The X-Files: Fight the Future, by Chris Carter
Just a bit too implausible
(Review posted 16 Aug 2005 23:49:50)

This note is about a movie rather than a book again; I keep doing that!

I've always really wanted to like The X-Files. It's a key Cultural Thing, it's got Big Tangled Conspiracies, it's got decent production values, it's got imagination and sometimes it plays cool games with the medium, and it's even got Gillian Anderson. I've seen some single episodes, and I really enjoyed a few of those ("Post-Modern Prometheus" seriously rocked). And now I've seen this Fight the Future movie, and it brings home why I've never managed to really Get Into this franchise.

Where, say, National Treasure is light and utterly implausible, this movie is dark and utterly implausible. Utter implausibility is a worse problem with a dark picture than a light one. I can kick back and enjoy the light silliness of something even if I can't even pretend to believe it; the same approach doesn't really work with something that wants to be heavy and dark and suspenseful and significant.

(The rest of this whining (all but the last paragraph) contains spoilers, I suppose, although it's not clear to me that there's anything coherent to spoil.) The first inhabitant of Earth, it turns out, was a virus. (Since viruses don't have their own replication apparatus and have to parasite off of other cells in order to reproduce, this is impossible.) The virus evolved to become so sophisticated that (roughly, I think) it formed into big groups that had arms and fangs and claws and things. (There are lots of cells that do that, but they aren't viruses; they're called things like "muscle cells", and the groups that they form into are called things like "squirrels".)

What various people (including Mulder) have mistaken for aliens over the years are actually virus creatures. Eventually the virus settled down in a quiescent form in underground caverns, where it's waiting for the aliens (aliens? so there are aliens??) to arrive on Earth, at which point the virus will either make humans into mindless slaves, or use our bodies as incubators for its very nasty children. The only people who will survive this are those people who are immune to the virus because they have been taken to cloning centers where they can be made into alien-human hybrids (none of which makes even enough sense to point out the errors in).

Fortunately the semi-bad guys (and I have to say here that the fact that the semi-bad guys are only sort of semi-bad, or at least you can't really be sure how bad they are, is one of the strong points of the franchise) who have been working with the aliens in hopes of figuring out how to benefit from them have gotten a sample of the virus, and have made a tiny vial full of vaccine.

This vaccine, when injected into a person hooked up to the cool-looking alien (or perhaps viral) machines in the aliens's (or perhaps virus's) secret Antarctic base, causes all the computers in the base to start flashing "ERROR" on their screens, sparks to fly everywhere, lots of baby aliens (or perhaps viruses) to break out of their glass bottles and attack Mulder only to suddenly and inexplicably vanish just before they eat him, and also causes the secret Antarctic base to convert into a huge alien (or perhaps viral) spaceship and fly away.

In real life, vaccines don't actually do that.

A really good Tangled Conspiracy franchise would never actually tell you what's going on, and what hints you did get would be quite plausible (if bizarre) at first, but then turn out to be clever deceptions later on. It wouldn't use technical terms (like "virus" and "clone" and "vaccine") without knowing what they actually mean. And (just for one last whine) it would have some excuse for the Conspiracy not simply killing off the annoyingly curious protagonist (the "well gosh if we kill Mulder then other people might get upset and cause trouble" excuse given in this film doesn't even count as an excuse, given how many other people they casually kill).

So anyway. X-Files fans have already seen this, many years ago. People like me who find it in the bargain DVD bin at the groceries probably won't regret the seven bucks or whatever that it costs, but (if they're sufficiently like me, anyway) it won't convert them into X-Files fans, however much they wistfully long for the conversion.