The X-Files Movie Made Me Emo, An Open Letter
It was more like X-Fails. I can't come up with enough sound bites to satisfy my disappointment in this movie. There are no plot spoilers here, although it would be hard to spoil the movie more. It's rotten, it's garbage, and I can't believe I'm so upset about that.
An open letter to the director and creator:
Dear Chris Carter,
How can you make X-Files boring? Why do you violate your own narrative conventions in the first scene by listing a location and time, then cutting back and forth to a separate location and a later time? Why is there no background music at all during most of the movie? Why is the paranatural material in the movie so boring that it would not work as an episode if cut down? How can you make the deaths of several characters with a lot of screen time have no emotional impact on me? How can you make the last-minute arrival of an "old friend" seem unimportant? I've never been so uninspired, except to rewrite your screenplay.
Before I saw this movie, I had wanted to watch all of the early X-Files seasons. I may never do that now, for fear of subjecting myself and my friends once again to something that I remember fondly but which turns out to be trite and cheesy.
Your movie would have been more compelling if we had only seen things from Mulder and Scully's perspectives, rather than knowing what they were getting into. That's how the series worked in a lot of cases. Most episodes showed indirectly that bad or paranormal things were happening without showing exactly what. We learned exactly what was going on at the climax. Why did you deviate from that?
This movie will not work with a director's cut. The problem is the script. You didn't give us something to care about, and you took away every chance we had to see the characters in a new light. It was the same light that we'd seen hundreds of times. We could have written the dialog ourselves. Many of us did. Did you feel trapped by that? Did you feel that you had to write within the confines of fans' expectations? You pussy.
I'm trying not to redefine my conception of X-Files and its fans after seeing this movie, but it's not easy. It's so tempting to believe that the early fans of the series liked it because they felt like they could improve it. I want to believe, but you're making it so hard.
Your fan,
Lifeblender
An open letter to the director and creator:
Dear Chris Carter,
How can you make X-Files boring? Why do you violate your own narrative conventions in the first scene by listing a location and time, then cutting back and forth to a separate location and a later time? Why is there no background music at all during most of the movie? Why is the paranatural material in the movie so boring that it would not work as an episode if cut down? How can you make the deaths of several characters with a lot of screen time have no emotional impact on me? How can you make the last-minute arrival of an "old friend" seem unimportant? I've never been so uninspired, except to rewrite your screenplay.
Before I saw this movie, I had wanted to watch all of the early X-Files seasons. I may never do that now, for fear of subjecting myself and my friends once again to something that I remember fondly but which turns out to be trite and cheesy.
Your movie would have been more compelling if we had only seen things from Mulder and Scully's perspectives, rather than knowing what they were getting into. That's how the series worked in a lot of cases. Most episodes showed indirectly that bad or paranormal things were happening without showing exactly what. We learned exactly what was going on at the climax. Why did you deviate from that?
This movie will not work with a director's cut. The problem is the script. You didn't give us something to care about, and you took away every chance we had to see the characters in a new light. It was the same light that we'd seen hundreds of times. We could have written the dialog ourselves. Many of us did. Did you feel trapped by that? Did you feel that you had to write within the confines of fans' expectations? You pussy.
I'm trying not to redefine my conception of X-Files and its fans after seeing this movie, but it's not easy. It's so tempting to believe that the early fans of the series liked it because they felt like they could improve it. I want to believe, but you're making it so hard.
Your fan,
Lifeblender