Mulder and Scully return, a little older and a lot more world-weary: although it proved the brand’s waning cultural potency and disappointed everyone still waiting to find out what was going on with all that black goo and alien conspiracy jazz, and is in essence an episode of the show writ large, this film is actually quite good. It helps that it retains, and indeed emphasises, the series’ key ambiguities, the mature approach to its characters and their world views, and the often cryptic, eliding approach to its generic conceits, the barely glimpsed atrocities and overall atmosphere of oppressive angst.
Simultaneously, it toys with the familiar, adding a likable element of new raffishness to the central twosome, who have long since become a strange kind of couple, with Mulder wryly satirising his own nerdish rants and Scully crashing intolerantly through situations she would have once handled with kid gloves. Amanda Peet makes a fine contribution as a conscientious FBI officer, and Billy Connelly is unexpectedly restrained and effective as a psychic with a dire past. The success of this film’s mixture of dry humour and dark moodiness confirms that the show was never meant to support that heavyweight superstructure of its increasingly incoherent central plot, and that its real pleasure was in its humane characters contend with a dark and threatening universe. As Michael Chabon said of H.P. Lovecraft, one otherworldly monster is hilarious; perceiving a universe filled only with them is profoundly disturbing.