Decoding The X-Files

TV'S CULT HIT IS now a summer action flick. Will it satisfy diehard 'X-philes' and lure new fans? Can the conspiracy survive on the big screen? The truth is in here.

LIKE THE TV SHOW, THE ""X-Files'' movie is a paradox--a geek thing that's also cool. Not just because it's noirish. Or because it's about alien conspiracies. The cool of ""The X-Files'' comes from its confidence--maybe because its creator, Chris Carter, is a surf jock, not some pasty dork who's read too many comic books. The movie announces this supreme confidence early on in a wry moment of understated swagger. FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) has just found out that his partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), wants to quit the Bureau. Discredited and depressed, Mulder is getting drunk in a bar. Finding the men's room out of order, he relieves himself in the alley, onto a movie poster. The movie is ""Independence Day.''

Right away, we know two things about the big-screen ""X-Files.'' That it wants to be a serious player in the alien-flick, summer-blockbuster genre--and that it has a sense of humor. Both are key elements in morphing this cult TV hit about a pair of renegade G-persons chasing UFOs and other paranormal villains into a box-office phenomenon. Plenty is riding on this transformation, besides the film's $63 million budget. Duchovny and Anderson want above-the-title movie careers. The studio wants another ""Star Trek''--a lucrative franchise of endless sequels. That means hooking a wide audience of ""X-Files'' virgins without alienating hard-core ""X-philes.'' Only a fraction of those 20 million regular weekly viewers have to show up at theaters for the movie to hit No. 1 on its opening weekend. Then there's the show's 60-country overseas audience . . .

But after the monstrous PR overkill of ""Godzilla,'' ""The X-Files'' seems mysteriously undermarketed. Billboards offer nothing more than the series' logo and the words ONLY IN THEATERS. And not until April did trailers appear aimed at non-initiates--the few remaining people on earth who don't know that the X-Files are Mulder's FBI dossiers on mysteriously unexplained cases. ""We had to first take care of the fans,'' says Bill Mechanic, chairman of Twentieth Century Fox. ""This audience doesn't want to be overhyped. We couldn't give too much away in the ads.'' The original ""Star Trek'' had been off the air for a decade before the first ""Trek'' movie came out. In Hollywood time, that's light-years ago, long enough for no one to have any idea what'll happen with ""The X-Files.''

You don't need to have seen this season's cliffhanger finale on TV to grasp what's going on in the movie. (The malevolent, cigarette-smoking ""Cancer Man'' burned all of Mulder's X-Files.) In fact you don't need to have seen the program at all to appreciate that, in a summer of dumb lizards and crashing space rocks, ""The X-Files'' is one smart scary movie.

""Things have to explode rather than implode,'' Carter says of blowing up his brooding, introspective TV show to 35mm. Literally. When the movie opens, the X-Files are officially closed. Mulder and Scully have been reassigned to an antiterrorism unit. A federal building in Dallas is about to get the living daylights blown out of it. They're on the scene, trying to find the bomb. Evoking the Oklahoma City bombing--albeit without the death toll--is an audacious display of questionable taste. But Carter is a hot-button pusher, capable of shocking even jaded viewers with tactics most filmmakers would shy away from. Imagine Steven Spielberg coldly offing a young boy who stumbles upon buried alien remains and is infected with their lethal ""black oil,'' as Carter does. The E.T.s of the ""X-Files'' movie are killing cousins to the reptilian slime Sigourney Weaver battles in the ""Aliens'' series. But Carter, director Rob Bowman (a series veteran) and special-effects man Mat Beck wisely refrain from ever fully showing off one of these nasty green bastards. ""This show walks a fine line between what's hidden and what's revealed,'' says Beck. Less really is more frightening.