I Want To Believe

[Guest blogger: Jeff Stone! Very eloquent...]

.......is a two-part episode of Millennium dusted off, rewritten with Mulder and Scully, and unleashed on the big screen to a legion of X-Philes, who must have spent the whole film going "THIS is the best they could come up with?!"

It is quite bizarre just how....underwhelming this film is. As I say, it's not an X Files story!! It even has Creepy Hawk-Nosed Guy from that silly devils-in-a-diner ep of Millennium. You can see exactly where the padding has been brutally shoved into the script to extend it out to feature length. The 'message' about stem cells is muddled...good? Bad? What would Jebus do? Are we supposed to care? The 'metaphors' about faith and belief are heavy-handed and ponderous. Skinner's cameo is an insult. The connections we are shown to the priest, the agents etc. all make sense, but in such a vague way that you feel that they started backwards with the secret and worked out how they could have M & S investigate it. I dunno if that makes sense, but the film doesn't really make much itself.

The film is also MISERABLE. None of the humour that leavened even the most depressing TV episode. Again, this is Millennium, not the bloody X Files. It's sad that the best moment of the whole thing is a strange joke involving Bush and J Edgar Hoover.

Oh, and the kiddy fiddler priest has lung cancer. Never mind why that should be relevant or necessary to the story, but WTF. Let's give him lung cancer.

Another thing that amused me is how the movie is a 'reverse Corman', in which millions were spent to make it look like it cost about $50,000. This is POOR, Chris. This is DULL. This is not a movie; this is not even a good TV episode. I am reminded of the DW TVM in 96...all that time to write a killer script, all that money shelled out (by Fox, the worst TV network in the known world, both times) - and *this* is all they could manage.

F**kin' pathetic.

I'd love to see the outtakes, where Frank Black is running around solving this case instead of our two heroes.

Jeff

[END]