Trailer
Plot summary
In 35,000 B.C., hunters in a North Texas cave meet an extraterrestrial life form, and a black oil-like substance passes from it into one of them. In the present, the same oil seeps from the ground and infects a boy who falls into a hole; firefighters sent in after him do not come out. FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, working a bomb threat at a Dallas federal building, are faulted at a hearing because a boy and firefighters were in the building when the bomb went off. A paranoid doctor named Alvin Kurtzweil tells Mulder the bombing was staged to hide how those people died, and Scully finds signs of an alien virus in one of the bodies.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The X Files (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To stop the story leaking, the makers printed the script on red paper so it could not be photocopied, fed disinformation to the press and worked under the codename Project Blackwood, which fans eventually spotted painted on the fire trucks in the North Texas scene.
- Secrecy extended to the crew: when Lata Ryan, who had worked with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park, was approached as executive producer, she was allowed to read the script only in front of the Ten Thirteen Productions staff and could not take it away.
- Because of the schedule every major set was built at the same time, which left the production paying rent on all the stages at once. Construction, supervised by coordinator Bill Liams, started seven weeks before filming.
- Los Angeles stood in for both Dallas and London, and the ice scenes, first planned for an ice field in Alaska, were moved to Whistler near the show's regular Vancouver locations after the tight schedule cut back location work.
- Shooting the film ate into the actors' time on the television series: because of the demands on David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, some fifth-season episodes had to be built around Mulder or Scully alone rather than both leads.
- It was the first time in the franchise's history that the music was composed and recorded with an orchestra. Mark Snow had only a couple of months to write and produce the score while still composing the weekly television series.
