The X Files: Pilot

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the airing of the pilot episode of The X Files. Here is what happens.

Young agent Scully (those shoulder pads!) gets called into FBI headquarters where she is told that she is to work with an agent that she knows by his nick name 'Spooky' Mulder. Mulder, despite being considered the best analyst in the violent crime section, appears to his peers to have lost his direction and dug himself into the so-called X Files, that are often dismissed and ridiculed. 

They meet for the first time in the basement office and get to work on a case right away. The ingredients of it will be a few classic themes that will reappear often in the 9 series of the show: alien abduction (or not), time loss, air turbulence, car radio going weird, bright lights and the implant one will come to associate with little green (or rather, grey) men.

The setting is Oregon and the victims are all from the same high school class (class of '99). The fourth of the group has just died when Mulder digs up the case and the two agents fly across country to investigate. There they meet the defiant locals (of course), headed by the sheriff (of course), and immediately make their mark by exhuming a body - or so they think. What they actually find are the remains of what Mulder would like to be an alien and what Scully believes to be an orangutan, but (nearly) all the evidence they gather gets destroyed when the motel they stay in burns to the ground.

One key player in the deaths and possible abductions is Billy Miles, who is in a catatonic state that he only ever wakes up from when time stops and people die. And his father - the sheriff - knew it was his boy that kills or causes the deaths of those kids. In the end, he and Mulder intervene when Billy is in the woods with a would be victim, while Scully is too far behind to see what is actually happening. This will also be happening again and again.

Billy Miles will revisit the show much later for several episodes. One frequent player is also introduced, but wordlessly, the Cigarette Smoking Man, who in the end stores the one piece of hard evidence that Scully managed to bring back from their trip - the implant - in the huge storage room deep inside the pentagon (also, to be revisited again and again).

And so it begins...

7/10  

The Messengers

The Solomon family moves to a farm in North Dakota to plant sun flowers, after they have had a rough time of it in Chicago for the last two years. The father lost his job and the daughter got into trouble back there.

The house they bought with their last money is, unsurprisingly, haunted by the ghosts of a family that died there. There are ominous shadows in the background and the daughter and her toddler brother seem to be the only ones seeing them - the teenage girl terrified by them, the boy having a blast.

When a mysterious stranger shows up and stays on to work on the farm, nothing much seems to happen for months, however. Then suddenly the visions come back with a vengeance. Nobody believes the teenager, however, as she is a known troublemaker.

In the end, it turns out that the farm hand was involved in causing all of the trouble back in the day, he was actually the father that did away with his entire family and loses it one day, after he has been attacked by the ever present crows. He suddenly cannot tell the new and old family in the house apart and tries to kill his all over again.

There are a lot of eye-rolling moments in this, mostly about the philosophizing of the farm hand and a local teenage boy. The scares are kind of interesting. The film also gives Kirsten Stewart an opportunity to show off the entire range of her acting.

Yes, I was being sarcastic just then.

Why the ghosts would be called "messengers" is not ever addressed. They don't appear to be giving any messages to anybody, unless you interpret their weird behavior in trying to scare the hell out of people and possibly trying to kill them as warnings. Come to think of it, though, the  crows on the farm are the probably the messengers.

Maybe we get confirmation in the sequel. Yes, there is a sequel! Part two at least bears the promise of some serious eye candy in the form of Norman Reedus. The only saving grace in part one was William B. Davis (the cigarette smoking men from The X Files).

4/10