The X Files - Fight the Future

****

I was passing through the various Starz channels and found The X Files – Fight the Future (1998) was on, and considering I had been watching the show some lately, the channel surfing ended. What Scully and Mulder have been through…sheesh. This film further reiterates that. When Mulder and Scully both are at the brink of simply quitting (we see that they are indeed done with it all by I Want to Believe), something pushes them to continue. In Fight the Future, Scully considers just being a doctor while Mulder goes to the local watering hole to get drunk. They had just been subject to this FBI investigation as a board of inquiry probes them for possible ties to a building’s bombing in Texas as its location was not where Mulder and Scully were intended to be. Mulder’s boredom had gotten the best of him and Scully followed along to the other building where he was located. The Cigarette Smoking Man (of course, who else?) has this guy that does dastardly deeds for him, leaving a major IED in a coke machine, Mulder tries to get a soft drink out of. Terry O’Quinn (one of a few big names to guest star) is a bomb specialist who wants the room cleared out, and it is realized that he’s purposely perishing for some cause not quite learned.

You go all the way back to 35,000 years prior to 1998 when Neanderthals find aliens in a “cave”. Violence shows us what their blue blood can do. They carry a virus. The “Syndicate” (those peculiar guys always meeting with CSM, like the Well-Manicured Man) has been working in concert with them to allow some type of colonization while also working secretly on a vaccine.

Mulder, obviously, is the monkey wrench. He is assisted by a doctor considered an apocalyptic crackpot named Kurtzweil (Martin Landau) who knew Mulder’s father. Mulder soon has Scully involved with him as the two investigate virus-infected firemen that had dropped down into a Texas hole in the ground looking for a boy (Lucas Black of Sling Blade (1996)). These firemen and the boy were found in the bombed building…it all starts to come together. Eventually Mulder and Scully are led to a large cornfield near a bee harvesting green house infected with the alien virus. Scully is stung when a bee caught in Mulder’s clothes nabs her as the two are just about to kiss, robbing fans of that great moment.

The bomber henchman of the CSM snatches away Scully with another rotter as they pretended to be paramedics, shooting Mulder, luckily just grazing him. One of those moments I hold dear to my heart (besides Mulder and Scully’s warm embrace at the very end of the movie after they escape the alien ship and it blasts off with her admitting “she saw it”) is Mulder awakening to find the Lone Gunmen greeting him on the bed, and as he plans to leave, Skinner arriving in a futile attempt to stop him. Yes, Skinner and TLG in the same room together with Mulder…quite surreal. But quite an epic moment as well. Mulder does escape and learns from The Well Manicured Man where Scully is and all about the alien virus. Hell, WMM even gives Mulder a vaccine to help Scully. So off to Antarctica to find Scully he goes.

Can you just imagine that moment when Scully reawakens from her slumber, having been left to be biologically altered in an alien ship along with other human unfortunates, to find Mulder? Mulder, traveling all the way to Antarctica (imagine that idea, Mulder tackling the travel to this part of the world?!?!), to find her. That act of love, far beyond the pursuit of the truth that is out there that the two had given such time and effort towards, without a doubt had to tell Scully that no one would ever be there for her like Mulder. And he was. Come hell or high water or Syndicate, Mulder came to her rescue. No matter how improbable. No matter how implausible.

You know I can’t really objectively offer a critique to the film in regards to whether the film can be viewed as deserved of cinematic treatment (or this particular plot/arc) or of mainstream appeal. It means to me a great deal more as I’m a dye-in-the-wool X-Files nut, but I do admit that Fight the Future won’t perhaps be as accessible to those who didn’t follow the show as it is to us who do (and continue to watch it aplenty). Blythe Danner occupies the film as the head of the investigative FBI query behind Mulder and Scully’s involvement in recognizing the dangers of the bomb and how it could have prevented the deaths of those inside the building (actually already dead bodies as Mulder and Scully soon learn), so she looks on at them with accusatory eyes and speaks in an apathetic, executioner’s tenor. Armin Mueller-Stahl is a vocal member of the Syndicate, seemingly as powerful as CSM. In Tunista, of all places, there is another cornfield, with other greenhouses storing bees. Mulder seems destined to quit but Scully reminds him that because of their pursuit of the truth a cure for the virus could very well prevent catastrophic spread. So the X Files has its purpose, importance, and reason for existing. As Mulder had opined after a few shots in the watering hole in DC about how much of a fool and laughingstock he was considered, his work wasn’t in vain. If anything it provided the means to possibly someday, in the future, fight against what blasted off in that giant ship in Antarctica.

Big events like Mulder inside the ship, saving Scully by injecting the vaccine into the ship which causes the hive to become infected by it, and seeing it blast off into the sky--as well as John Neville's adieu to the series in a car explosion after actually helping Mulder instead of working against him, doing so for the sake of his grandchildren--are my go-to examples of this film's cinematic contributions. Television now has the ability to go places the movie industry does because there is money directed towards that medium (including streaming services) and brilliance in writing as a crop of very astute storytellers lend their talents to series allowing them to flesh out characters and give them time to go into places the movie industry is handcuffed by. Still, I personally like that Fight the Future is relaxed into its universe, introducing names that might mean something to movie fans but remembering that truly those who care come to X Files for Mulder and Scully's neverending journey through the darkness of evidence coverup and doctored lies.