Decoding The X-Files

Turns out, the explosion is a diversion, a cover-up for the alien colonization scheme of the series' ""mythology.'' These space invaders aren't coming to get us. They've been here since the ice age, the movie discloses. For the last 50 years, Cancer Man's partners have been conspiring to repopulate Earth with alien-human ""clones.'' Being evil geniuses, they've also developed a secret antidote to the ""black oil'' virus--just in case the aliens had two of their three fingers crossed when they made the deal.

Defying orders, Mulder and Scully's scavenger hunt for the truth takes them to a genetic farm breeding killer bees and menacing corn, to a tumbleweed exurb in Texas, to a morgue (no ""X-Files'' is complete without Dr. Scully's poking around a cadaver) and, finally, to Antarctica, where a naked, half-frozen Scully awaits her laconic Lancelot.

The movie wrapped last September on the same Fox sound stage James Cameron used for ""Titanic.'' Carter is as paranoid as his show, and was obsessed with maintaining total secrecy around the movie. ""One of the few things I have is the element of surprise,'' he says. ""I've protected that for well over a year and a half.'' He made the cast and crew sign confidentiality agreements. Scripts for ""Fight the Future'' (the movie's official title) were printed on uncopyable red paper. His staff leaked phony script pages, spread disinformation over the Internet. Since ""X-philes'' enjoy being lied to and misdirected, the secrecy strategy heated up thousands of fevered Web sites.

Conditions on the set were less than ideal. Budget constraints dictated that a black-helicopter chase in a cornfield be shot in a single night. They barely beat dawn, but the resulting sequence is a hauntingly dark echo of Cary Grant's run for his life in ""North by Northwest.'' Anderson had to go almost an entire day virtually naked on a frozen set, behind a plastic sheet covered in gook called Ultra Slime. Duchovny and director Bowman came down with flus only marginally less toxic than the black oil. Never a patient actor, Duchovny got even crankier than usual. ""David would walk on to the set and say, "What the f--- is taking so long?' '' Bowman recalls. ""I said, "It's a movie, David. It takes longer to make'.'' As Anderson observes, the life of a star isn't all ""bright lights and aromatherapy.''

This is a watershed moment for ""The X-Files.'' Duchovny's contract expires after next season. Will he renew? ""I don't think so,'' he says in his trailer on the show's Vancouver set. ""It's a grind.'' His star power is sufficient now that Carter has agreed to relocate the show to Los Angeles. Duchovny's wife, actress Tea Leoni, is in L.A., and he's always hated the relentless rains of British Columbia. After joking on a talk show that it pours ""400 inches'' a day in Vancouver, some locals took offense, stopping him in the street to say, ""It's not raining today, motherf-----!'' A good time to move on. ""By the end of next year, I will have fulfilled my commitment to the show and to the fans,'' he says. ""Please let us go.'' The TV series he's sick of. A movie series he doesn't rule out: ""I wouldn't mind doing that every three or four years. Kind of like a high-school reunion. That would be fun.'' Anderson is dealing with the L.A. move in her own endearingly vulnerable way. ""I can't even imagine the mourning process and the grief that will take place,'' she says in her trailer. ""I'll be crying for days.''

Duchovny and Anderson could not be more different, or unlike their characters. Mulder is a credulous believer in paranormal phenomena who takes his quest very seriously. Duchovny appears to take almost nothing seriously, except basketball and his newlywed devotion to his wife. On translating the TV show into a movie, he says, ""We're expanding the storytelling apparatus into a medium that is larger and more intricate. I hope to take it on the road and make it a stage show. Maybe there will be an "Ice Capades X-Files'.'' After uttering something actorly and pretentious (culled from his Yale lit. M.A.), he'll undercut with an idiotic ""ass'' joke. Anderson, by contrast, is the anti-Scully. ""The stuff she says is so far beyond my intelligence,'' she admits. ""The words she uses aren't even in my vocabulary.'' Scully is cool, clinical, a scientist with an M.D. Anderson is a moody, spiritual Method actress, a recovering punk voted ""most bizarre girl'' in high school who now meditates and drives a silver Porsche Carrera S4. What the two actors have in common is their uncommon sex appeal. Both are the stars of countless X-rated fantasies both online and off.