The X Files (film)

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The X Files
Movie poster
Directed by	Rob Bowman
Produced by	Chris Carter Daniel Sackheim
Written by	Chris Carter Frank Spotnitz
Starring	David Duchovny Gillian Anderson Mitch Pileggi Martin Landau William B. Davis
Music by	Mark Snow
Cinematography	Ward Russell
Editing by	Stephen Mark
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	June 19, 1998
Running time	121 minutes
Country	Canada  United States
Language	English
Budget	$66,000,000 (estimated)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The X Files is a 1998 movie which is a continuation of the television series The X-Files. The film's main tagline is "Fight the Future" and was placed close enough on posters that people assumed this was part of the film's title.

Although the movie can be viewed separately, and certainly was during its theatrical release, it plays an integral role in the ongoing storylines of the show. In X-Files chronology it takes place between seasons five and six.

A sequel has long been rumored and all but confirmed by Chris Carter. It will be a supernatural stand alone story, not part of the "UFO" mythology. As of May 2006, the only things holding it up are a few legal issues that are fighting to be resolved with 20th Century Fox.[1] In the August 6, 2006 edition of Parade magazine, David Duchovny explicitly claimed that all of the requisite actors had "signed on" to play in a sequel.[2]

Contents 1 Major cast members 2 Plot summary 3 Production 4 Soundtrack 5 Trivia 6 Footnotes 7 External links

[edit] Major cast members

These actors are those who also have roles on the TV show:

• David Duchovny as Special Agent Fox Mulder
• Gillian Anderson as Special Agent Dana Scully
• Mitch Pileggi as Assistant Director Walter Skinner
• William B. Davis as Cigarette-Smoking Man
• John Neville as Well-Manicured Man
• Dean Haglund as Richard 'Ringo' Langly
• Bruce Harwood as John Fitzgerald Byers
• Tom Braidwood as Melvin Frohike
• Don S. Williams as First Elder

The following actors do not appear on the TV show:

• Martin Landau as Alvin Kurtzweil
• Jeffrey DeMunn as Ben Bronschweig
• Blythe Danner as Assistant Director Jana Cassidy
• Terry O'Quinn as Darius Michaud (he appears in the TV show, but as two other different characters)
• Armin Mueller-Stahl as Conrad Strughold
• Glenne Headly as Barmaid (uncredited)

[edit] Plot summary

The movie opens in prehistoric times in a wordless sequence. A Neanderthal man happens upon what appears to be a large, primal, vicious alien in a cave (although the camerawork uses zooms and flash-edits to keep the creature from being visualized fully). The two fight, and the caveman wins, stabbing the alien to death. However, what fans of the show will recognize as the black oil bleeds from the alien's wounds and soaks into the Neanderthal. After a fade to modern-day small-town Texas, a little boy (Lucas Black) falls down a hole in his back yard, and finds a human skull. As he picks it up, black oil seeps out of the skull and into the boy's skin, as a team of firemen descend to rescue him.

In the summer of 1998, at the end of the show's fifth season, the X-Files were shut down, and Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were assigned to other projects. They are first seen assisting SAC Darius Michaud (Terry O'Quinn), and his FBI team investigating a bomb threat to a federal building in Dallas, Texas. When Mulder separates from the team to scout out the building across the street, he discovers the bomb. He and Scully are able to evacuate the building and prevent hundreds of casualties before it explodes. (Several media commentators noted parallels between this and the real-life 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.) [3] [4]

Mulder and Scully return home to Washington, DC, but instead of commending their roles in preventing the deaths of hundreds, they are instead chastized because four victims were still in the building: three firemen, and one little boy. They are both scheduled separate hearings in which their job performance will be evaluated.

That evening, Mulder encounters a paranoid doctor, Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), who explains that the four victims were already dead, and the bomb was allowed to detonate to destroy the evidence as to how they died. Mulder enlists Scully to travel with him to the morgue to examine the bodies. They learn that the bodies have suffered a complete cellular breakdown, not at all caused by the bomb. Mulder leaves Scully in the morgue to fly back to Dallas to investigate evidence left from the explosion. He urges Scully to join him, and she shares evidence that the bodies were infected with an alien virus. They travel to the boy's home, but find a brand-new park in place of the hole in which he fell. Unsure what to do next, they wind up following a team of tanker trucks to a massive cornfield surrounding two bright, glowing domes. When they infiltrate the domes, they find simply a large empty space. However, grates on the floor open up, and a massive swarm of thousands of bees chase the agents into the cornfield. Soon helicopters fly overhead, and the two make a harrowing escape back to Washington.

Upon their return, Mulder, finding the evidence disappearing before his eyes, unsuccessfully seeks help from Kurtzweil, while Scully attends her performance hearing, and learns that she is being transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah. She informs Mulder that she would rather resign from the FBI than be transferred. Mulder is devastated at the thought of not having Scully as a partner to help him uncover the truth, telling her, "I don't know if I want to do this alone. I don't know if I even can. And if I quit now, they win." The two have a tender moment, until she is stung by a bee which had lodged itself under her shirt collar. She has an adverse reaction, and Mulder calls 911. However, when the ambulance arrives to transport her, the driver shoots Mulder in the head, and whisks Scully to an undisclosed location. Mulder awakens, (the bullet grazed his temple) and, with the help of The Lone Gunmen, sneaks out of the hospital. He is accosted by The Well-Manicured Man, who gives him Scully's location in Antarctica, along with a serum to combat the virus she is infected with. Well-Manicured Man is then killed for his betrayal to the Syndicate.

Mulder journeys to Antarctica to save Scully, in the process discovering a secret lab run by the Cigarette-Smoking Man and his colleague Strughold. The lab is destroyed just after they escape to the surface, when the alien ship lying dormant underneath comes back to life and leaves its underground port, zooming away into the sky. Only Mulder sees it go, as Scully is unconscious at the time.

Later, Mulder and Scully attend a hearing where their testimony is routinely ignored, and the evidence covered up. The only remaining proof of the whole ordeal is the bee that stung Scully, collected by The Lone Gunmen. She hands it over, cooly stating, "I don't believe the FBI currently has an investigative unit qualified to pursue the evidence at hand."

At another crop outpost in Tunisia, Strughold learns that the X-Files office has been reopened...

[edit] Production

According to several different May 1998 newspaper articles on the rising costs of film production, 20th Century Fox spent around 60 million dollars promoting the film worldwide[5], and the production budget, originally said to be 60 million dollars as well, was eventually revealed to have been closer to 66 million. With a minimum expenditure of 126 million dollars for production/promotion, the movie had a worldwide gross of slightly over 189 million, of which the studio would have received around about 55%.

[edit] Soundtrack

Main article: The X-Files: The Album

[edit] Trivia

• The movie was filmed in the hiatus between the show's fourth and fifth seasons^{[citation needed]}, and reshoots were done during the filming of the show's fifth season^{[citation needed]}, which meant that some episodes of that season did not revolve around Mulder and/or Scully^{[citation needed]}, because one or both actors were not available^{[citation needed]}. Examples include "The Unusual Suspects," "Christmas Carol," "Chinga," and "Travelers."^{[citation needed]}
• This was the second 20th Century Fox Television-produced series to transfer to the big screen; the first was Batman. (A third, The Simpsons Movie, is slated for a July 27, 2007 release^{[citation needed]}. Additionally, the cancelled Fox television series Firefly was continued as the film Serenity in 2005 by a different studio.)^{[citation needed]}
• In one scene, Mulder leaves a bar and urinates on a wall that displays a poster for the 1996 20th Century Fox co-produced sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day,^{[citation needed]} which referenced The X-Files television series two years before this film was released.^{[citation needed]} Chris Carter was allegedly not a fan of Independence Day.^{[citation needed]}
• During the making of the film the filmmakers went to great lengths to preserve secrecy, including printing the script on red paper to prevent photocopying, and leaking disinformation to the media. ^[1] To help preserve secrecy, the film's working title was "Blackwood", named after Algernon Blackwood, a British writer of ghost stories.
• The movie was originally intended to make its network broadcast premiere on Fox the Sunday after September 11, 2001,^{[citation needed]} but was immediately pulled from the line-up.^{[citation needed]} The movie's central concept also deals with a complex conspiracy within FEMA, which has led some^{[citation needed]} to bring up the film since the agency's perceived ineptitude during Hurricane Katrina.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ The Making of "The X-Files", DVD, Special Features, 20 Century Fox, 1998.

[edit] External links

• The X Files at the Internet Movie Database
• The X Files at Rotten Tomatoes
• The X Files at Metacritic
• The X Files at Box Office Mojo

v • d • e The X-Files
Episode List
The X-Files	The X-Files film (Fight the Future) | TBA film sequel | DVDs | Soundtracks: The Truth and the Light, Songs in the Key of X, The Album | Books | The Magazine | Video games: The Game, Resist or Serve, Unrestricted Access
Main Characters	Fox Mulder | Dana Scully | Walter Skinner | John Doggett | Monica Reyes | The Lone Gunmen | Informants
Conspiracy	Cigarette Smoking Man | Deep Throat | X | Alex Krycek | Alien Bounty Hunter | Well-Manicured Man First Elder | Second Elder | Marita Covarrubias | Conrad Strughold | Knowle Rohrer The Syndicate | Purity Control | Black oil | Colonists | Men in Black
Other Characters	Eugene Victor Tooms | Flukeman | Donnie Pfaster | Robert Modell | "Monsters of the week" | Jose Chung Byers | Langly | Frohike | Duane Barry | Samantha Mulder | William Mulder | Teena Mulder | Baby William Agent Pendrell | Cassandra Spender | Jeffrey Spender | Diana Fowley | Alvin Kersh | Leyla Harrison
Cast and Crew	David Duchovny | Gillian Anderson | Mitch Pileggi | Robert Patrick | Annabeth Gish | William B. Davis | Nicholas Lea | Chris Carter | Glen Morgan and James Wong | Howard Gordon | Frank Spotnitz | Darin Morgan | David Nutter | Rob Bowman | Kim Manners
Related	Millennium | Harsh Realm | The Lone Gunmen