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Mulder and Scully are fascinating and complex characters, but in I Want to Believe, it is as if time, and a post 9/11 world, has passed them by. With the X-Files division still shut down, the two are called in to consult on the disappearance of an FBI agent from rural Virginia. Assisting in the investigation is a defrocked priest, convicted of pedophilia, who has been seized by visions of the abductees. Mulder and Scully’s personal relationship is tested by this journey back into the dark, while she wrestles with her own demons in the medical field by way of a young patient with a rare illness who might be helped by a radical, but highly painful course of treatment.

The film touches on issues of faith, forgiveness, science and medicine vs. belief, and the power of prayer, but throughout, it suffers from an emotional honesty at its core. It doesn’t feel believable, or right, that our two heroes would be at this place at this point in their lives. With the end of the world not at stake until 2012 (based on the show’s timeline), the movie isn’t aiming to resurrect the paranoiac zeitgeist the show rode in the ‘90s. Thus, by design, it is a curiously muted affair with only Billy Connolly (as Father Crissman) making any kind of strong impression among the film’s new characters and the sole chase sequence feeling conspicuously out of place.

Ironic then, that the one thing I would not accuse I Want to Believe of being is a cash grab. Carter, replacing Rob Bowman as director this time around, believes very strongly in his material, and has attempted to craft something of substance. He just hasn’t found a way to do it with these characters in the latter part of the ‘00s. As unlikely as it may sound, the most compelling sequence in the film plays out over the closing credits. Set to a remix of Mark Snow’s score and a hypnotic tune entitled “Broken”, both performed by the band UNKLE, a sequence of images sometimes tracking forward, other times backward, moves through ice and snow, frozen tundra and rocky hillsides before eventually pushing on to gentle lapping waves and a completely unexpected reveal. If it were at the start of the movie, it would suggest a far more compelling movie to come. Ending the movie as it does, it instead calls to mind what might have been. At this stage in the game, wanting to believe simply isn’t enough.

Next time: An end of summer “how bad do you want it” mash up column featuring the raw sexual power of Prince, Morris Day, and, um, Ron Howard? What else could it be but More American Graffiti Bridge?

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