THE X-FILES- FIGHT THE FUTURE
The first X Files film maintains a dark,
straight faced sense of humour throughout. When Muldar takes a leak in an alley behind a bar, he urinates under a poster of the
Independence Day movie. Scully continues to stand as a sceptic, until the end when we are left deliberately uncertain as to how much she remembers and sees during her abduction and containment in an alien breeding centre. Does she even see the Close Encounters Of The Third Kind style space ship at the end
Gillian Anderson plays Scully somewhat lighter in mood than usual. Muldar jokes with her early on about a locked door in a building that they are searching for a possible bomb, and teases her with the idea that they are trapped on the roof. When he genuinely gets locked in with the bomb she doesn't believe him at first. Later, when they are surrounded by aliens and he is trying desperately to carry her to safety, she seems to have died and to require resuscitation, but she may actually be getting her own back for his earlier cruel joke. It is she, rather than he, who presents the FBI with the slender evidence that serves to get the X-Files themselves reopened. That suggests a hint of belief beneath the scepticism.
The film pays homage to many other films, from North By Northwest, (The chase by helicopter through corn fields and the mount Rushmore like descent to the mysterious domes that contain the bees), Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, (The alien ship, and that Mount Rushmore thing again, as Close Encounters borrowed that from North By Northwest), 2001: A space Oddessy (the caveman's fall through the ice in 35,000 BC melts into the scene of the doomed child falling through the hole in the ground in Kansas (present day), The Thing From Another World (and The Thing, it's remake) in which an alien ship is found in the polar regions, Conspiracy theory (the crackpot who gives the heroes the clues they need seems right out of the plot of the Mel Gibson film, and Independence Day, (exploding away whole buildings, and that poster). Coma is also included in here, with Scully's ambulance crew kidnapping her away for questionable research practices). Such tongue in cheek homage means no pro-occultist could really claim this film, or the series that spawned it, to be their own. It belongs to the doubters, skeptics and Humanists far more.