The Fractal Hall Journal

Gillian Anderson’s performance is brilliant, highlighting once again how Hollywood hasn’t found a single actress of her calibre since she was first cast as Scully. Why don’t female characters in film or TV appear to be any good? Because “acting ability” just isn’t considered to be any where near as important as finding a pretty little thing to hang off the hero’s arm. Scully’s one of the greatest female characters ever created, and played by a top class actress. Let’s face it, a character like this is never going to come along again.

There’s one bit, where Scully walks in late to a meeting where the head of her hospital is about to override her decision regarding one of her patients. For a second, I thought the scene was going to go badly south, because it looked like Scully was going to let it slide. You can see every emotion on Anderson’s face, every single missed opportunity and sacrifice she’s had to made over the past decade, every doubt that haunts her. The thing is, I’ve seen too many female characters react by letting something like this slide, then later on (for example) sneaking back to give the patient the treatment anyway. Because that’s just how women behave, isn’t it, Hollywood?

Not Scully, thank fuck. She puts her foot down, reminding all of us that she doesn’t take shit from anyone. It’s a fucking brilliant scene, and don’t try and tell me there’s a single female character in any other movie this year who gets treated with anything approaching the respect Scully does.

She’s completely the heart of the film, and it’s such a damned shame that this film is going to be dismissed just because it doesn’t have enough aliens in it. She convinces Mulder to get involved because it gives him a chance to be pardoned, for them to finally get their lives back, only to watch him get too involved, for both of them to get close to something so unimaginably dark that it taints both them and their relationship. That’s pretty heavy stuff, and something that’s stayed with me long after I left the cinema, something I couldn’t really say about the first film. I have to admit, in plot terms at the start I was a bit worried that it was looking like Carter was just doing another serial killer thing, as if what he really wanted to do was Millennium: The Movie, but when the weird-science twist becomes apparent, like a bolt of lightning we suddenly believe, absolutely, that we’re watching the X-Files once more.

There are negatives, of course. There’s a possible suggestion that being abused as a child makes you catch gay, which is incredibly ignorant. On a fannish level, Mulder gets pardoned far too easily, considering all the shit that went down in the final episode of S9. Does a low-level agent like the one who asks for his help really have that much pull with a military court? If I can get all fan-fictiony for a moment, I’m going to go ahead and assume that because the original trial was so mickey mouse he was acquitted of murder in his absence (maybe with the off-screen help of Doggett and Reyes? Oh, God yes! Fan Wank Supreme!), but was still being chased on the lesser charge of escaping from custody. I can just about believe the Bureau would let that charge go in exchange for helping them find a kidnapped agent.

But, all-in-all, this really is a disturbing, fascinating, engaging film, one that embraces the themes of the original series and takes the characters into darker psychological territory, all the while reminding us why we liked them so much, and cared so much about what happened to them. It’s a far better encapsulation of the show than the first film, and one that to my mind shows how relevant the X-Files remain.