If you're bored already, join the club. And if you're wondering why an FBI agent--and you know these people carry guns--didn't, you know, shoot her attackers instead of scratch at him with something she pulled out of a flower pot, then you're already beginning to see the problems.
Of course, what makes this The X-Files is that the search team was lead to the arm by a psychic. Ooooh...
Yeah, who gives a shit?
Enter Scully, now working for a hospital, retired from the FBI, talking to the priestess from BSG via teleconfernce. Except that it was a literal enter: Scully moment with a backlight making her look like an angel and a Cecil B. DeMille closeup. For fuck's sake, it's The X-Files, right? I figured she'd appear at some point. Why the big deal?
But that's not it. No... Now she's working at a Catholic hospital.
Hey, I'll give a little bit of benefit of the doubt here. We saw a half dozen or so episodes where she wrestles with her childhood faith. But, really? She was an FBI agent for fifteen years. What happened to teaching at Quantico? But it gets better. Now she's also a brain surgeon. And an oncologist. I also heard she could fly but we never see it.
Which is followed by the enter: Mulder moment. It's pretty much handled in the exact same way as Scully's except that instead of looking amazing as she got older, Mulder's gone hermit. Still, The X-Files without Mulder is like steak without butter; okay, just not that great. Ask Robert Patrick.
The two of them team up again at the FBI's request to work with the psychic and find their missing and very ugly agent. Mulder believes, Scully doesn't, except that it just doesn't work this time. Mulder seems desperate and Scully, as opposed to her open minded, scientifically curious self, is just plain judgmental. Yeah, the guy is a child molester, but fuck. Lay off. He's helping now, isn't he?
And the back and forth begins but in this new and grating form.
Along the way, we run into a kid with cancer that Scully nearly breaks down over, deal with the ethics of genetics, and a thousand other little issues, one of which would have made an interesting sub-theme but none of which were handled well because they had to compete for screen time with everything else.
And we discover that Mulder and Scully are living together. Except that it feels fake. Like two people who crawled into bed together and pretended to be a couple instead of are actually a couple. Yes, I know it's acting but, man, there was just no real chemistry there.
It's not until the last half hour that we discover the really strange creepy thing that has always made The X-Files what it is. But by then I didn't care. Mulder had become so desperate to believe the sicko-psychic and Scully so desperate to believe in anything that both had become incredibly irritating. Even a second kidnapping and a few quick glances at surgeons speaking in a foreign--do do do do, do do do do--language didn't do anything to rebuild the momentum that was lost.
It basically became a study of how to screw up a pair of iconic characters.
But the editing hurt worse than anything. They kept telling the viewer what we already knew. After Skinner's enter: Skinner moment, Skinner and Scully are driving around looking for Mulder. Now, we've already seen Mulder survive a car wreck and crawl out, then discover the big bad's hideout. And Skinner says, "I'm sure Mulder survived."
Yeah, thanks dude.
Then Mulder breaks into the hideout and gets captured and dragged, literally, to the woodshed. Then cut back to Skinner saying, "I'm sure he'll call us before doing anything stupid."
These are useless scenes. But if they had to be included to give Skinner his screen time, I don't understand why the editor stacked them after we already see Mulder doing these things.
When writing stories, I have to ask myself whether the scene offers anything new or whether I'm just going over information the reader already knows. If it's the latter, then I always cut the scene because it just slows the pace of the piece. But if The X-Files has a problem, it's not with the decisions they made. It's that they didn't make any decisions throughout the entire movie. They threw in plot, more plot, and the kitchen sink just to round things out. And it drags exactly like you would expect it to. There is no pace, no emotional connection because the viewer is just waiting for the movie to get into gear.
I think that a halfway skilled editor could probably recut the movie about twenty minutes shorter and make it two hundred percent better in the process. Or, as Mark said, "I think it could have been a one hour episode."
Yeah. Me too.