The X-Files (1998), Poster, Plot, Production, Soundtrack, Blu-ray Release and Trailer

This article is about the 1998 movie. For the 2008 movie, see The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

The X-Files is a 1998 science fiction film based on the television series of the same name.

Fight the Future, the film’s tagline, is sometimes used promotionally as an unofficial subtitle, but it does not appear as part of the film’s copyrighted on-screen title.

The stars of the TV series, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, reprise their respective roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. If viewed in the context of the X-Files chronology, the film takes place between seasons five and six of the TV series, and unlike the second film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, is based upon the series’ extraterrestrial mythology.

Plot

The film opens in 35,000 BC North Texas during prehistoric times in a wordless sequence. A Neanderthal man stumbles upon what appears to be a large, primal, vicious alien in a cave (although the camera work uses zooms and flash-edits to keep the creature from being visualized fully). The two fight, and the caveman wins, stabbing the alien to death.

However, fans of the show will recognize the black oil as it bleeds from the alien’s wounds and soaks into the Neanderthal. After a fade to modern-day small-town Texas, a little boy (Lucas Black) falls down a hole in his back yard, and finds a human skull. As he picks it up, black oil seeps out from the ground beneath his feet, and black slivers move up his legs until they reach his head — his eyes go black. Shortly afterward, a team of firemen descend to rescue him. They are presumably lost to the same fate as the boy (it is later said that the four firemen and the boy were all transported).

A team of biohazard-suited men in a helicopter, accompanied by several semi-trailers and a man named Ben Bronschweig (Jeffrey DeMunn) descend upon the scene.

In the summer of 1998, at the end of the show’s fifth season, the X-Files were shut down, and Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were assigned to other projects. They are first seen assisting Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Darius Michaud (Terry O’Quinn), and his FBI team investigating a bomb threat to a Federal building in Dallas, Texas.

When Mulder separates from the team to scout out the building across the street, he discovers the bomb in a first-floor vending machine. While Michaud remains to disarm the bomb, Mulder and Scully are able to evacuate the building and prevent hundreds of casualties before it explodes. It becomes clear to the viewer, (but not the agents) that Michaud is making no effort to disarm the bomb, which ultimately explodes. (Several media commentators noted parallels between this and the real-life 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.)

Mulder and Scully return to Washington, D.C., but instead of being commended for their roles in preventing the deaths of hundreds, they are instead chastised because four victims were still in the building: three firemen, and one little boy. They are both scheduled separate hearings in which their job performance will be evaluated.

That evening, Mulder encounters a paranoid doctor, Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), who explains that the four victims were already dead, and the bomb was allowed to detonate to destroy the evidence as to how they died. Mulder enlists Scully to travel with him to the morgue to examine the bodies.

They learn that the bodies have suffered a complete cellular breakdown which could not have been caused by the bomb. Mulder leaves Scully in the morgue to fly back to Dallas to investigate evidence left from the explosion. He urges Scully to join him, and she shares evidence that the bodies were infected with an alien virus. They travel to the boy’s home and find a brand-new park in place of the hole in which he fell. Unsure what to do next, they follow a team of tanker trucks to a massive cornfield surrounding two bright, glowing domes.

When they infiltrate the domes, they find simply a large empty space. However, grates on the floor open up, and a massive swarm of thousands of bees chase the agents into the cornfield. Soon black helicopters fly overhead, and the two make a harrowing escape back to Washington.

Upon their return, Mulder, finding the evidence disappearing rapidly, unsuccessfully seeks help from Kurtzweil, while Scully attends her performance hearing, and learns that she is being transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah. She informs Mulder that she would rather resign from the FBI than be transferred.

Mulder is devastated at the thought of not having Scully as a partner to help him uncover the truth, telling her, “I don’t know if I want to do this alone. I don’t even know if I can. And if I quit now, they win.” The two have a tender moment (they lean towards each other, as though to kiss), until she is stung by a bee which had lodged itself under her shirt collar. She has an instant adverse reaction, and Mulder calls for emergency help.

However, when an ambulance arrives to transport her, the driver shoots Mulder in the head, and whisks Scully to an undisclosed location. The real ambulance pulls to the scene moments later as the scene fades to black. Mulder awakens in a hospital (the bullet grazed his temple), and, with the help of The Lone Gunmen, sneaks out of the hospital.

He is accosted by The Well-Manicured Man, who gives him Scully’s location in Antarctica, along with a weak vaccine to combat the virus she is infected with. The Well-Manicured Man then kills his driver and himself before his betrayal of the Syndicate can be discovered.

Mulder journeys to Antarctica to save Scully, in the process discovering a massive, underground secret lab run by the Cigarette-Smoking Man and his colleague Strughold. Mulder revives Scully with an injection of a vaccine, disrupting the stable environment of the lab and reviving the cocooned aliens.

The lab is destroyed just after they escape to the surface, when the alien ship lying dormant underneath leaves its underground port, launching into the sky. Scully is unconscious while the ship flies directly overhead, and Mulder wakes her in time to allow her a hazy view of the gray ship disappearing into gray leaves; it is unclear whether Scully, in her weakened state, discerned anything.

Later, Mulder and Scully attend a hearing where their testimony is routinely ignored, and the evidence covered up. The only remaining proof of the whole ordeal is the bee that stung Scully, collected by The Lone Gunmen. She hands it over, noting that the FBI does not currently have an investigative unit qualified to pursue the evidence at hand.

Later, on a bench along The National Mall in Washington, Mulder is appalled by the media cover-up of the entire incident, and tries to persuade Scully to leave his crusade. Scully refuses, noting that “if I quit now, they win.”

At another crop outpost in Tunisia, Strughold is given a telegram by the Cigarette-Smoking Man; the telegram informs them that The X-Files have been reopened.

Cast and characters

* David Duchovny as Special Agent Fox Mulder
* Gillian Anderson as Special Agent Dana Scully
* Martin Landau as Alvin Kurtzweil
* Blythe Danner as Assistant Director Jana Cassidy
* Armin Mueller-Stahl as Conrad Strughold
* Mitch Pileggi as Assistant Director Walter Skinner
* William B. Davis as Cigarette Smoking Man
* John Neville as Well-Manicured Man
* Dean Haglund as Richard ‘Ringo’ Langly
* Bruce Harwood as John Fitzgerald Byers
* Tom Braidwood as Melvin Frohike
* Don S. Williams as First Elder
* George Murdock as Second Elder
* Jeffrey DeMunn as Ben Bronschweig
* Terry O’Quinn as Darius Michaud
* Glenne Headly as Barmaid (uncredited)

Production

According to several different May 1998 newspaper articles on the rising costs of film production, 20th Century Fox spent around $60 million promoting the film worldwide,[3] and the production budget, originally said to be $60 million as well, was eventually revealed to have been closer to $66 million. With a minimum expenditure of $126 million for production/promotion, the film had a worldwide gross of slightly over $189 million, of which the studio would have received approximately 55%.

The X-Files was filmed in the hiatus between the show’s fourth and fifth seasons and reshoots were done during the filming of the show’s fifth season, which meant that some episodes of that season did not revolve around Mulder and Scully but just one of the two, because they were filming for the movie. Examples include Unusual Suspects, Christmas Carol, Chinga and Travelers.

During the making of the film, the filmmakers went to great lengths to preserve secrecy, including printing the script on red paper to prevent photocopying, and leaking disinformation to the media.[4] To help preserve secrecy, the film’s working title was “Blackwood”, named after Algernon Blackwood, a British writer of ghost stories.

Soundtrack

Main article: The X-Files: Fight the Future: The Album

Blu-ray Release

Producer Frank Spotnitz announced plans to release a new Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray Edition of the movie. “We are working on packing the [re-issued] DVD and Blu-ray DVD releases with as many extras as they will fit, including video and audio commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, bloopers, trailers, a new documentary, and several other cool surprises,”.

The Blu-Ray was released on December 2, 2008.

The X-Files (1998) Trailer