This is much more than just an extended television episode, and stands as an interesting movie in its own right, but it can be appreciated more if you are familiar with the regular X-Files characters. They are all here: Skinner, the Lone Gunmen, 'Well-Manicured Man' (John Neville), and 'Cigarette-Smoking Man' or 'Cancer Man' as Mulder has called him.
The X Files starts 35,000 years ago in Texas, when two prehistoric men discover a particularly vicious life-form in a snow-buried cave which kills one of them and is itself stabbed by the other man, oozing thick black blood. We skip to the present day and same location, and a boy who falls down a hole and finds a human skull, just before the same thick black substance starts to seep through the ground around his feet...
FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully then appear, trying to find a supposed terrorist bomb in a Federal building. The bomb explodes, but then Mulder finds out that it was intended to cover-up the events in Texas in an elaborate Government conspiracy involving a deadly virus and typically aliens.
The movie is quite scary at times and for the most part well acted.
The X Files' creator, Chris Carter, promised that this movie would re-stimulate interest in the X Files and reveal the truth. It has partly, and the movie, while not a classic, is certainly one of the best of this summer's crop of Blockbusters and will more than satisfy fans of the series.
written by Ed in April 1998