AmateurMovieReviews.com

There are very few television shows whose plotlines lend themselves to the silver screen. Can you imagine anyone trying to make a movie based on Desperate Housewives? But one show that did seem like the perfect candidate for a theatrical tie-in was the wildly popular Chris Carter creation The X-Files. So when Fight the Future was released in 1998, fans were ready to see what their favorite TV show looked like on the big screen.

Fight the Future opens with a scene showing two men walking through a vast expanse of snow and ice. A title card tells us that this was happening 35,000 years ago in what is now North Texas. The men are apparently hunting some game and have tracked their prey to a cave. They go into the cave prepared for the final confrontation, but are surprised to find what can only be called an alien creature. The men fight, and the creature spills the famous black, oily substance that X-Files fans know too well.

The scene then changes to the present, showing several boys playing in the modern North Texas landscape. One of the boys falls into the same cave that served as the arena for the long-ago fight we just witnessed. As the boy's friends crowd around the opening and ask if he's okay, we clearly see that he is not. The black oil has taken over his body and we know he's done for. The same goes for the rescuers who are subsequently called in to find out what's going on. Soon, unmarked vans that practically scream "government conspiracy" arrive and start to clean up the mess.

With that, we switch locations yet again and go to the Federal Building in Dallas. There has been a bomb threat, and FBI agents are sweeping both that building and surrounding ones. Two of the agents assigned to this task are Special Agents Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) and Dana Sculley (Gillian Anderson), the main characters of both the television series and this movie.

Although the agents discover the location of the bomb in time to have a specialist come in and try to disarm it, the explosives nevertheless detonate, thereby destroying almost the entire building. How did the bomb go off? Did the specialist make a mistake and cut the wrong wire? No. He just sat in front of the explosives and calmly watched the timer tick down to 0:00. Obviously, there's more to the situation than meets the eye.

Thanks to information provided by a man named Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), Mulder and Scully don't just take the bombing at face value. They dig a lot deeper and soon find out that the bombing was related to the incident in North Texas, which in turn was related to the larger government conspiracy that Mulder has been trying to get to the bottom of for almost his entire career. The rest of the film then deals with Mulder and Scully's investigation into the conspiracy. However, since the television series wasn't over yet, viewers immediately understood that the two agents wouldn't get all the answers.

Screenwriter Chris Carter said that one of the biggest challenges of making an X-Files movie was doing a story that would be worthwhile to the show's regular viewers and be interesting to those who'd never seen an episode before. I think Carter and director Rob Bowman succeeded in that respect.

When I saw Fight the Future in the theater, I was a big X-Files fan, so everything naturally made sense to me and I didn't really think about how the movie would play for someone seeing the characters for the first time. However, I recently had the opportunity to re-watch the film on DVD -- after several years of not seeing a single X-Files episode. I was surprised at how well Fight the Future has held up as a movie in its own right. I was still interested in what was happening in the film even though I had long forgotten what the whole conspiracy thing was about.

Overall, Fight the Future is a decent thriller that is entertaining enough to watch whether you're an X-Files fan or not. The story is understandable, the characters are interesting, and Duchovny and Anderson have great chemistry. This is a good movie to see on a quiet Friday night at home.