I bit the bullet and went to see the second X-Files movie today.

A bit of backstory: I used to be an X-Files fanboy (I never quite warmed to the term “X-Phile,” which is what the early fans decided to call themselves).  I was a fan from the very first season, which premiered my freshman year in college, and I distinctly recall gathering in the dorm room of the person we knew who had the largest color TV (15″!) to watch each and every Friday night.  It became a ritual, since we were all too young to drink and too snobbish to go to the bars where it didn’t matter.

The show, if you will recall, built one of the first Internet followings.  This was back in the days when getting onto the Internet involved climbing three flights of stairs in Mary Graydon Hall at American University and working your way back to a computer lab with machines so old that they clearly had been rejected by the government of Burkina Faso.  When the ancient green-and-black CRT displays kicked on, you had to choose whether you wanted to log into “Internet” or onto Bitnet.  I wonder whatever happened to Bitnet.

And, yes, I was one of the people who got the inside joke in the second season premiere, “Little Green Men,” when Scully flips through a passenger manifest looking for Mulder’s name and the other names on the list were all posters from the alt.tv.x-files newsgroup.  My name wasn’t on the list, since I was what you’d call a “lurker.”

I recall going to see the X-Files movie the night it came out (and recall trying not to be too disappointed with it).  At one point, I could explain the series’ entire mythology to you: the bees, the alien virus, the black oil, all of it.

The show lost me in its eighth and ninth seasons, however.  David Duchovny was publicy trying to exit his contract, and the show had been slated to end with season eight, but then Fox unexpectedly picked it up for a ninth season.  This is never a good sign–it didn’t go so well with Buffy, and I’m not really expecting a whole lot from Scrubs.

I watched the show’s final episode in May 2002 more out of a feeling of obligation than anything else–the world changed that final season, and stories about government consipracies just weren’t really all that entertaining anymore.  The show signed off, producer Chris Carter promised us that it would continue in movie form, and we waited.  And waited.  And waited.

I was excited after seeing the trailers for the movie.  Then the reviews started to come out and, well, they weren’t terribly good.  The New York Times review wasn’t great, and the posting on io9 was just brutal.  Hence, when Ray asked last night if I wanted to go see the movie, I declined.  (Mostly this had to do with my aversion to paying the evening price for a movie, and I was exhausted after romping around San Antonio all day).

I glanced at more reviews this morning, sighed, and then put the thought out of my mind while Ray and I met my mother for lunch.  Then, on a whim, I checked movie times, saw there was a show in half an hour at the cinema near our house, and said, “Let’s go.”

The reviews are right on one major point: The X-Files: I Want to Believe is not a summer blockbuster.  It’s like an extended version of one of the show’s non-mythological episodes (which, frankly, the reviewers should have seen coming since Chris Carter said it wouldn’t involve the mythology, and the studio gave it a small budget).

But I liked it anyway.  What the movie does do is bring the series to a conclusion that would have been impossible six years ago.  And I have to admit, I kind of think it’s a conclusion — early buzz suggests that the movie probably won’t do that well, which probably rules out a sequel.  Too bad.  I think the movie does a nice job of setting up where Scully and Mulder are now in their lives.

I walked out with the same feeling I got when we saw Serenity, the movie based on Joss Whedon’s cancelled-too-early series Firefly.  Maybe it was one long in-joke, maybe it wasn’t as action oriented as it should have been, but it did what it needed to do.  It was, in short, appropriate.  It was nice to see Scully and Mulder again.  Maybe we’ll catch them again sometime, maybe not.  After all, as the after-credits scene suggests, they’re doing just fine without us.