I went into this movie with perhaps foolishly high hopes. I am a long-time fan of the series, ever since I was a kid. I saw Fight the Future and walked away entertained. While I did walk away from I Want to Believe having been entertained and not feeling like I wasted my $7.50, I did feel a little let down.
Don't get me wrong: I Want to Believe is indeed a stand-alone story in the X-Files universe. While you can't enjoy it fully if you've never seen any X-Files shows or Fight the Future, it can be enjoyed if you know the story of how the tv series ended (hence the reason why Mulder and Scully aren't together, etc.) The story is good, the acting is excellent and the story is everything you'd expect from the X-Files. My only gripe is that this feels more like a 2-hour special episode of the series rather than a feature film.
Fight the Future was big. It was up to Mulder and Scully to stop an alien conspiracy to colonize the earth through hostile means. There were aliens, government conspiracies; it was big time. The stakes were about as high as they can get. I Want to Believe seemed much smaller in scale. The story this time round involves a pedophile psychic priest, a missing FBI agent and a Russian doctor playing Dr.Frankenstein. Again, it makes for a great story and a creepy concept, but I was expecting something grander in scale.
All things considered though, I Want to Believe was two hours and $7.50 well-spent for an old fan. We get to see Mulder and Scully get back together and tackle some old issues, Skinner gets a cameo at the end and the story has a decently happy ending. A couple plot holes remain unfilled (what happened to the FBI agent? The experiment subject? Scully's patient?) but that aside, I'd recommend seeing this if you were/are a fan of the series and saw Fight the Future. If you're not an X-Files fan, skip it unless you have a taste for the macabre.
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