When they can't figure something out on their own, there's always an informant to fill them in on the details. Our heroes find clues easily right when it's most convenient for them to do so.
Even so, the script (by series creator Chris Carter) is often sloppily plotted with a reliance on coincidences and improbabilities. You really can't hold that against the movie. Of course, in retrospect, the notion that FEMA could be a well-organized shadow government secretly running world affairs sounds pretty ridiculous in light of what we now know about the agency. Somehow, Mulder and Scully must piece together this puzzle from clues including corn fields, bees, fossil fragments, threatening helicopters, and a goopy Black Oil from outer space. The mysterious Syndicate seems to be behind it, with help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Soon enough, they discover that the bombing of a federal building (a rather ballsy echo of the real-life Oklahoma City tragedy of a few years earlier) ties into a far-reaching government conspiracy to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials planning an invasion of Earth. Naturally, nothing is what it seems to be. After the closure of their X Files, agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been reassigned to a more traditional case involving a domestic terrorist threat. We get back on track with the jump forward to modern times. The opening titles eschew the show's famous theme music, and the film begins with a lengthy (frankly cheesy) prologue in which prehistoric Neanderthals encounter an alien.
While familiarity with the characters, their relationships, and the show's ongoing mystery plot will certainly help to make this a richer experience, the movie sufficiently reintroduces most of those elements, and has its own standalone story with a coherent beginning, middle, and end.
At the same time, the film was also structured to play well for new viewers. The events of the movie will essentially resolve that plot point and lead into the sixth season's storyline. It starts with reference to the fifth season cliffhanger, in which the FBI's "X Files" paranormal investigation department has been closed down. The movie was designed as a bridge between the show's fifth and sixth seasons.
It's now widely acknowledged to be the full title. Eventually, both fans and the show's creators did the same. The phrase "Fight the Future" was originally just a tag line printed on movie posters, but the studio's marketing department took to incorporating it into the title to differentiate the film from the TV series. Technically speaking, the movie's on-screen title reads only as 'The X Files'.
Despite some glaring flaws, the film was generally well-regarded among both existing fans and new viewers.
How do you convince people to pay to see something in theaters that they can get for free on TV every week? Will anyone who'd never watched the show want to see the movie? Released the summer of 1998 after Season 5 had finished airing, 'The X Files: Fight the Future' (as it is commonly known) turned out to be a pretty sizable box office hit. Later on, numerous programs from 'South Park' to 'Hannah Montana' would duplicate its success, but at the time, no one was sure that the ploy would work. It was a bold move that, to my knowledge, had never been attempted before. Right at the zenith of its popularity, 'X Files' creator Chris Carter decided to bring his popular television series to movie theater screens - while the show was still on the air.