X-Files: Fight the Future, The DVD: Review By stevegibbs

What do a series of mysterious deaths near a Texas playground, a bomb in a Dallas federal building and a paranoid doctor all have in common? That's what FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) would like to know.

This big-screen episode of the successful TV show pits our heroes directly against the cigarette-smoking man and his shadowy syndicate. Mulder and Scully's detective work (part sixth sense, tip-offs, accidents and good old coincidence) uncovers a terrible plot - "a plague to end all plagues" - involving pre-historic aliens. This leads the dynamic duo from the halls and backrooms of Washington all the way to Antarctica, where they face a chilling (no pun intended) fight for the future.

"Making of the X Files" Doc*mentary

Audio Commentary

Theatrical Trailers

Presented in 2.35:1 Widescreen. The filmmakers seem to have gone to great lengths to keep this movie dark. Whether that was simply to hide how cheap the sets were, or to add to the creepy quotient, I don't know. But for the most part it does seem to work fairly well.

Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital Surround. Both tracks are fairly decent, but I must confess that the movie itself doesn't contain a great deal of memorable audio, other than occasional shades of the spooky TV intro music to let us know when to hold our breath.

The disc is well put-together, with some nice menus and features. The doc*mentary is somewhat enigmatic (like the show), but interesting all the same. It did leave me wondering whether the show's regular contributors have been living in this ambiguous X Files world a little too long.

Not being a die-hard X Files fan, I think I missed some inside jokes or subtle revelations, and the movie seemed to raise more questions than it answered. However, having said that, I still enjoyed it and was impressed at the way in which a stand-alone story was able to carry the threads of the series mythology.