Tying in with the home video release of The X-Files - I Want to Believe and coinciding with its tenth anniversary, 20th Century Fox has given the first X-Files feature film, subtitled Fight the Future, the Blu-ray treatment.
While the story involves The X-Files’ myth-arc about extraterrestrials and the shadow government known as the Syndicate, series creator Chris Carter, who co-produced and wrote the screenplay, does a good job walking a fine line of furthering the series story along while providing enough information to not completely lose those new to The X-Files. Unfortunately, his heavy hand is felt forcing the plot along, greatly diminishing the logic and suspense.
The film opens in North Texas, 35,000 B.C. as two Neanderthals track a creature to a cave, which turns out to be an alien. When they kill the alien, what appears to be blood at first is actually an extraterrestrial parasite that X-philes will know as “black oil,” which it resembles in appearance as was foreshadowed during the opening credits. Cut to present day, and a young boy discovers the same cavern and is infected with the black oil along with some firemen who attempted to rescue him. They are all whisked away under secrecy.
Fight the Future takes place in the series chronology between the fifth and sixth seasons. At the end of Season Five, the X-Files were shut down by the agency, which is why we find agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) assigned to a bomb threat in Dallas under Special Agent in Charge Darius Michaud (Terry O'Quinn). For reasons not clear except to the writers, Mulder on a hunch decides to search another building where he finds a bomb. Michaud says he will handle the bomb and orders everyone to leave. However, the audience sees that Michaud allows the explosion to happen.
Article comments
1 - Aaron
"There are two commentary tracks: the original commentary with Carter and director Rob Bowman from the previous DVD release and a BonusView picture-in-picture commentary with Carter, Bowman, co-author Frank Spotnitz, and co-producer Daniel Sackheim, which is also available as an audio track."
What do they talk about? Anything interesting? :)