I did it. I saw X-Files.
It was a way more whacked out experience than I expected.

One blogger writes about how the burdens of consistency stifled X-Files' creative freedom in its later seasons. While I lost interest after my first three seasons of obsession, consistency really killed the first hour of the X-Files for me. For some reason, the first half of the movie felt like a scrapbook of vignettes meant to demonstrate and remind of who the characters were -- Mulder, wry and sad, and Scully, scientific and assertive. Check, check. But they felt like symbols. There wasn't really humor or a connection.

A theme in the movie was stubborness. Mulder stubbornly refused to give up. Scully stubbornly and inexplicably refused to stop being an asshole to the psychic pedophile self-hating priest. One of the FBI agents throughout the movie just disbelieved Mulder and the psychic without any well developed reason. All this stubborness! And it fell on its face because the characters felt flat. Instead of making us feel somehow the relationships among the characters by developing them, the movie tries to coast on the audience's memories from 10 years ago.

And the most whack thing was that Scully and Mulder are clearly friends in the movie. Until an hour in when out of nowhere, they're in bed together like an old married couple, talking about their worries and sharing an awkward kiss in which Scully pushes Mulder's face away, saying "scratchy beard." I wanted to die of awkwardness. Here, they'd just gotten together and they were already divorced. And on top of that, the amazing thing about Mulder and Scully's romantic tension on the show was that you would get really involved in the characters and it would build really slowly over time. The movie's relationship reveal was like saying "Um, I like you." "Oh, I guess I like you to." "Okay, I guess we should kiss." Maybe I missed something in the later seasons where they got together? I remember hearing secondhand of something about a Scully miscarriage rumored to Mulder's kid, but I thought it was an unresolved mystery and an opportunity for fan fic speculation.

Those were the main drawbacks of the movie. That said, I definitely am glad I saw it because it was at least emotionally intense for me. :) Quite an experience. The mystery was pretty interesting and they tied together many seemingly disparate plot lines and themes by the end. While there were a few guessable turns, it kept me involved and thinking about the mystery.

And, as Camellia and I had hoped and joked, there were a few cute shots of david duchovny.