The X-Files: I Want To Believe

Some files are meant never to be closed, and many would argue that The X-Files fits that category. Six years after the series ended and 10 years after the last film, Scully and Mulder take barely a scene between them to get The X-Files back in its rhythm. It isn’t the best case that the two have solved, it isn’t the most difficult, it isn’t even the best of science fictions, and it barely fits into the category of paranormal, but it is perhaps the closest look at two characters that TV audiences have loved for years now.

Older and wiser, less flashier and argumentative, Scully (Anderson) and Mulder (Duchovny) here are retired from the FBI and at peace. Yes, they are living together, and the film just lets that drop, casually. After all those years of speculation about whether they would do “it”, when they would do “it”, this matter-of-factness sets the pace for the rest of this adventure. This Scully and Mulder are not here to impress us — that battle was long won— they are here to be themselves, do what they believe in. And if you think about it, the Scully and Mulder we know would go about their love in their own way, at their own pace.

When the FBI seeks their help to look for a missing agent — the only clue they have is a psychic who claims to be able to see her — they get into it grudgingly. With everybody doubting the psychic, Mulder, who is the “believer” of The X-Files, is quickly drawn in. Scully, now working as a doctor in a church-run hospital, is as always the sceptic.

More than the search for the FBI agent, the film at many levels is about the larger question of faith, and how far one would go for it. The film pits stem-cell therapy against religion, is about scientists taking organ transplant far enough to play god, about a serial paedophile priest who prays with the belief that God will forgive him, about Scully debating reason and emotion in trying to save a dying patient, and about Mulder who seeks no reason at all for his beliefs.

There are many things stunningly out of place. Such as a top-notch surgeon like Scully “googling” to find out about stem-cell therapy, and apparently using the information on her patient to save his life. But Anderson is so earnest, her portrayal of a doctor torn between what she knows and what she would like to believe so tortured that you can almost believe she is doing everything in her power to save the boy.

Yes, it is not The X-Files we know, but be as it were about former FBI agents Scully and Mulder, let it herald the beginning of a whole new adventure: The Ex-Files. I want to believe.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com