The Boyf and I went to see X-Files tonight. Spoiler-containing not-so-brief thoughts below the fold.

Non-spoiler thoughts: it would have made a pretty good episode of the show but maybe not so much a movie with an admission price. There will be nothing lost by waiting to rent it. Better yet, rent the show.

Spoilers ahead!

Bottom line, it would have been a pretty solid two-part episode of the series and I enjoyed it for what it was but it isn’t earth-shattering and, much to my surprise, it does nothing to resolve any of the meta-plot of the series.

Seriously. This thing doesn’t even mention the meta-plot of the series. OK, one ostensibly central character uses one of his roughly dozen lines to make fun of Mulder’s sister’s abduction and that is, for reals, it.

There are some pretty problematic plot holes, too, and some choices that it makes no sense for experienced investigators to make, some meaningless gotcha moments of pseudo-suspense. This is not a movie without problems. It doesn’t have a lot going on inside. The plot is singularly devoid of startling twists. The twists that exist don’t make a lot of sense or, when they make sense, also seem completely unnecessary.

One of my main problems, to be honest, is that the villains are unnecessarily gay. (As The Boyf said in the car afterwards, “It does nothing to help The Movement.”) When the sexualities of the villains get revealed it’s done as though this explains everything when in fact all it reveals is that the current crop of FBI investigators are (eventually) capable of completing a basic records check on a suspect.

All of this comes at – from random angles – one central impression with which the movie left me: that all the FBI investigation stuff in this felt like a pilot for a sequel series about the next batch of agents and less a movie about Mulder and Scully. A lot of the movie is about Mulder and Scully – almost all of it, in fact – and the parts that are not, the parts that are about the next generation of agents after Mulder and Scully have put the Bureau behind them, are largely about how the current generation are idiots. There would be a scene in which, say, one of the current agents would begin an activity and I would think, Aha, now the new kids will do something useful, and then they wouldn’t. This was something I just couldn’t shake, that one of two things happened in the process of this movie being made:

(1) That a project for a sequel series got shitcanned so they decided to scrape together a movie out of it, or

(2) That in order to make Mulder and Scully seem like the capable, experienced ones they had to make everyone else seem less than wholly competent.

I kept feeling like I was about to watch the Star Trek: Generations of The X-Files but then any activity on the part of the new kids would just… trail off. It would turn up nothing or it would be exhibited as skepticism immediately contradicted by events or it would just fade into the background. So, don’t watch it for the purposes of it’s-been-a-decade-let’s-make-some-gear-porn CSI-style hijinks, I guess.

You know what, though? All that said, I enjoyed it. I’m admittedly fairly easy to please when it comes to movies – Flash Gordon is one of my favorites of all time and not just for the underwear scene – but seriously, I watched a fair amount of this show. I was never a devoted follower but I did keep up and I have always found it very difficult to turn it off when it came on because I really enjoy watching those two characters interact. A lot of the movie is about them, not about anything else, and those parts are pretty golden. I liked it. All its problems, its Unnecessarily Gay Villains, its hinted-at-but-never-really-explored “main” plot, its unbelievably lackluster performances by pretty much everyone other than the principles and Billy Wilder, all that kind of receded from view when the screen was full of Mulder and Scully just… being Mulder and Scully.

I don’t know if I’d see another one, but the movie’s depiction of those two characters so far into their relationship did what I suspect it’s really meant to do: it made me want to go back and watch the series in depth. I told The Boyf it was a damned good thing we went to a late showing because I was thus prevented from dragging us over to the Barnes and Noble at the same mall to see if they had the first season on DVD. As a movie it doesn’t really work. As a two-hour advertisement for the DVDs of the show it’s pretty amazingly effective.