"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" arrives billed as a "stand-alone" film that requires no familiarity with the famous television series. So it is, leaving us to piece together the plot on our own. And when I say "piece together," trust me, that's exactly what I mean.

   

In an early scene, a human arm turns up, missing its body, and other spare parts are later discovered. The arm is found in a virtuoso scene showing dozens of FBI agents lined up and marching across a field of frozen snow. They are led by a white-haired, entranced old man who suddenly drops to his knees and cries out that this is the place! And it is.

   

Now allow me to jump ahead and drag in the former agents Mulder and Scully. Mulder (David Duchovny) has left the FBI under a cloud because of his belief in the paranormal. Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a top-level surgeon, recruited to bring Mulder in from the cold, all his sins forgiven, to help on an urgent case. An agent is missing, and the white-haired man, we learn, is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a convicted pedophile who is said to be a psychic.

   

Scully brings in Mulder, but detests the old priest's crimes and thinks he is a fraud. Mulder, of course, wants to believe Father Joe could help on the case. But hold on one second. Even assuming that Father Joe planted the severed arm himself, you'll have to admit it's astonishing that he can lead agents to its exact resting place in a snow-covered terrain the size of several football fields with no landmarks. Even before he started weeping blood instead of tears, I believed him. Scully keeps right on insulting him right to his face. She wants NOT to believe.

   

Scully is emotionally involved in the case of a young boy who will certainly die if he doesn't have a risky experimental bone marrow treatment. This case, interesting in itself, is irrelevant to the rest of the plot except that it inspires a Google search that offers a fateful clue. Apart from that, what we're faced with is a series of victims, including Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and eventually Mulder himself, who are run off the road by a weirdo with a snowplow.

   

Who is doing this? And why does Father Joe keep getting psychic signals of barking dogs? And is the missing agent still alive, as he thinks she is? And won't anyone listen to Mulder, who eventually finds himself all alone in the middle of a blizzard, being run off the road, and then approaching a suspicious building complex after losing his cell phone? And how does he deal with a barking dog?

   

I make it sound a little silly. Well, it is a little silly, but it's also a skillful thriller, giving us just enough cutaways to a sinister laboratory to keep us fascinated. What happens in this laboratory you will have to find out for yourself, but the solution may be more complex than you think if you watch only casually. Hint: Pay close attention to the hands.

   

What I appreciated about "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" was that it involved actual questions of morality, just as "The Dark Knight" does. It's not simply about good and evil, but about choices. Come to think of it, Scully's dying child may be connected to the plot in another way, since it poses the question: Are any means justified to keep a dying person alive?

   

The movie lacks a single explosion. It has firearms, but nobody is shot. The special effects would have been possible in the era of "Frankenstein." Lots of stunt people were used. I had the sensation of looking at real people in real spaces, not motion-capture in CGI spaces. There was a tangible quality to the film that made the suspense more effective because it involved the physical world.

   

Of course it involves a psychic world, too. And the veteran Scottish actor Billy Connolly creates a quiet, understated performance as a man who hates himself for his sins, makes no great claims, does not understand his psychic powers, is only trying to help. He wants to believe he can be forgiven. As for Duchovny and Anderson, these roles are their own. It's like they're in repertory. They still love each other, and still believe they would never work as a couple. Or should I say they want to believe?

   

The movie is insidious. It involves evil on not one level but two. The evildoers, it must be said, are singularly inept; they receive bills for medical supplies under their own names, and surely there must be more efficient ways to abduct victims and purchase animal tranquilizers. But what they're up to is so creepy, and the snow-covered Virginia landscapes so haunting, and the wrongheadedness of Scully so frustrating, and the FBI bureaucracy so stupid, and Mulder so brave, that the movie works like thrillers used to work, before they were required to contain villains the size of buildings.

           

The X-Files: I Want To Believe

Three and a half stars



Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, and Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner

Director: Chris Carter

Rated: PG-13 for violent and disturbing content and thematic material

Encounters at the End of the World

Read the title of Encounters at the End of the World carefully, for it has two meanings.  As he journeys to the South Pole, which is as far as you can get from everywhere, Werner Herzog also journeys to the prospect of man’s oblivion.  Far under the eternal ice, he visits a curious tunnel whose walls have been decorated by various mementos, including a frozen fish that is far away from its home waters.  What might travelers from another planet think of these souvenirs, he wonders, if they visit long after all other signs of our civilization have vanished? 

Herzog has come to live for a while at the McMurdo Research Station, the largest habitation on Antarctica.  He was attracted by underwater films taken by his friend Henry Kaiser, which show scientists exploring the ocean floor.  They open a hole in the ice with a blasting device, then plunge in, collecting specimens, taking films, nosing around.  They investigate an undersea world of horrifying carnage, inhabited by creatures so ferocious we are relieved they are too small to be seen.  And also by enormous seals who sing to one another.  In order not to limit their range, Herzog observes, the divers do not use a tether line, so they must trust themselves to find the hole in the ice again.  I am afraid to even think about that. 

Herzog is a romantic wanderer, drawn to the extremes.  He makes as many documentaries as fiction films, is prolific in the chronicles of his curiosity, and here moseys about McMurdo chatting with people who have chosen to live here in eternal day or night.  They are a strange population.  One woman likes to have herself zipped into luggage and performs this feat on the station’s talent night.  One man was once a banker and now drives an enormous bus.  A pipe-fitter matches the fingers of his hands together to show that the second and third are the same length — genetic evidence, he says, that he is descended from Aztec kings. 

But I make the movie sound like a travelogue or an exhibit of eccentrics, and it is a poem of oddness and beauty.  Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.  The underwater photography alone would make a film, but there is so much more. 

Consider the men who study the active volcanoes of Antarctica and sometimes descend into volcanic flumes that open to the surface — although they must take care, Herzog observes in his wondering, precise narration, not to be doing so when the volcano erupts. It happens that there is another movie opening now that also has volcanic tubes (Journey to the Center of the Earth).  Do not confuse the two.  These men play with real volcanoes. 

They also lead lives revolving around monster movies on video, and a treasured ice-cream machine, and a string band concert from the top of a Quonset hut during the eternal day.  And they have modern conveniences of which Herzog despairs, like an ATM machine, in a place where the machine, the money inside it and the people who use it, must all be air-lifted in.  Herzog loves these people, it is clear, because like himself they have gone to such lengths to escape the mundane and test the limits of the extraordinary.  But there is a difference between them and Timothy Treadwell, the hero of Grizzly Man, Herzog’s documentary about a man who thought he could live with bears and not be eaten, and was mistaken.  The difference is that Treadwell was a foolish romantic, and these men and women are in this god-forsaken place to extend their knowledge of the planet and of the mysteries of life and death itself. 

Herzog’s method makes the movie seem like it is happening by chance, although chance has nothing to do with it.  He narrates as if we’re watching movies of his last vacation — informal, conversational, engaging.  He talks about people he met, sights he saw, thoughts he had.  And then a larger picture grows inexorably into view.  McMurdo is perched on the frontier of the coming suicide of the planet.  Mankind has grown too fast, spent too freely, consumed too much, and the ice is melting and we shall all perish.  Herzog doesn’t use such language, of course; he is too subtle and visionary.  He is nudged toward his conclusions by what he sees.  In a sense, his film journeys through time as well as space, and we see what little we may end up leaving behind us.  Nor is he depressed by this prospect, but only philosophical.  We came, we saw, we conquered, and we left behind a frozen fish. 

His visit to Antarctica was not intended, he warns us at the outset, to take footage of “fluffy penguins.”  But there are some penguins in the film, and one of them embarks on a journey that haunts my memory to this moment, long after it must have ended. 

Encounters at the End of the World

Four Stars

Director: Werner Herzog

Rated: G