Hello. I am teabird, and I am an X-Files junkie. DH and I saw the movie Saturday night. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
Visually, the movie has the feel of the early Vancouver years, before the production was moved to California: dark, chilly, ambiguous. Scully and Mulder are now more mature and bonded, their daily lives no longer rooted in darkness.
Scully has devoted herself to medicine. The case she is struggling with involves a very sick boy, about the age their son William would have been. How Scully should treat his illness brings on an existential crisis, as she is forced to decide between a course dictated by science, and another that would be guided by emotions - her own, and the boy's parents'. She wants to believe in the supreme value of science, yet she has chosen to work in a Catholic hospital, where spiritual, emotional - and bureaucratic! - forces are aligned against her.
Mulder is Mulder, adorned by a beard, attractively scruffy, ensconced in a study where every available surface is pinned with a clipping about paranormal events. His signature poster, "I want to believe," rules the collection. (Of course.) He claims to be happy, but any X-Files junkie will know that's not true when the camera pans to the pencil-studded ceiling. Mulder wants to believe - but no one else does.
(Note: the study reminded me of John Nash's office in "A Beautiful Mind," one of my favorite movies, even though the fountain-pen scene was a fabrication by Ron Howard...)
Plot details can be found in any review. I'll just add one note: don't leave before the credits have ended. If you do, you'll miss something very special indeed...
