At the height of the DVD market, back in the 2000s, all manners of films received special, extended, unrated, or occasionally even director’s-cut editions, offering sometimes-minor, sometimes-revelatory variations from their theatrical releases. The 2008 movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe was released in theaters during this era, and accordingly its later-2008 DVD included an extended cut of the film. As with many such alternate versions, the longer one is “unrated,” primarily in the sense that it was not submitted to the MPAA for a rating, and contains about three minutes’ worth of extensions. A little more gore, a little more time on a few character beats; not exactly a revelation.

So fans of the X-Files franchise were surprised to learn that series creator and I Want to Believe writer-director Chris Carter had a whole other director’s cut up his sleeve, debuting this past Friday on Hulu.

But it wouldn’t be The X-Files without some extra convolutions in the bigger-picture story. Not only did an extended cut of this movie already exist, Carter’s director’s cut actually runs several minutes shorter than the theatrical release. (It’s also wholly unrelated to the long-gestating, Ryan Coogler-helmed reboot that recently shot its pilot episode.) Still: This is the first kinda-new X-Files content since the revived eleventh season ended in 2018 — ten years after the last film, which arrived ten years after the first film. Spooky! So what’s the deal with the awkwardly titled The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn?

First, some background: The X-Files: I Want to Believe has long occupied a strange place in the wild world of X-Files continuity. For many fans, the X-Files series ended with its seventh season in spring of 2000. After that point, Gillian Anderson continued as a regular for another reason, David Duchovny stepped his involvement way back to periodic appearances, and by the time the show limped along through its ninth season, it was pretty far removed from being a show about their characters, FBI paranormal investigators Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. (Anderson took some episodes off at this point, too.) Both characters returned for a 2002 series finale, which wrapped up some storylines in a less-than-satisfactory fashion. It seemed pretty clear that the show had been overextended, which was a shame, because the 1998 feature film (bridging the fifth and sixth seasons) laid the groundwork for the show to transition to occasional big-screen installments after Duchovny and Anderson grew weary of the weekly grind.

So by the time I Want to Believe got up and running, fans were eager for a return, but the broader viewing public that once embraced the show didn’t seem as interested. It was, in retrospect, an awkward amount of time: Not quite enough time had passed that this would work as a legacy sequel (which wasn’t really that popular of a thing until the 2010s, anyway), but it had also been more than six years since the finale. In the summer of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, this was more than enough for The X-Files to feel like yesterday’s geek news.

It probably didn’t help that Mulder and Scully were returning with a stand-alone storyline that had nothing to do with the show’s signature alien conspiracy. Creatively, this made perfect sense; that storyline was beaten to death by the end of the series, and the show itself always had far greater range than just UFO stories. Its mix of aliens, mythological creatures, psychic powers, and other hard-to-explain phenomena was what made it such a thrilling week-to-week experience.

But more casual fans did largely associate the show with sci-fi stuff, so maybe a story about Mulder and Scully, ties with the FBI long severed, returning to the fold to track down a possible serial killer with the questionable help of a pedophile priest claiming to be psychic… Well, maybe that wasn’t the most appealing decision Carter could have made. What’s more, the movie couldn’t help but catch viewers up on Mulder and Scully’s post-series lives, so rather than dropping back into FBI investigations with little fuss, there’s a lot of character-based material about Scully’s religious and scientific faith, and Mulder’s compulsion to investigate the dark and mysterious corners of humanity. It was basically the perfect casual-fan-alienating mixture of continuity, episodic storytelling, and just plain murk (Mulder and Scully haven’t seen each other regularly as the movie begins but also seem to sleep together offscreen?!?). The worst of both worlds, perhaps, especially if fans weren’t really anticipating something like a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Lorenzo’s Oil.

So how does a shorter director’s cut resolve those issues? Honestly, it doesn’t; time does. With the passage of time (and the addition of 16 more episodes’ worth of proper Mulder-and-Scully adventures that arrived in 2016 and 2018), I Want to Believe has less of a burden to contend with. Almost 20 years later, it’s far easier to accept as a mostly-stand-alone small-scale thriller story freighted with the heavy backstory of our pals Mulder and Scully. If it doesn’t have the humor, scope, or playful not-quite-romance of some of the show’s best episodes, well, neither do some of the show’s many other good episodes! This was, as mentioned, a show that could do a lot of things. I Want to Believe chooses a few more serious-minded of those things. That’s less dispiriting now. It’s also clearly Carter’s sensibility; he was never really in charge of the funniest or weirdest episodes of the show.

To that end, the tightening up of the director’s cut does make some sense. If the movie is going to function as a supersized episode, it might as well retain the show’s brisk network-TV pacing. At the same time, some of the tweaks do see Carter pushing the material into a more cinematic direction. The opening of the movie is instructive, with definite changes that don’t alter the basic trajectory of the story. Carter still cross-cuts between an FBI agent who gets abducted by mysterious, shadowy figures, and a scene of other agents searching a snow-covered field for her body (and finding someone else’s severed arm). But in the director’s cut, the clever matches between the two scenes (the agent’s pet dog barking in one scene into the canine searchers in the other) come faster, with more jagged back-and-forth that calls greater attention to the pairing. It wouldn’t be completely out of place on the show, but the disorientation feels more like a movie.

That’s about the scale of changes fan can expect to see, or barely see. Yes, there’s a little more violence here and there, but that was true of the previous extended cut, and Carter’s own claim of putting the “scares” back in the movie seems misguided as this version is only mildly creepier. Some of this material might have garnered an “R” from the MPAA in 2008 — Carter claims that was the motivating factor behind all of the tinkering, trying to get that magic PG-13 — but it barely registers as such now. (Hannibal had vastly gorier episodes airing on NBC less than a decade after this movie came out.)

Despite Carter’s efforts to reorient his movie around its actual story rather than ancillary character drama, what pops from I Want to Believe still isn’t the Frankenstein overtones of the movie’s ultimate villains, who are still largely unmemorable as far as X-Files one-and-done characters go. (In general, the fact that other possible psychics are mentioned in the movie’s dialogue is a nice nod to fans but maybe not the best strategy; mentioning Clyde Bruckman, a character in one of the show’s very best episodes, can only end in disappointment by comparison.) Instead, it’s still Carter’s juxtaposition of Mulder and Scully’s respective fixations — his on believing a man who sensible social rules tell us to cast out (Billy Connolly, giving a strong performance), hers on attempting to save the life of an ill child — that makes the movie involving and affecting. Those story threads do seem sharper and clearer in this version, where they’re both slightly more connected to the main storyline. But is that Carter’s re-edit doing the work, or the enduring power of his creation? It’s a mystery, I guess.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.