The strategy here isn’t bad – to create a feature-length, stand-alone episode rather than a big-screen spectacle tied to the television series’ labyrinthine mythology. Unfortunately, it’s an average episode at best. Directed by the show’s creator, Chris Carter, I Want to Believe inexplicably botches the relationship between former FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), which was the essence of the series. We get flashes as to why they are the perfect couple – pillow talk at one point involves a toxicity report on a severed arm – yet most of the time they engage in vague arguments about whether or not they should be investigating the “darkness” again.
