The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshtyn
Director: Chris Carter
Writers: Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz
Cast: Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly
It's been nearly 20 years since the last X-Files movie, and nearly 10 since Scully and Mulder signed off on a two-season revival of the original series, yet the franchise has lost none of its original shine. Looking back at the X-Files at its best, you still get that conspiracy thrill of watching Mulder and Scully dance around mysteries, and each other, which is probably why Ryan Coogler is presently shepherding a revival of the show.
But Coogler's not the only one looking to revive X-Files things. Original series creator Chris Carter revealed earlier this summer that he's been at work on The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshtyn ("Doctor Frankenstein" in Russian), a new director's cut of the 2008 movie which marked Mulder and Scully's last big-screen outing. With this new cut, Carter promised to reintroduce certain horror elements, including graphic gore, that the studio previously asked him to trim, creating what's been advertised as a truer vision of Carter's film. So, does it actually give us something new?
The short answer is no, but the long answer is something a little bit more interesting. The first thing you notice about this new cut (I'm not writing Vrach Frankenshtyn out over and over again, sorry) is that it's actually several minutes shorter than the theatrical cut from 2008. Carter's not just adding things back into the film that he wished he could have included back then; he's also trimming up some dialogue scenes, leaning more heavily into the mystery than the character work. The result is a movie that subtracts more than it adds, in more ways than one.
The plot is the same: When we rejoin Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson), he's in hiding from the FBI and she's working as a doctor, trying to save the life of a young boy with a supposedly incurable condition. When the FBI comes calling again with a case that only Mulder is equipped to solve, the pair reluctantly head off to snow-covered West Virginia to solve a mystery involving a missing FBI agent, a clairvoyant defrocked priest (Billy Connolly), and some very shady Russian organ harvesters.
As the extended title suggests, the director's cut leans more heavily into this last bit, giving more body horror shots, a great focus on visceral discomfort, and other bits of gore like a rebar impalement that, in the original cut, is only implied. There are also a few added little traces of dialogue meant to add texture to the central mystery, as Scully and Mulder butt heads while working to find out why people keep showing up with body parts missing. The visual effects are solid, but the new cut's efforts to shift deeper into pure horror territory don't really produce any major, noteworthy scares.
The chief tension in X-Files storytelling has never been the balance between "mythology" stories and "monster of the week" stories. The chief tension has always been the balance between the attention-grabbing supernatural stuff and the character work Duchovny and Anderson have been doing on and off for three decades. You watch The X-Files because you want to see aliens and monsters, sure, but you also watch it because you want to see Mulder and Scully's intense sexual tension even as their ideological battles rage. I've never been a particular fan of this film, but to the extent that I am a fan, it's because of what's going on with Mulder and Scully, and what Anderson and Duchovny are able to wring from that. Scully's suffering a crisis of faith, while Mulder's diving back down into his old obsessions, threatening their already precarious relationship and their futures in their respective fields. What the first X-Files movie lacked in this, it made up for in big-budget bombast. What I Want to Believe always had going for it, amid a smaller story, is the chemistry of its leads.
Here, that chemistry is blunted, not just by a rough script that was already there, but by Carter's insistence on cutting even as he added. One of my favorite moments in the film, a conversation between Scully and Mulder in bed, loses some of its tenderness, while their other arguments lose steam. When the story is this intimate, and the characters around them are so vaguely sketched (Amanda Peet, doing her best, is saddled with the sole character trait of "FBI Agent," while Connolly has to play "repentant pedophile" and not much else), Scully and Mulder need to be the center, regardless of the monsters and mayhem around them. In this new cut, they're still the center, but their position feels narrowed, less in focus.
That leaves I Want to Believe: Vrach Frankenshtyn in an odd position, becoming perhaps the only filmed X-Files story so far that's really just for completists. It adds little, subtracts more, and feels more like Carter trying to re-assert ownership of the thing he created than anything else. I really wish I had better news, but while it was fun to hang out with Mulder and Scully again for a little while, there are many better places to go for that.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshytn is now streaming on Hulu.
