The X-Files: Fight the Future — A Pre-Pandemic Movie Fit For Our Times
Cinema remains timeless because the best films not only age well but gain new forms of relevancy. During our current predicament as a species facing a biological threat, apocalyptic literature and film gain a higher significance beyond mere entertainment. Suddenly Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” or Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” become frighteningly familiar. Hunkered down in the eastern corner of Los Angeles, where the streets are slowly taking on an eerie silence, two nights ago I suddenly felt an impulse to revisit one of the great underrated virus films of the 1990s, “The X-Files: Fight the Future.” Released in June 1998, this was one of that decade’s more impressive forays into adapting hit TV for the big screen. Now largely forgotten except among diehard fans of “The X-Files” TV show, this is an apocalyptic noir that taps with paranoid elegance into both our current bacterial crisis and a lingering suspicion the powers that be hide dark secrets.
Even prehistory is hiding something in this movie as it opens in 35,000 B.C. where two cavemen are attacked by a black oil emerging from what appears to be an alien creature. We then cut to 1998, where walking across the screen like young 90’s sex symbols, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been taken off their beloved X-Files, where they investigate general paranormal cases and a wider government conspiracy to cover-up extraterrestrial life. The bombing of a government building early in the film sets the two agents on a new quest that leads them right back to their usual territory. It turns out the bombing was meant to cover-up evidence of a coming viral plague. A paranoid doctor named Kurtzweil (Martin Landau) alerts Mulder to a deep government conspiracy involving shadow operators, FEMA and other unknown figures in using a viral outbreak to pave the way for alien colonization of Earth.
When “The X-Files” first premiered in 1993 on the Fox network, it played like a gothic phantasmagoria of a post-Cold War mentality taking hold in the United States. With the Soviet Union gone there were no enemies left, only an alien invasion seemed powerful enough to threaten U.S. economic and cultural hegemony. Created by Chris Carter, “The X-Files” set two FBI agents, the determined Mulder and skeptical Scully, to face not a foreign threat, but internal ones in the form of “monster of the week” episodes and a broader “mythology.” Mulder was convinced his sister had been abducted by aliens in the 1970s and the government was somehow covering up what those strange UFOs were really all about. Scully tried to apply rational scientific analysis to this and every paranormal case they faced in-between unlocking the conspiracy. By the fifth season the show was enough of a hit and cultural phenomenon, popularizing terms like “The Truth is Out There” and “Trust No One,” that Carter decided it was time to leap into a widescreen canvas.
The movie, sub-headed “Fight the Future,” was shot in the summer of 1997 and would break ground in literally flowing out of season five narrative-wise and then flowing back into season six. It was directed by Rob Bowman, a series regular who would go on to shoot less gripping fare like “Reign of Fire” and “Elektra.” For those interested, the two season five episodes that set the stage for the movie’s theme are the epics “Patient X” and “The Red & the Black.” But Carter’s sharp screenplay is brilliantly crafted in a way where it doesn’t matter if you watched every episode of the show or not, it stands on its own as an atmospheric pre-pandemic thriller. I say “pre-pandemic” because it’s a film about the sense that a great disease or cataclysm is on its way. Kurtzweil huddles with Mulder in an alley, warning him that “a plague to end all plagues” is coming, created by a shadowy cabal “negotiating a planned Armageddon.” With beautifully conveyed urgency, Landau’s doctor describes a pandemic in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the reins of government, this as the alien virus renders us helpless before the extraterrestrial takeover. This is grandiose fantasy in the best tradition of H.G. Wells or Michael Crichton where the fantastical is combined with just enough of a hint of realism.
“The X-Files” rarely uses great amounts of CGI as a movie, preferring to be set in dark streets, morgues and apartments richly photographed by Ward Russell. This is a potent thriller of images. Carter’s script is deliberately cryptic, requiring the viewer to pay close attention to visual language. A boy falls down a hole in Texas only to be infected by the dark oil from thousands of years before, soon government forces move in and turn the spot into a camp fit for containing some toxic spill. Later a shadowy government scientist (Jeffrey DeMunn) will climb down the hole in a hazmat suit and discover a creature has emerged from the oil itself, it is a virus in mutation. Mulder and Scully meanwhile wander arid Texas desert looking for clues, finding hidden structures full of bee swarms. Bowman also gives us refined men in suits meeting in London discussing the need to work on a vaccine to combat the coming plague. These are meant to be the secret agents of history, represented best by the show’s key villain, known only as the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) and an intimating cabal figure played with eloquence by Armin Mueller-Stahl.
The timelessly relevant theme of “The X-Files: Fight the Future” is that as we go about our daily lives viral threats take shape and the ruling order prepares its own agenda. The COVID-19 pandemic is a much more serious matter, the latest chapter in the long string of biological threats humanity has faced as a species. But with a president seemingly incompetent, if not downright ignorant about the nature of crisis, and populations suddenly in fear of both the invisible plague and the disruption of daily life, the fantasies of “The X-Files” are a nightmare reflection of our current state. In one of the film’s best scenes, brimming with an almost gothic romanticism, Mulder and Scully nearly kiss, and an infectious bee sting shatters the moment. Later another cabal figure, the Well-Manicured Man (a regal John Neville), makes it clear to Mulder during a late night limo ride that humanity’s fate lies in a vaccine. Is this not how we feel now?
Beautifully framed by the music of the show’s great house composer Mark Snow, the film hurtles towards a grand climax best not to spoil. 22 years later and “The X-Files: Fight the Future” gains a new timelessness that might help it to be rediscovered. It’s a surreal thriller for a time when all that we thought we knew suddenly breaks into a puzzle.
