The X-Files revisited at 30: Fight The Future (1998)

The X-Files is celebrating its 30th birthday this year – and the first X-Files movie, Fight The Future, is 25. We’ve been looking back.

There were many great television shows during the 1990s. Many were highly critically acclaimed or successful. None quite captured the zeitgeist of the decade in the manner The X-Files did.

Arguably, by the time series creator Chris Carter brought the show to the big screen, in 1998’s Fight The Future, it had passed its peak in that regard. The years where stars David Duchovny & Gillian Anderson would appear naked on the cover of Rolling Stone were largely behind them. The Sopranos was only a year away from launch and would catapult ‘cable TV’ into the 2000s and bear a ‘prestige TV’ era that The X-Files never quite experienced.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to understate just how popular The X-Files was in the middle of the 1990s, both in America and abroad. It was an obsession for many in the nascent days of the internet message board and the age of the VHS tape, the trading card and the TV magazine where you would get your spoilers and episode guides. That was my childhood and The X-Files, by around 1995, was a central part of my development. I fell in love with the adventures of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully heart and soul.

This meant that its translation to the cinema was a big deal, both for me and for the series. Quite what Carter intended had never really been done before. The movie would bridge the fifth and sixth seasons of the show, as production moved from Vancouver in Canada to Los Angeles (in the main to better service Duchovny’s intended career prospects). Fight The Future would be filmed largely between the fourth and fifth seasons of the show, with the fifth year having to be written with a clear destination in mind, unique for a show containing a deep and complex mythology where layers would be frequently added that did not always beget resolution.

Fight The Future would then lead into the sixth year, meaning to get the full picture – and some fairly key revelations – audiences in the summer of 1998 would have to go out to the pictures. These days, it might have gone straight to Disney+ and cut the theatrical experience out to ensure more eyeballs, more’s the pity. The sixth season premiere, ‘The Beginning’ (after fifth season finale ‘The End’) even opened with clips from Fight The Future in its ‘previously’ tag (a common network era staple for helping viewers catch up). This was so rare. This just didn’t happen. Movies happened after TV shows ended, so why was The X-Files different from the traditional model?

Carter explains the rationale to Jody Duncan in ‘The Making of The X-Files: Fight the Future‘:

We could have just done a big two-part episode at the end of the fifth season, as we’d done in the past. But we had the opportunity to take what had always been a big-screen story to the big-screen — so why not do that? A movie would be a chance to blow the mythology wide open. It seemed a novel way to answer some of the questions raised in the show’s first five years, while revitalising the show as it proceeded into its later years.

In truth, those later years were never quite the same. The series retained something of the cinematic gloss Fight The Future added, and did across the next four seasons present more than its fair share of great episodes, but it lost the atmosphere the chilly Vancouver air provided. It got back there for two revival seasons in the 2010s but it, again, didn’t really compare. The first iteration of The X-Files was over, appropriately, with ‘The End’. That didn’t, however, dampen my excitement for seeing the two characters I loved the most on the biggest canvas possible.

My sense of expectation for Fight The Future was off the scale in the summer of 1998. I had just turned 16. We didn’t get the movie until August in the U.K. so I was deep into the last summer holiday before the advent of Sixth Form and the end of traditional school. There was a lot swirling in the ether for me around that. My parents were divorcing and separating. My GCSE results beckoned. It was in retrospect a challenging time, outside of the simple angst-ridden mire of being a teenager.

The X-Files had long been a world that I could escape within and stoked my imagination, so Fight the Future was the pinnacle of that summer for me. I rounded up a group of school mates to join me on a cinema trip in central Birmingham. None of them were invested in the show as I was. I vividly remember being atop the number 33 bus and doing my best to give a mythology ‘primer’ for them of the first five years before we got there. I don’t think any of them really much cared, but explaining it I remember being a thrill, and personally satisfying. I felt like I understood the ‘truth’ that the show so focused on trying to decrypt.

What I felt after watching the movie oddly hasn’t stayed with me in the way my memories of going to see it have. Perhaps because I really enjoyed it. I can recall my disappointment after leaving the 2008 follow up, I Want To Believe, in a palpable way. I’ll get to that soon. Fight The Future I suspect I had a great time with back in August 1998, as I have in the many instances I’ve watched it since. I won’t argue it is necessarily one of the best pictures of the 1990s from a critical standpoint, but it makes my list by sheer virtue of what it meant – and still means – to me. It was certainly one of the most important cinematic experiences of my teenage years.

Fight The Future – which was largely known at the time as ‘The X-Files Movie’ – is largely the best such a tricky prospect for a film could have been. Tricky in the sense that it needed to be that aforementioned bridge, needed to satisfy die-hard fans like me, and pull in newcomers like some of the friends I dragged with me on that August day. It also had to push beyond the conventions of television and tell a story for Mulder and Scully on a bigger canvas than they had ever experienced. Trying to cover all of those bases and be a satisfactory product would challenge anyone, but Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz manage across two hours to do it.

What helped undoubtedly was the fact The X-Files always retained cinematic aspirations. As early as second season episode ‘Duane Barry’ in 1994, episodes were being screened on a big screen canvas and Carter was musing on the idea of the series transitioning to a larger scope. Production values of what was a traditional network series often betrayed the limited budget available, thanks to a highly skilled team. Storylines were epic in scope, unfurling a global conspiracy with often an international travelogue as seasons developed. And the more the show became a success, the more glamorous and movie star Duchovny and Anderson began to look. The writing for a movie, as the show went stratospheric, was on the wall for some time.

The plan was initially more traditional. Five seasons of production would segue into a cinematic franchise every few years, as Star Trek for example had done (albeit in ungainly fashion, certainly after the 1960s if you read up on the history). The Fox network understood a cash cow when they saw one, however, and extended the series’ life for two more years. Everyone signed on. The movie therefore would capitalise on the show’s success while the show was still on air. To date, the examples of this happening are slim to none. Fight the Future might, in point of fact, be the only example of a series to movie transition while a show is on air, perhaps outside of the TV sitcom or animated series.

Fight The Future therefore billed itself in a slightly misleading way. It wasn’t the conclusion of Mulder and Scully’s adventures but it promised “the truth will be revealed”, which wasn’t quite accurate. All it ended up doing was clarifying aspects of the ‘mythology’ that had already been suggested or established. It gave the sinister plans brewing over five seasons a shape, laying the groundwork for the sixth season to conclude many of those storylines with a level of detail that a big, broad movie could never do. The biggest reveal, about Mulder’s sister Samantha – who vanished when he was a boy – ended up on the cutting room floor. Fight The Future in that sense was a parlour trick, albeit a well-meaning one. It was maintaining the balance needed above while aspiring for a greater sense of scale.

Rob Bowman, directing, as he had done many of the series’ more effective looking episodes to date, largely pulls that off. Carter and Spotnitz open with a set piece the show would have struggled to adequately pull off, the bombing of a Federal building that evoked the infamous Oklahoma City attack several years before. It has a more overt sense of travelogue, be it the deserts of Tunisia or the icy plains of Antarctica, even exterior shots filmed near the Royal Albert Hall in London. It travels back further than most shows would ever go, to 30,000 years BC. It pulls in character actors of note on a cinematic scale, such as Martin Landau or Armin Mueller-Stahl. It sees Mulder and Scully running from helicopters, escaping exploding buildings etc… placing them more in the mould of action stars than paranormal detectives.

Yet – and this is where I believe the film is a success – it always feels like The X-Files.

It gives us many of the primary recurring characters from the show, albeit largely in cameos – Skinner, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the Lone Gunmen. It brings together numerous story threads from multiple seasons (even if it quietly ignores a few others). And Carter and Spotnitz accentuate the character traits of Mulder and Scully for cinematic audiences, while using handy cheats (Mulder talking to a barmaid, played nicely by the late Glenne Headly) to deliver exposition the audience needs. Quite unlike what would have happened if the studio’s earlier idea that an X-Files movie could feature genuine stars such as Richard Gere and Jodie Foster (despite how they would have looked the part), Fight the Future gives us undiluted Mulder and Scully, with Duchovny and Anderson more than stepping up to the opportunity. It might not define them as movie stars but it elevates them away from mere TV leads.

In that respect, Fight The Future nods to a future landscape where cross-pollination between TV and cinema is far more common. Both actors now flit between these mediums in their post-X-Files careers, while even the biggest movie star names – such as Harrison Ford, for example – take on streaming era, lavishly produced TV roles. It now works both ways. Fight the Future retains the essence of the series whilst simultaneously giving the audience something more, something that reflects the scope of what the storytelling could achieve – even down to regular composer Mark Snow, for years having created brilliant episodic themes with synthetic effects, let off the least for a genuinely sweeping, cinematic rendition of the series’ iconic musical themes.

Whether it sits among the greatest examples of The X-Files is debatable. Mythology episodes – in the canon of which this stands – could be hit and miss. Fight the Future plays the middle to an extent. The pace perhaps lags a touch in the mid-section. It largely replays a climax we have seen the show present before, with one of the agents in peril and Scully not quite seeing the gigantic evidence of alien life before her eyes (though it did allow for an eternal debate about how Mulder and Scully got home from Antarctica, which even dripped into the show during the eighth season). Despite holding the trappings of a blockbuster designed to appeal to the masses, it wouldn’t convert a non-fan in the way the best X-Files episodes of television perhaps could.

Fight The Future is, nonetheless, one of the better television to cinema translations for a popular piece of entertainment we have seen, and that remains as true twenty-five years on as it did then. Few shows had the narrative structure, and the sense of iconic popularity, to break out onto a cinematic canvas during its own run. Later phenomenons such as Lost or Game of Thrones didn’t achieve that. And these days, the model of production has changed to a degree that how Fight the Future came to be is unlikely to happen again. Much like the series that spawned it, it is unique.

If you want more of me discussing the film in depth, breaking down the plot and characterisation, do check out my X-Files podcast, The X-Cast, and our 110+ episodes where we broke down Fight the Future minute by minute during 2020. I’m not on every single episode but a more comprehensive breakdown of the film in audio format you are unlikely to find. Thanks if you give it a listen.

The truth remained out there. And a decade later, Mulder and Scully looked for it again on the big screen. The result was a very different cinematic beast…