Filed Under "X"

My spouse and I were really excited about the premier of the movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe. As true X-Files junkies, we spent an entire week attending to household chores and fanagling work schedules in order to go out, guilt-free, on a movie date. While we were happy to have one another's company, my disappointment in the movie was mirrored by his.

First Problem: The thing was filmed in British Columbia, and the film makers tried to pass off much of the setting as rural West Virginia. Early in the movie, a time stamp appeared on the bottom of the screen identifying a location in West Virginia at a particular hour of the day. My brain, as that of a former resident of the state, could not compute the movie's sharply peaked mountains rising beside enormous expanses of snow-covered meadows, gouged by long, straight country roads -- features of topography that are entirely inconsistent with what one typically would find in the Mountain State.

Second Problem: The film attempts to weave current events into the plot, but the threads completely fray. Surely there is a better avenue for portraying unexplained psychic phenomena than to route it through the character of an anguished, pedophilic Catholic priest. As a matter of fact, the movie seemed to employ character stereotyping as rule of thumb, and it became tedious.

Third problem: One of the intriguing characteristics of both the series and the last movie was that the viewer was left wondering about the resolution ... not frustrated by unanswered questions ... but wondering, and wanting more. Sadly, I Want to Believe laboriously answered questions posed by its weak plot, and at about mid-point I found myself thinking, "I want to believe this is about to be over."

This film should be filed under "X" for xceedingly dull, xtraordinary waste of money, and xpelled from memory.