Premiered 6/19/98
It's hard to review this as a movie and as an X-Files fan, which is because I seem to have two different writing styles. When I watch an episode of the X-Files, I'll usually watch it a few times to pick it apart, then I post my thoughts as more of a stream of conscious rant on what I watched. With my movie reviews, I started that as something for my job and I would post them to the radio station's website, so I tried to write as little about the plot as possible. I focused on the actors, the special effects (if any), and just enough of the plot without spoiling anything. Writing about this movie as just as movie is hard for me, possibly my hardest movie review, since I am invested in seeing these characters more than any others that appear in films. Being as invested as I am in the characters, it's interesting to see a new side of Mulder in a bar. It serves two purposes- its not just a funny scene, but its a way to sum up the entire series in under 30 seconds.
As a fan of the series, it seems very obvious to me that this was written a year earlier in the break between the fourth and fifth seasons. This could in fact have worked better as the fourth season premiere and opener for the fifth season since it features the bees and the oil that played more of a role during that year of the series. However part of it does fit in line with the fifth year, which featured the use of a vaccine to the black oil. Chris Carter stripped away much of the mythology, which is actually for the best, since it would have bogged down the movie with far too much plot. Some fans may have felt cheated since they didn't see Krycek or other events from the series, but I realize why those cuts were necessary.
What actually bothers me as a fan is that they knew they were writing the Well-Manicured Man out of the series by the end of Season 5, so they should have got much more mileage out of the character before his death. He did appear three times in during that season (Patient X, The Red and The Black, and The End), but it seems like much more could have been done with his role. They did imply his role as good guy, but killed him off just as it was revealed, which is much the same way that X met his end in the beginning of Season 4.
The use of the black oil bugs me too, though I think it is most effective in this movie. It acts as a vessel for creating new aliens, much like the face hugger in Aliens, so humans or any other species act as nothing more than a cocoon. It fit this grander scale for a movie yet it just complicates what we've previously seen on the series. The first use was a vessel as well as it body jumped into people in it's quest to find it's space ship and go home. Cool; its a liquid E.T. that wanted to phone home. Then came another pair of episodes where it was less fluid, but still made its victims into mindless zombies. Chris Carter always expects fans to read between the lines and understand his thought process, so my only guess is that this version of the black oil is an original version that came to Earth first and was never seen before because it was trapped in a cave; what has been seen before is the decaffeinated version.
I do like the revelation by the Well-Manicured Man, before he becomes the Well Done Man in a car bomb, which is that he tells Mulder about Samantha's disappearance. She was given up by his father so that she could become part of their experiments into clones and hybrids and now it finally makes sense to me why there are so many varieties of clones. Eves, the blond boys in Season 4 that were seen with the Samantha clones, the adult clones of Samantha, even those doctors. I think that could have even been explored much more within the series, but I am going to "read between the lines" again and assume that the blond boys were the son of another Syndicate member.
F.E.M.A. being mentioned as the government within a government sounds very much like what the Syndicate could be and that seems like an interesting new wrinkle to the series. Cigarette Smoking Man as the head of F.E.M.A. could have worked as well to finally explain just what his job is, except we've already seen him within the F.B.I. as a man who ranks above A.D. Walter Skinner. I guess its back to my original theory, that CSM works at the F.B.I. but his role within the Syndicate is that he's their head of security so he oversees moles within other branches of the government. I still like knowing that F.E.M.A. will take over if the government should fall. It's so eerie that it just has to be true.
While this movie complicates some plot threads and adds interesting new wrinkles to the series, I think its strongest point is between its two central characters, Mulder and Scully. The moments they have together are the best moments of the movie and it ties back into the ending of Season 5 as well. The possibility that Scully would leave the F.B.I. may be more believable as a part of a season ending cliffhanger, but they did pull it off wonderfully through their dialogue. Mulder shows more feelings towards Scully than ever as he says she owes nothing and he owes her everything, which ties it all back to the "Redux" arc where he blamed himself for Scully's cancer. She also shows more feelings than ever towards Mulder as it looks like she is about to spit out the words "I love you" before being stung by that stowaway bee. The characters of Mulder and Scully are at their strongest at the movie's conclusion, despite not being X-Files agents, and it acts a great way to lead into the new direction for Season 6.
