i want to believe (that this review is over-stating its case...)

[rivendellrose]

Well, NPR's movie critic Nathan Lee has posted his review of The X-Files: I Want to Believe... and it ain't pretty. The link.



"...[T]he scariest thing about the movie is a strain of ugly, unexamined homophobia attached to the villains: Psychopathic foreigners lurking in the sticks like slasher-flick bogeymen, they're sexual deviants who prey on the status quo (read: middle-class, heterosexual white women).

Carter maximizes their otherness in every possible way as a thematic contrast to the Mulder-Scully relationship. But he does so in terms so exploitative that he actually uses gay marriage as a trope of the horrific. I want to believe he's better than that."

I know better than to take reviewers at face value, usually, but the NPR critics are usually close to what I eventually come out of a movie thinking, and that statement worries me. I'd expected to have to contend with a vaguely iffy movie that didn't feel as nostalgic as I would like for the old days of the X-Files. I hadn't expected outright unpleasantness from a socio-political angle. I hope Lee is exaggerating...

Comments

[zinjadu.livejournal.com]

Whatever. I'm still going to see it. All the thoughtful stuff will probably pass over my head for the simple fact of omg X-Files.

I am, if nothing, easy. XD

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll be seeing it, too - I just hope it'll be subtle enough that I can ignore that stuff.

The reviewer did also say that Gillian Anderson was her usual marvelous self, though. That'll be enough for me, I suppose. ♥

[beam-oflight.livejournal.com]

Say it ain't so! That sucks, normally I can ignore this stuff though, but still :(

[lovelies.livejournal.com]

Oh, that figures. I once took a class on media theory about how horror movies mirror societal fears and tension of the time of their making. And what's making modern American society more tense? Now I'm afraid it's going to be The Invasion -bad.

[hoperomantic.livejournal.com]

Oh, that doesn't sound good... I'm really hoping that it isn't as bad as I've been hearing... *sigh*