Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 12/02/2008 Run time: 352 minutes Rating: Nr
The X-Files Revelations is a two-disc grab bag of eight significant episodes from Fox's iconic sci-fi/horror series starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI agents investigating the paranormal. From season 1, it includes the pilot and "Beyond the Sea," in which Brad Dourif plays a death-row inmate who claims to have psychic visions of a serial killer. In "The Host" (season 2), Mulder (Duchovny) and Scully (Anderson) pursue a human-sized fluke worm, and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (season 3) features an Emmy-winning Peter Boyle as a man who can see how people will die. "Memento Mori" (season 4) deals with an attempt to save one of the agents from a critical disease, Jerry Springer appears as himself in the black-and-white Frankenstein story "The Post-Modern Prometheus" (season 5), "Bad Blood" (also season 5) is a vampire story, and in "Milagro" (season 6), a writer turns to Scully as his subject as he also becomes a murder suspect. Released just before the theatrical opening of the second X-Files movie, The X-Files Revelations bills itself as the "essential guide" to that movie. But really it's just a broad sampling of the kind of episodes the series had to offer, with one major omission. By concentrating on the stand-alone "creature feature" episodes, it almost completely ignores the entangling, absorbing, and often-baffling story lines about alien abduction and government conspiracy that the series was known for. Tellingly, only two of the episodes (the pilot and "Memento Mori") also appear in The X-Files Mythology compilation series, which attempted to condense nine seasons of conspiracy themes into 16 discs. The X-Files Revelations has a lot of entertaining episodes, especially "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," and creator Chris Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz have filmed new introductions explaining why they picked each episode. And fans will also be interested in a 27-minute WonderCon panel from February 2008 with Duchovny, Anderson, Carter, and Spotniz discussing the new movie. But novices shouldn't expect this two-disc set to teach them everything they need to know about The X-Files. --David Horiuchi
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