During the early 2000s, as the DVD market soared to its peak, movie enthusiasts found themselves treated to a plethora of special editions. Films came in varied cuts—extended, unrated, or director’s editions—each offering slight to significant deviations from the original cinematic versions. Released amidst this trend, the 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe soon appeared on DVD featuring an extended cut. This version, as was typical of the time, went unrated, bypassing the MPAA’s review, and added around three minutes of content, providing more gore and deeper character moments, though it didn’t offer major surprises.
Amid this backdrop, news has emerged that has X-Files enthusiasts buzzing: Chris Carter, the series’ visionary and the mind behind the film’s script and direction, has unveiled a completely new director’s cut, premiering recently on Hulu.
In classic X-Files fashion, the narrative twists continued with this development. Despite the existence of an extended cut, Carter’s director’s cut presents a unique take by being notably shorter than its theatrical counterpart. Importantly, this revised version is separate from the Ryan Coogler-led reboot, whose pilot was just filmed. Nonetheless, Carter’s creation marks the first fresh X-Files material since the eleventh season wrapped in 2018—adding more lore a decade after the previous movie, which itself followed the original by ten years. Enter the new iteration intriguingly titled: The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn.
To appreciate the journey of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, it’s essential to understand its unique role in the expansive X-Files universe. For many devotees, the series felt complete with its seventh season wrap-up in 2000. Gillian Anderson stayed on for an additional season, but David Duchovny limited his appearances, leading the show into its later seasons notably transformed. By the ninth season’s end, the spotlight had shifted from its central figures, FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, with even Anderson stepping away from certain episodes. The 2002 series finale attempted to tie up loose ends, albeit unsatisfactorily for some, highlighting a sense of the narrative overstretching itself. Ironically, the 1998 film successfully bridged seasons five and six, hinting at a future where its storied investigations might unfold on the big screen, on occasion, as opposed to the weekly grind Anderson and Duchovny were growing weary of.
By the time I Want to Believe came to fruition, fans longed for a revival. However, the once-vast audience seemed to have drifted. The passing years posed a timing dilemma: too brief to capitalize on a nostalgic legacy sequel trend (which hit its stride in the 2010s) but substantial enough since the last episode aired. Released in a year dominated by blockbusters like Iron Man and The Dark Knight, The X-Files struggled to escape the shadow of its earlier glory, landing awkwardly in the shifting pop culture landscape.
It probably didn’t help that Mulder and Scully were returning with a stand-alone storyline that had nothing to do with the show’s signature alien conspiracy. Creatively, this made perfect sense; that storyline was beaten to death by the end of the series, and the show itself always had far greater range than just UFO stories. Its mix of aliens, mythological creatures, psychic powers, and other hard-to-explain phenomena was what made it such a thrilling week-to-week experience.
But more casual fans did largely associate the show with sci-fi stuff, so maybe a story about Mulder and Scully, ties with the FBI long severed, returning to the fold to track down a possible serial killer with the questionable help of a pedophile priest claiming to be psychic… Well, maybe that wasn’t the most appealing decision Carter could have made. What’s more, the movie couldn’t help but catch viewers up on Mulder and Scully’s post-series lives, so rather than dropping back into FBI investigations with little fuss, there’s a lot of character-based material about Scully’s religious and scientific faith, and Mulder’s compulsion to investigate the dark and mysterious corners of humanity. It was basically the perfect casual-fan-alienating mixture of continuity, episodic storytelling, and just plain murk (Mulder and Scully haven’t seen each other regularly as the movie begins but also seem to sleep together offscreen?!?). The worst of both worlds, perhaps, especially if fans weren’t really anticipating something like a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Lorenzo’s Oil.
So how does a shorter director’s cut resolve those issues? Honestly, it doesn’t; time does. With the passage of time (and the addition of 16 more episodes’ worth of proper Mulder-and-Scully adventures that arrived in 2016 and 2018), I Want to Believe has less of a burden to contend with. Almost 20 years later, it’s far easier to accept as a mostly-stand-alone small-scale thriller story freighted with the heavy backstory of our pals Mulder and Scully. If it doesn’t have the humor, scope, or playful not-quite-romance of some of the show’s best episodes, well, neither do some of the show’s many other good episodes! This was, as mentioned, a show that could do a lot of things. I Want to Believe chooses a few more serious-minded of those things. That’s less dispiriting now. It’s also clearly Carter’s sensibility; he was never really in charge of the funniest or weirdest episodes of the show.
To that end, the tightening up of the director’s cut does make some sense. If the movie is going to function as a supersized episode, it might as well retain the show’s brisk network-TV pacing. At the same time, some of the tweaks do see Carter pushing the material into a more cinematic direction. The opening of the movie is instructive, with definite changes that don’t alter the basic trajectory of the story. Carter still cross-cuts between an FBI agent who gets abducted by mysterious, shadowy figures, and a scene of other agents searching a snow-covered field for her body (and finding someone else’s severed arm). But in the director’s cut, the clever matches between the two scenes (the agent’s pet dog barking in one scene into the canine searchers in the other) come faster, with more jagged back-and-forth that calls greater attention to the pairing. It wouldn’t be completely out of place on the show, but the disorientation feels more like a movie.
That’s about the scale of changes fan can expect to see, or barely see. Yes, there’s a little more violence here and there, but that was true of the previous extended cut, and Carter’s own claim of putting the “scares” back in the movie seems misguided as this version is only mildly creepier. Some of this material might have garnered an “R” from the MPAA in 2008 — Carter claims that was the motivating factor behind all of the tinkering, trying to get that magic PG-13 — but it barely registers as such now. (Hannibal had vastly gorier episodes airing on NBC less than a decade after this movie came out.)
Despite Carter’s efforts to reorient his movie around its actual story rather than ancillary character drama, what pops from I Want to Believe still isn’t the Frankenstein overtones of the movie’s ultimate villains, who are still largely unmemorable as far as X-Files one-and-done characters go. (In general, the fact that other possible psychics are mentioned in the movie’s dialogue is a nice nod to fans but maybe not the best strategy; mentioning Clyde Bruckman, a character in one of the show’s very best episodes, can only end in disappointment by comparison.) Instead, it’s still Carter’s juxtaposition of Mulder and Scully’s respective fixations — his on believing a man who sensible social rules tell us to cast out (Billy Connolly, giving a strong performance), hers on attempting to save the life of an ill child — that makes the movie involving and affecting. Those story threads do seem sharper and clearer in this version, where they’re both slightly more connected to the main storyline. But is that Carter’s re-edit doing the work, or the enduring power of his creation? It’s a mystery, I guess.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.