The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

"Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show's first feature-film incarnation, The X-Files," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The first X-Files movie, released before the show ended, added nothing substantive.... The new film, [Chris] Carter's debut as a feature director, adds even less, but it won't hurt the show's legacy, at least among die-hard fans who appreciated it as a wittily sustained pop take on what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called 'the paranoid style in American politics.'"

Carter "has dispensed with the convoluted mythology that bogged down the show in the last third of its run," notes Stephanie Zacharek. "I Want to Believe comes off like a solid - if not great - episode from one of the show's early seasons, a reasonably suspenseful story made by a director with a sturdy sense of how to tell a story. Yet it's the very modesty of "I Want to Believe" that makes it so admirable."

Updated through 7/26.

Also in Salon: "I was crazy about The X-Files, Fox's pre-9/11 ode to trusting no one," writes Rebecca Traister. "Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend. But the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for was Scully."

"Did we really just fast-forward through six years of long-deferred passion to arrive at boringly consummated couplehood?" asks Dana Stevens. Also in Slate, Juliet Lapidos: "Just as Twin Peaks was superficially about talking logs and psychic dreams but more essentially about small-town betrayals and the trauma of incest, the X-Files standalone episodes, beneath the paranormal apparatus, were really about sad sacks acting out."

"The last time a geek favorite delivered such an anticlimactic follow-up to a cherished science-fiction institution, a rascally, malapropism-spouting Rastafarian frogman named Jar-Jar Binks was prominently involved," growls Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Even at its stride, The X-Files was a load of malarkey," writes Jan Stuart in the Los Angeles Times. "But it was thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable. One could say the same about the first two-thirds of The X-Files: I Want to Believe before it spins out of control and into a delirious plane of awfulness."

Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "I Want to Believe, as the title suggests, deals with issues of faith and credence, raising some interesting issues along the way; unfortunately, the script (by Frank Spotnitz and series creator Chris Carter) ties its various plot strands together in a clunky and unconvincing way, allowing theme to run roughshod over story."

"It's technically true that the new film is accessible to the uninitiated, but the mediocre material may only interest those with prior emotional or paranormal investment," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe is in no conventional sense a good movie," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. And yet, for fans of the series, it may be just good enough." It's "not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, provided you, too, want to believe. But you have to want it pretty badly."

"What I appreciated about The X-Files: I Want to Believe was that it involved actual questions of morality, just as The Dark Knight does," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It's not simply about good and evil but about choices."

John Patterson talks with Carter for the Guardian.

Gregg LaGambina talks with Gillian Anderson for the AV Club. More from John Hiscock in the Telegraph, where Will Lawrence talks with David Duchovny.

"[I]t's worth looking at how [Anderson and Duchovny] have crafted careers that allow them to enter and exit the geek ghetto as they see fit," writes Alonso Duralde, introducing a guide at MSNBC: "Any actors who are about to board a starship might want to read this safety card first."

Elaine Lipworth talks with Billy Connolly for the Independent.

Allyssa Lee meets "lead snow man" Andrés Dominguez for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates: "Because the show has been off the air for so many years now, audiences may wonder why these characters haven't moved on from their obsessively singular points of view," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "Some things never change, and even though the actors haven't lost their charm and sparkle, it feels like they're trapped in a rerun, minus the action."

"It remains a pleasure just to see Anderson, one of the best and most chronically underemployed American actresses, doing anything on-screen," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But long before I Want to Believe reaches its anticlimax, you too may be having visions - of the exit sign."

"'Don't give up!' is ultimately revealed to be the film's mantra, though given the contrivances and clunky speeches that abound, it resonates less as a statement about the need to keep the faith than as Carter's plea to fans whose reward for a decade of patience is merely this forgettable mediocrity." Nick Schager.

"The movie has manifold pleasures for the show's fans, as much for the interplay of Mulder and Scully - the soulmates who were afraid to become lovers - as for a story that concentrates on human, not astral, malfeasance," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "But for the uninitiated, The X Files: I Want to Believe may seem as musty and forbidding as one of those dank secrets that Mulder and Scully were forever digging up from some backyard, or fetid swamp, or their own aching hearts."

"For anyone who believed the film could recapture something other than the palpable chemistry between Mulder and Scully and the constantly eerie atmosphere present in the TV show, get ready to have your belief system shaken to its core," writes Nick Plowman. "It's no wonder the details surrounding the film were kept under such tight wraps."

Update, 7/26: "[F]ar from making believers out of the audience, it does everything possible to turn them into staunch realists, not to mention people who might then wonder, What was the big deal about that show, anyway?" Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com.

Posted by dwhudson at July 25, 2008 11:04 AM