It's pretty good, but not great.

For a summer blockbuster, it is incredibly low key and restrained. I don't think there is a gunshot or an explosion.

It also has pretty much nothing to do with any plotline from the series.

It's basically the equivalent of a two-part episode from the later seasons, but shot in high quality (and beautifully, as well).

It felt like a 'franchise tester' movie. If it does well enough, I'd expect to see a bigger, noisier X-files film next.

The premise has always irritated the fuck out of me: dogmatic sceptics rejecting clear evidence of the supernatural because of their attachment to narrow-minded rationalism, while the credulous saucer-gawpers are right all along. They can fuck right off with that.

So, er, I never watched it. Don't like much sci-fi anyway, Dr Who being the huge exception.

It was a bit subtler that that; Scully started off being put there to test everything with 'science', yes, but she always valued evidence most of all; she didn't reject it, she interpreted it and enough stuff happened to her that of course she was convinced by it. They play on that all the way through of course, it was fundamental to the show and to the dynamic between the characters, but it also always was the two of them against almost everyone else. More about government conspiracies to conceal unsavoury truths than anything else really.

For example an important part of it was that stuff that initially seemed like one thing to Mulder (eg alien abductions) and another to Scully (ptsd or some other thing like that) turned out to be a third thing all along (the government experimenting on people without their consent).

Anyway it's great and you missed out.

QUOTE:
It was a bit subtler that that; Scully started off being put there to test everything with 'science', yes, but she always valued evidence most of all..

It's the fact that that sentence contains "but" rather than "and" that sums up the problem.

Hang on, I'm confused.
What I mean is, you said "rejecting clear evidence of the supernatural because of their attachment to narrow-minded rationalism" and I'm saying no, she didn't reject the evidence out of hand because it didn't fit with her world view, she evaluated it as a scientist.

Her *bosses* wanted her to use science to discredit Mulder, but she never did. This is where my "but" came from; the mission she was sent to do was the dishonest thing, but she had the integrity to follow the evidence.

Lyra's got it right.

I'm re-watching The X Files from scratch at the moment, by the way. Bloody good stuff, and ahead of its time in terms of the quality of dialogue, the effort put into each individual episode etc.

Even if some of it is a bit quaint in the internet age, eg the retro-looking computer in Ghosts In The Machine.

I guess it's something that all sci-fi that's set in a contemporary landscape has to grapple with: why is it that scientific orthodoxy, and much popular opinion too, rejects space aliens and superpowers and that? New Who, for example, because of its odd fixation on Earth Now, has to deal with it, and does so rather badly to be honest, invoking mass collective denial and stuff.

But the X-Files has always seemed to me to embrace the business about the rationalist orthodoxy being blinkered and the "believers" being the only ones who care about the truth. The fact that your woman, by being the only one who's truly rational, is led to reject the narrow dogmatism of her "bosses" in favour of all the weirdness--that amplifies the problem rather than mitigating it.

In the best SF, the ideas are the stars, and that idea is a bad one.

Yeah, but SR, our previous conversations on things like the moon landing photographs suggests your and my orientations differ a lot here.

Wyatt Earp wrote:

QUOTE:
Yeah, but SR, our previous conversations on things like the moon landing photographs suggests your and my orientations differ a lot here.

Well, you can think that if you want.

If I want to believe, you might say.

All I'm saying here is that I think I've a bee in my bonnet about that kind of thing, and therefore that it's more likely to get in the way of my enjoyment than of yours.

Well, the X Files is fictional entertainment. I don't need or expect it to represent the world as it is.

No, but it reflects a worldview, as does all SF.

QUOTE:
is led to reject the narrow dogmatism of her "bosses" in favour of all the weirdness

Well not really, they all know for a fact that the government is experimenting on people, etc. They assume that she will be narrowly dogmatic etc; they don't bargain for her being openminded at all. They put her there because they think she'll be as wrong as Mulder is. They're *both* wrong, most of the time.