Well, not just any television series, but Chris Carter’s sci-fi drama series The X-Files, which has 11 seasons, 218 thrilling episodes, and two feature films on the way, you know you can not ignore its legacy.
Putting greater emphasis on the standalone movies, there are essentially two types of viewers: those who know what the series is about and those who have no idea, with the latter implying that they have not seen any of the episodes.
Please believe us when we say that if you fall into the second category and have not seen any of the episodes, it is perfectly fine. After all, the only goal was to bring the television show to the big screen.
It is a whole new story that the films sort of continue the events that the television show featured, and we do see some of the same recognizable faces return as the main characters.
The first solo film, The X-Files: Fight the Future, was released in 1998, and it was directed by the renowned Rob Bowman. Based on Chris Carter’s The X-Files, this sci-fi thriller revolves around fictional unsolved crimes known as The X-Files and the characters who try to solve them.
It is reasonable to describe this picture as one that focuses heavily on atmosphere, mystery, and, of course, signs and warnings. The movie’s timeline takes place after the fifth season’s final episode, The End, and before the sixth season’s first episode, The Beginning, with a screenplay by Carter.
Fans of The X-Files will be astonished to learn that Carter originally intended to discontinue the television series after the fifth season. The aim was to continue the program’s legacy through a series of films.
There are no points for guessing that the 1998 film was supposed to be the start of everything. However, the Fox Broadcasting Company, seeing that the television series was far too profitable to be canceled on the spot, required Carter to create the screenplay for the film as a bridge between the two seasons.
Following a ten-year hiatus, Bowman’s film was followed by The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Carter directed and co-wrote the 2008 supernatural thriller film, which he also co-wrote with Frank Spotnitz. The film is both a personal interaction between the main characters Mulder and Scully and a standalone, self-contained mysterious horror picture.
In today’s video, we will go over the ludicrous yet underappreciated X-Files films in depth.
The X-Files: Fight the Future
The timeframe of the opening sequence goes back to 35,000 B.C. that has two prehistoric men running into an enormous, cosmic alien inside a cave. We don’t get a clear image of how the creature looks but the terrorizing primal being effortlessly kills one of them and contaminates the other with what looks like some kind of a black-oil-like substance.
Cut to the present day, the same area is now known as North Texas and a young boy inadvertently crashes right inside the same cave. Post laying his hands on a human skull, he gets infected by the same black-oil substance which at first begins to ooze from the ground below him and then tiny slug-like beings start slithering inside his body and go all the way up to his head.
His eyes turn jet black. A squad of firefighters is sent down the cave to rescue the boy but they don’t make their way back. Shortly, men donning hazmat suits turn up at the same location and they are able to retrieve the bodies of the boy and the firemen.
The scene next has on display Fox Mulder and his partner Dana Scully assigned to an anti-terrorism unit post the X-Files getting shut down. The duo is seen probing deeper into a bomb threat and aiding Special Agent in Charge Darius Michaud inside a Dallas high-rise.
With Mulder discovering the bomb in a vending machine inside a building just across the street, he is able to evacuate everyone out of the building along with Scully. However, Michaud chooses to remain inside the building and deactivate the bomb.
But unbeknownst to Mulder and Scully, he just waits out for the bomb to explode without making any effort. When the duo comes back to Washington DC, they are severely rebuked for the death of Michaud along with four other casualties inside the building – a young boy and three firemen. Does it ring a bell? Mulder and Scully are also scheduled to have separate performance hearings.
Later that evening, Mulder gets approached by an overtly anxious doctor called Alvin Kurtzweil, who is also more of an alien conspiracy theorist. He explains to Mulder that some of the victims of the bombing incident were already dead from before and the entire bombing was a part of the plan to cover up their deaths.
Mulder goes with Scully to the hospital morgue to check the bodies and post the examination, it’s quite evident to them that the casualties did not die due to the bomb detonation but that they were already dead before. Credits to Scully for being able to figure out and share the evidence of an alien virus that the bodies were infected with. Together, they travel back to the crime scene in Texas but are quite surprised to discover that the whole place has been transformed into a new park. There’s no sign of the hole where the young boy fell into anymore.
But they are lucky to chance upon a few friends of the boy and after conversing with them for a while in the hopes of getting to know more about the incident, they end up following a few tanker trucks leading them to a colossal cornfield with two very well illuminated domes.
It goes without saying that they end up entering the domes and once inside, they find an enormous empty space. Scully deduces the whole area to be more like a venting system and they are able to hear a certain kind of humming.
This is precisely when all the vents open up and a bevy of bees come out of the grates. The duo makes it out of the dome and is also able to evade black helicopters before making their way back to Washington.
Scully shows up at her scheduled performance hearing and gets to know that she is getting transferred. Of course, Mulder is exceedingly dejected and cannot even fathom the mere thought of not having Scully as his partner. They are about to share a moment when Scully gets stung by a bee that had somehow managed to be under the collar of her shirt all this while.
She has an immediate reaction and falls on the ground. Mulder is forced to call the medics for help and as they transfer her inside the ambulance, the driver shoots Mulder and takes Scully away.
Thank God for Mulder not being severely wounded that he manages to sneak out of the hospital by taking the assistance of The Lone Gunmen as well as the FBI Assistant Director, Walter Skinner.
Post-meeting a rival who happens to be the Well-Manicured Man, he gets the location of Scully as well as the vaccine that will help her work against the infected virus. However, right after Mulder leaves, the Well-Manicured Man is seen killing his driver and himself by detonating a car bomb so as to keep his treachery of The Syndicate unexposed.
Mulder travels all the way to Antarctica to rescue Scully. That’s where he learns about a secret lab, one that’s run by the Cigarette Smoking Man and his colleague Conrad Strughold.
Mulder finds Scully in a large underground facility that comprises numerous human beings enclosed in what looks like ice confinements. He is able to use the vaccine on her and resuscitate her just before the cocooned aliens try breaking and escaping from their confinements.
The duo is able to escape to the surface when a gigantic alien spacecraft that had been lying underneath the ice all this while rises from below and flies into the sky above, disappearing right into the clouds.
After a few days, Mulder and Scully attend a hearing together where their attestation is overlooked and somehow the evidence has been covered up. The only living proof happens to be the bee that had stung Scully and she hands it over.
Mulder gets further shocked when he comes across a story about the media cover-up of the whole incident in Texas. Scully is all the more determined on working along with Mulder and get to the bottom of things.
The movie ends with yet another crop outpost in Tunisia, one where the Cigarette-Smoking Man is seen handing Strughold a telegram, which states that the X-Files unit has been opened again.
A recipient of seven wins and eleven nominations, Bowman’s The X-Files: Fight the Future was a box office success grossing close to 190 million dollars worldwide against a budget of 66 million dollars. The highlight of the flick happens to be the fact that it does not feel like a movie, it is more inclined towards being a rather long episode of the series, only one that boasts a run time of 122 minutes.
It’s pretty clever in terms of the aliens that are featured there; just one look at them and you know how inspired Bowman has been by movies like Alien for that matter. What we have here is a mind-blowing musical score by Mark Snow, some brilliant special effects on display along with a fascinating storyline, a script that was written in just ten days.
In short, fans of the tv series are bound to be in for a good time. As for the category of people who have not seen the series, it’s certainly worth a watch and your time too.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
Ex FBI agent Dana Scully is currently employed as a doctor at a Catholic nursing home called Our Lady of Sorrows in Seattle. One of her patients includes a young boy called Christian, who suffers from an incurable brain disease.
She is paid a visit by Special Agent Mosley Drummy who is on the lookout for Mulder. Scully’s former partner has been living in isolation as a fugitive for the last couple of years and Drummy reaches out to Scully in the hopes of being able to find Mulder.
He further tells her that the FBI will also shelve their pursuit for Mulder if the latter aids them in probing deeper into the sudden and mysterious disappearances of a multitude of women in West Virginia. One of the most recent women to vanish into thin air happens to be a young Special Agent called Monica Bannan.
Scully reaches out to Mulder, who is initially quite hesitant and considers it to be some kind of a ruse on the part of the FBI into luring him out and capturing him. But he eventually decides to help out and goes back to Washington DC with Scully.
They meet Special Agent in Charge Dakota Whitney there who tells Mulder that he might be the best chance Monica Bannan has now. She asks for Mulder’s expertise in the paranormal field, quizzes him about a dissevered human arm and Joseph Fitzpatrick Crissman.
Apparently, ‘Father Joe’ in his former days was a pastor, one who was expelled from his ecclesiastical status on charges of being a convicted pedophile. Currently, he is claiming psychic powers and asserting that it’s God who is sending him visions of the crimes. It goes without saying that Scully is utterly sickened by the past actions of the Father and dismisses his psychic visions.
Whitney and Drummy travel all the way to Montana along with Father Joe and Mulder to Bannan’s home in search of more clues and it’s only after Father Joe starts to bleed from his eyes that he is able to finally subdue the skepticism of the others not wanting to believe him.
Later that evening, another woman who is driving her way back home gets kidnapped by a snowplow driver called Janke Dacyshyn. Father Joe’s help is enlisted yet again and post a rather exhausting night hunt amidst a snowy field, he is able to lead the way to a frozen burial ground comprising of people and severed body parts.
A further examination of the body remnants spearheads them to Dacyshyn, who happens to be an organ transporter and his husband, Franz Tomczeszyn. The latter was one of the 37 altar boys that father Joe had molested.
The FBI ends up raiding the facility where Dacyshyn works but he manages to evade them leaving behind the severed head of Bannan. Although Mulder and Whitney are able to pursue Dacyshyn to a construction site, Whitney falls to her death when he catches her by surprise and knocks her down many floors below, thus escaping yet again.
Meanwhile, Scully visits Father Joe in his apartment to confront him about his psychic visions. Father Joe suffers a seizure and Scully has him admitted to her hospital. It is there that she learns about Father Joe having advanced lung cancer. She asks him if he thinks Bannan is still alive, to which he tells her yes.
On the other hand, following the death of Whitney, Mulder is even more hell-bent on investigating things further. So much so that he takes Scully’s car and drives to Nutter’s Feed Store and starts asking people around. It so happens that Dacyshyn also arrives there at the same time and Mulder decides to follow his truck.
However, Dacyshyn is smart enough to run Mulder’s car off the road. But this does not stop Mulder, who has crawled from the car wreckage continues walking down the road and comes across a small compound.
As Mulder enters, a two-headed guard dog ends up attacking him and the ruckus eventually draws Dacyshyn out to inspect. It is then that we as viewers get to realize that the compound was actually being utilized by an Eastern European medical team, one that was busy slaughtering people and robbing them of their body parts and internal organs for literally years.
In fact, they have been using the body parts all this while so as to keep Tomczeszyn alive, who by the way had also suffered a similar seizure attack around the same time Father Joe did.
Mulder is further horrified to see that they were literally about to carry on with whole head transplants by trying to place the head of Tomczeszyn on the body of the woman who was previously seen getting abducted by Dacyshyn. Of course, Mulder attempts to save her but somehow one of the doctors manages to inoculate him with a tranquilizer from behind.
The incapacitated Mulder is taken outside by Dacyshyn. All this while, Scully, not being able to get in touch with Mulder over the phone has already reached out to Walter Skinner.
Together, they are able to make their way to the compound right on time where Skinner is able to save the woman from getting beheaded and Scully is able to get the better of Dacyshyn who was about to ax Mulder to death.
It’s later that Scully informs Mulder about the death of Father Joe. Apparently, the former priest and Tomczeszyn both died at the same time and Mulder deduces that the fates of the two men were connected by a lot more than just visions. Sometime later, Scully is also seen all geared up to operate on his young patient, Christian.
Chris Carter’s 2008 supernatural thriller film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe might not be as successful as the first movie but there is no denying that the movie does boast a spectacular work of cinematography by Bill Roe and most importantly great chemistry between our lead characters David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
Yes, the movie does feature scenes that will keep you driven to the edge of your seats but we are not going to disclose them to you. We suggest that you take out 104 minutes off your busy schedule and give this flick here a shot.
Is There Going to Be A Third X-Files Movie?
Well, if reports are to be believed, it looks like agents Mulder and Scully are in for another round of supernatural escapades. According to Chris Carter, he has already written a third X-Files movie but as of now, it is only the television series that has been revived back in 2016.
But truth be told, the future of the X-Files – be it a third movie or more episodes for that matter, is right now heavily reliant on the busy, hectic schedules of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. If they can somehow mark their calendars, fans of the franchise will know that they are in for yet another treat.