|
|
The X-Files: Fight the Future
The truth is out there...or is it?
 |
The X-Files: Fight the Future
|
|
Rated PG-13
|
|
Starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, Mitch Pileggi, Blythe Danner
|
|
Directed by Rob Bowman
|
|
Twentieth Century Fox
|
|
105 minutes
|
|
|
Review by Melissa J. Perenson
 he X-Files: Fight the Future is the first motion picture based on Fox's hit TV series The X-Files, which was created by Chris Carter. In the movie, a young boy in northern Texas falls into an abandoned cave. Before his friends can help him back up, a black oil-like substance seeps into his body. The firemen who try to rescue him suffer a similar fate.
Soon after, in Dallas, FBI agents Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) find themselves called on to investigate a bomb threat involving a federal office building. The former partners used to work together on the FBI's so-called X-Files, unsolved cases that Mulder believes were part of a government cover-up to hide the existence of extraterrestrials. While this assignment is a bit more mundane than the agents are used to, they're just glad to still be working together now that the X-Files division has been closed by the government. However, when things go terribly wrong during the case, Mulder and Scully are set up to take a fall.
The balance tips back in their favor when Kurzweil (Landau), an old friend of Mulder's father, reinvigorates Mulder's search for the truth by pointing him toward questions nobody else seems interested in asking. Meanwhile, Scully has to stand before an internal FBI committee investigating the bombing, and the committee's subsequent actions force her to reconsider her future with the FBI--and without Mulder.
As Mulder and Scully together seek out the truth of what really happened
in Texas, the members of the mysterious Consortium--who appear to be behind the conspiracy Mulder so ardently believes in--meet to determine their course of action in light of a global emergency triggered by the black oil. And in light of Mulder's insistent pursuit of the truth.
You know it's The X-Files when...
The X-Files movie has a fast-paced story--written by Carter and series co-executive producer Frank Spotnitz--that's bound to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. It includes all of the elements found in a typical X-Files episode: unexplained phenomena, fright-filled moments, and a multi-layered subtext. It also successfully combines an intelligent story with big-budget action and eye-catching special effects (a balance few event films manage to achieve--witness Godzilla), even though the convoluted plot will likely leave moviegoers puzzling over how the pieces fit together.
Against the odds, Carter has also made a film that is accessible to a general audience but that won't seem redundant to longtime fans of the TV series. This is thanks to a clever narrative and to the fact that the film focuses on only one aspect of the X-Files mythos. Even so, Files fans will get more out of the Fight the Future than non-fans, and certain scenes definitely take on a different meaning when viewed in the context of the series' five-year history.
Director Rob Bowman, who helmed 25 X-Files TV episodes, keeps the action rolling smoothly and crafts some exquisite shots that would have been impossible to capture on the small screen. Likewise, Anderson and Duchovny's TV chemistry translates smoothly to the big screen, and the high emotion quotient of the film even brings a new undercurrent of energy and camaraderie to their already unique relationship. Both actors do well at making their performances go the distance on the larger canvas of film without being distracted by the movie's greater landscape.
As Carter promised, Fight the Future also answers long-standing questions raised on the TV show, but in the process it asks a host of new questions itself. That's frustrating news for fans of the series, but in the end it's okay--after all, it wouldn't truly be an X-File if everything were tied up neatly in a box.
Fight the Future succeeds at being an entertaining movie while at the same
time providing true fans with the quintessential X-Files experience. Better
still is the fact that the fresh acting of Duchovny and Anderson--and indeed the reinvigoration of the franchise itself--indicates that The X-Files has
avoided the fate of Star Trek: The Next Generation, whose first film effort, Generations, proved uninspiring.
-- Melissa
Back to the top.
Rod Serling's A Town Has Turned to Dust
Towns may turn to dust, but bigotry is timeless
|
Rod Serling's A Town Has Turned to Dust
|
|
Starring Ron Perlman, Stephen Lang, Gabriel Olds
|
|
Directed by Rob Nilsson
|
|
The Sci-Fi Channel
|
|
June 27, 9 p.m. ET
|
|
|
Review by Tamara I. Hladik
 annify (Olds), a young journalist from the New Angeles asteroid, has a bead on the story that's going to make his career. On Earth, an aboriginal Driver named Tommy Tall Bear (Zahn McLarnon) has been accused of attempted rape and is to be transported back to civilization on New Angeles for trial. Quite a story for Hannify, for Earth is proscribed--an off-limits, radioactive dust bowl. No one's been allowed back since civilization fled the exhausted planet. A forsaken few who were stuck on the now-desolate planet pick over the Earth's carcass for scrap metal to export to the asteroids, where civilization resides. Earth's forsaken, the aboriginal "Drivers" and the Caucasoid "Dwellers" who exploit them, live in a world with the barest breath of law. To break this story would be a career-maker for ambitious Hannify.
The Earth town Carbon is a choke-dry burg led by Jerry Paul (Perlman), the brute strongman of the Dwellers. It is his wife that 17-year-old Tommy has allegedly tried to rape. The Drivers are ironically named, for they are more the Driven, harassed out of their traditional homesteads by the racism of the Dwellers, a racism that is mined and refined like ore by Paul. By the time Hannify lands on Earth, his big story is bigger--Paul is forging a lynch mob out of local fears and prejudices. Hammering hatred into a weapon, Paul and his gang rush the makeshift jail, where Tommy is being held. The makeshift sheriff, Harvey Denton (Lang), backs down, and Tommy is strung up like jerky meat.
Afterward, for all the righteous furor, the town still seems uneasy, and Hannify's instincts begin to catch the scent of the real story...
Perlman revitalizes Serling's 1958 teleplay
A Town has Turned to Dust is a quiet but strong movie. Essentially a morality play about the perils of racism, the piece is neither overwhelmed by its futuristic setting nor independent of it; it is a coolly integrated work. Its drama, its characters, and its plot are well woven into its environment--Carbon seems alien enough, but its violence is ours: the gun, the club, the fist.
If A Town Has Turned to Dust's relentless focus on bigotry and its fully conceived and developed characters feel familiar, it is because the drama was written by Rod Serling. The teleplay and its additional drafts were among Serling's papers, and A Town has Turned to Dust actually aired in 1958 on CBS-TV's Playhouse 90. That version was directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, The Island of Dr. Moreau) and starred, interestingly enough, Rod Steiger, William Shatner and James Gregory. Serling's widow, Carol, worked with producer Nelle Nugent (Amadeus) and director Rob Nilsson (Northern Lights) to imbue it again with life.
So much of this production is of superior caliber: the art direction (wonderfully devolutionarily gritty), the cinematography (saturated sepia tones), the casting, and the acting (except for Barbara Jane Reams, who is a bit under par as Maya, Paul's wife). Ron Perlman as Paul deserves special mention. Paul, as interpreted by Perlman, is an unabashed brute, yet the scene in which he makes a humble, impassioned and sincere cry for Maya's warmth and love does not turn trite. Paul does not discover his softer side and he is not on the cusp of a new awareness. He is a brute still, and, as rendered by Perlman, one who suggests that even the crudest among us, the most emotionally illiterate, long to speak and hear words of affection and love. What is real and familiar about this delivery is that this desire is not at odds with that base nature; it is just another, very ordinary, part of it.
This script was written quite a few ticks ago, and it would be
reasonable to question if a teleplay of this vintage could say something about bigotry to which modern folks could relate. Though it does have moments of awkwardness where the dialogue could be shined up a bit, as a whole, this is demanding drama, must-see SF.
Also look for singer Judy Collins, who gives a good shake as the sheriff's moral conscience. What I liked best about this production was its illustration of how weak and supple the will becomes when it compromises with injustice, how it even seems necessary that some are oppressed so that all might have a greater stability.
-- Tamara
Back to the top.
|
