Now it is The X-Files for film buffs
By Ervell E.
Menezes
THAT marketing is a major aspect of
Hollywood is evident in many of its releases. One has
only to see the number of TV serials that have been
converted into films to realise this. There was The
Adams Family (1991), The Fugitive (1993), The
Beverly Hillbillies (1993), Maverick (1994),
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and Mission:Impossible
(1996). Now it is The X Files.
But the major thing about The
X Files is that it is the first big hit of the
Internet age, a show about obsessive loners for obsessive
loners precisely the kind of people whod
rather sit at home and watch TV than go to the movies.
Now, the makers of the film are catering to whom?
Is it a whole new
film-going audience? Or is it a little of both, that is
the old TV The X Files fans as well as the new
market of movie-goers. Then theres the trouble of
things being to simplistic for the "X-philes".
Well, its a problem of their own creation. But the
flip side for the producers is that it adds to the
audience of The X Files.
Isnt David Duchovny
a big name today precisely because of the TV serial? Yes
Fox Mulder (Duchovny and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)
are FBI agents who work as a team. They have their
differences but they sort of need each other and no
prizes for guessing but they are also in love with each
other, or so they think.
In The X Files agents
Mulder and Scully are drawn into a web of intrigue while
investigating the mysterious bombing of a Dallas office
building and the secrets buried inside. Set against the
dynamic backdrops of Washington DC, the dusty fields of
northern Texas, private meetings in London and the frigid
reaches of Antarctica, the film is meant to popularise
the already popular TV personalities. Apart from Mulder
and Scully theres Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), a
writer whose favourite subject is Doomsday, and Strughold
(Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose undercover activity is so
essential to the plot.
There are three starting
introductory scenes. The first sequence reveals a
ferocious creature killing a caveman. The second shows a
boy falling into a pit, being attacked and infected by a
sort of black goo that gets under his skin and darkens
his eyes. This new extra-terrestrial biological entity
(remember the film The Entity two decades ago?) is
the focal point of the film. The third and most elaborate
scene deals with the discovery of a bomb at the FBI
building in Dallas. Despite the efforts of special agents
Mulder and Scully, the blast occurs.
Not being a TV serial
buff, The X Files is new to me. It begins
promisingly with a hint of some foreign power in action,
but around the halfway mark the interest flags. The
reason for some dramatic happenings are not duly
explained and credibility suffers. Then things get too
far-fetched. There may be a few good twists but surely
not enough to keep the viewer engrossed; the result is,
it creates a lukewarm effect. Youre neither here
nor there and then the thing you miss most is that you
are not alone and in the night, but you are in a theatre
with hundreds of others. You are no longer an obsessive
loner for whom the story was first written for.
I saw Pulp Fiction
again but the delay in releasing it (after four years)
must have adversely affected it. No, I dont condone
the spurts of violence. They tend to get too graphic
these days. But the structure is brilliant. There is no
conventional beginning, middle and end. Rather, it begins
somewhere near the end and ends somewhere in the middle.
Which means that after the end (not chronological) you
are still a bit confused about the story and that I think
is its biggest selling point.
In three intertwining
slice-of-life narratives, director-scriptwriter Quentin
Tarentino introduces us to a pair of thick-witted
hit-men, a double-crossing prize-fighter on the run, his
absent-minded French girlfriend, his hit-men hiring boss,
his exotic but drug-addicted wife, and two young lovers
contemplating a career namely, whether to start
holding up restaurants instead of liquor stores.
What Tarentino wanted to
do as separate episodes he thought of combining into one
narrative. It gave him the opportunity to play with his
characters and have them move from one story to another.
The main characters of one story would go to be a
supporting character in the next. And what a way he does
it! He makes nonsense of time in the conventional manner.
The cast is made up of 12 principals and a handful of
cameos but you weave in and out of them as in a maze. As
for star power, theres Travolta, Willis, Samuel L.
Jackson, Uma Thurman, Harvey Kietel, Tim Roth and Amanda
Plummer. Why theres even Tarentino himself as the
high-strung Jimmy. It certainly is a path-breaker.
This
feature was published on December 20, 1998
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