Network TV was the place to be on the small screen back in the mid-to-late ‘90s, before streaming services started churning out series en masse. This was the era of The X-Files in its prime, with David Duchovny’s Agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Agent Dana Scully as pop culture icons. They came to the big screen in the summer of 1998 with The X-Files: Fight the Future, which combined the best parts of the show’s mythology for longtime fans with blockbuster scale for newcomers. I rewatched it for the 25th anniversary, and realized some things that didn’t quite hit home in 1998.
Now, I’m not going to claim that June 2023 was the first time that I rewatched Fight the Future since seeing it in the theater as a preteen, and there’s a well-worn VHS copy of the movie somewhere to prove it. A lot has happened since the theatrical premiere on June 19, 1998 – including a second movie and a semi-successful Fox revival – but there’s still a lot to enjoy from this film.
