Having been a huge fan of the original, I’m very on the fence about this. Part of it surely is that I’m no longer in my early teens, when the X Files was just the best thing ever; but still, it just didn’t capture that feeling to me. It was way too on the nose, hokey CGI UFOs like in a SyFy original movie—I honestly thought that the scene in Roswell (or not?) would end up being a deliberate fake out.
They also pushed Mulder way too hard into paranoid nutcase territory. I’d thought the O’Malley character would end up being a foil for Mulder, sort of showcasing where paranoia leads when unchecked, contrasting Mulder’s drive for seeking out the truth with O’Malleys right wing anti-government extremism—wanting to believe versus wanting to be believed—, but so far, they seem to be playing it straight, or at best, in an ‘any harbor in a storm’-kind of way.
I’m also not sure regarding the about-face regarding the conspiracy’s perpetrators. So one girl says, but it wasn’t aliens, and all of a sudden Mulder is convinced? Sure he can be gullible, but usually only when people confirm his ideas. Just didn’t ring true to me.
Also, the whole ARV-thing was just way too casual. Oh, the proof you’ve been looking for all these years? Yeah, it’s just gathering dust in this hangar. One also presumes that these paranoid in the extreme characters never documented anything on film, or rigged things such that a massive data upload to the net would occur if a certain button isn’t pressed regularly, and so on—no, the government just barges in and blows everything up, and poof, it’s just gone, likely to never play a role again. (Briefly, when O’Malley took Mulder to those people that were ‘very paranoid’ about their work, I hoped fiercely that once they take the bag off of Mulder’s head, he’d be face to face with the Lone Gunmen—cue “wait, so you guys know one another?” from O’Malley.)
In fact, for nearly the first half of the first episode, I was convinced this would be just a big fake-out—Mulder was just pretending to go along with O’Malley’s nonsense, the UFO crash was staged, the girl a hoax, and the ARV some clever special effects. For the second half, I mostly wished they’d taken that direction.
Still, there were also some bits I loved. Lots of callbacks to UFO lore—element 115, electro-gravitation, Kenneth Arnold, that was all there. Also, I thought the interaction between Mulder and Scully rang true for the most part (except in some of the forced info-dump scenes). Everybody seemed a believable future version of their old characters; Skinner hasn’t shown much development yet, but maybe we’ll get to see some in future episodes.