For three decades, the truth has been out there.
Now it's coming to Arc Cinema.
Chris Carter's The X-Files premiered on television in 1993 and became hugely popular, its fans being dubbed "X-Philes". For most of its 11-season run it focused on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigated unsolved cases allegedly involving paranormal phenomena. Mulder, a criminal profiler, was the conspiracy theorist and believer in the supernatural; Scully, a medical doctor, was the sceptic.
As well as individual cases, the pair had an overarching story involving an apparent alien invasion.
Arc Cinema at the National Film and Sound Archive will be screening a 35mm print of The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), the first of two feature films based on the series.
It was released between the TV series' fifth and sixth seasons and follows Mulder and Scully, removed from their usual jobs on the X-Files, investigating the bombing of a building and the destruction of criminal evidence.
They uncover what seems to be a government conspiracy to hide the truth about an alien colonisation of Earth.
The National Film and Sound Archives' programs manager, Travis Green, said he was an ardent fan who began watching the series as a teenager.
Green said the series helped change television.
"It had a female lead who wasn't the typical female lead in the 1990s - she was a woman of intelligence, not eye candy for the male lead."
The series also benefited into the dawning of the internet age. Conspiracy theories and paranormal speculations had long been around but the internet helped spread them faster and wider than ever before and The X-Files was one of many shows whose fans could interact and post content for each other around the world.
Green - who categorised himself as more of a Scully-style sceptic - said the movie stood on its own for the uninitiated, possibly serving as an introduction, but ardent fans would get even more out of it.
He remembered having to wait for each episode to come out every week - unlike now, where binging multiple episodes, even whole series, is possible - and having not seen the movie since its initial release was excited to see it again on the big screen.
The X-Files: Fight the Future is on at Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive on Saturday, September 9, 2023 at 7pm. Tickets $12/$10 from nfsa.gov.au.
