The aliens are not coming, just so you know.

The X-Files

11.1: My Struggle III

(SPOILERS) Good grief. Have things become so terminal for Chris Carter that he has to retcon his own crap from the previous season, rather than the (what he perceived as) crap written by others? Carter, of course, infamously pretended the apocalyptic ending of Millennium Season Two never happened, upset by the path Glen Morgan and James Wong, left to their own devices, took with his baby. Their episode was one of the greats of that often-ho-hum series, so the comedown was all the unkinder as a result. In My Struggle III, at least, Carter’s rewriting something that wasn’t very good in the first place. Only, he replaces it with something that is even worse in the second.

So Scully wakes up in hospital, and everything we saw in My Struggle II was a foretelling at best. Or just a dream, like that season of Dallas, only she isn’t in the shower and now not enough people are watching to give a shit. And Mulder, as is inevitable with these unimaginative Carter envisionings, must turn sceptic when Scully turns prophetic (we had the same thing when they introduced disbelieving Doggett).

Scully has very little to do but lie in bed, and God knows she’s done enough of that during the series, while Mulder eventually races off to find CSM, accompanied by a ridiculously apathetic – even by Carter’s standards – voice over (“I was running only on adrenaline and Scully’s premonitions”). Mind you, he isn’t any worse off than Dana, who is experiencing some pretty Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place-standard medical care (“Neurologically speaking, her brain’s on fire”), and is somehow able to transmit a message in Morse Code while comatose.

Carter’s always been all over the place as a director, but here he’s as borderline incoherent as his teleplay. Nothing hangs together, and his instinct to rake over the coals of long dead embers of X-lore and characters elicits no sparks whatsoever. The best I can say is that Chris Owens (Spender) has aged more interestingly than Duchovny, who between finishing up Californication and taking on this new run has become a cross between Walter Matthau and Bob Mortimer, such that he seems to be uncomfortably squeezed into his traditional FBI suit. I suppose you could regard his graphically slitting the throat of Scully’s would-be assassin as something different, but by this point in the episode, no tonal aberration on Carter’s part really surprised me.

Besides Spender, who was never very interesting in the first place and for some reason seems to have been entrusted by our intrepid duo, we have William, their son, one of the least productive elements of the ailing later stage arcs of the original run, who rather than being Fox’s son is revealed as the product of Scully being artificially impregnated by his dirty old dad (during En Ami, it seems). What’s the betting we find this wasn’t so at all by the end of the season? Or at the start of the next. Is there a less called for returnee than CSM? I felt he was past his expiry date around the point he had an episode devoted to his memories (and that was only Season 4), and Carter’s really flogging a dead horse here, making him the Big Bad again and in so doing shrinking the size and potential of the X-universe irreparably. Do something new, for goodness sake. His mere invocation is a surrender to the absence of the creative impulse.

Poor old Skinner, meanwhile, would actually be a welcome presence if they gave him something to do, other than be on the receiving end of the umpteenth unnecessary string of accusations from Mulder (“Whose side are you on?!”)

Is there anything good to be said about My Struggle III? The one great coup of is the faked Moon landing pullback one-shot in a TV studio. There’s also more from the Georgia Guidestones by inference (although none of that happened now, or yet), and mention of a secret space programme, one of the more buzzed about assertions of conspiracy lore these days. Oh, and CSM clears up that the aliens aren’t coming anymore, because it’s all a bit of a lost cause down here. Why, precisely? I think it must be Trump – everything suddenly is, after all – if Carter’s hilarious incontinent opening montage is anything to go by. Who knew the X-world had only suddenly turned to shit, when in fact its covert shitness had been the series’ theme all along? But Carter’s always been at his worst when trying to be political/topical. We’re told at one point that Mulder doesn’t want to believe. With an episode this pitiful, who can blame him?

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog