Evolution comes up just a notch above Dude, Where’s My Car? in the entertainment department.
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Ivan Reitman must have taken a look at the hit he wrote and directed in 1984, "Ghostbusters," and said, "I can do that again." The result is his 2001 big-budget bomb, "Evolution," and, no, he couldn´t do it again. Maybe the years had dulled his senses. Maybe he didn´t have the right cast this time around. Maybe he should have written the screenplay himself rather than trust it to three other guys.
In any case, "Evolution" comes up just a notch above "Dude, Where´s My Car?" in the entertainment department thanks to a few visually arresting special effects and an effectively all-encompassing soundtrack. But as far as humor goes, you won´t find much here. This is one comedy that failed to evolve.
The first thing Reitman does is put his on-screen team together, and like "Ghostbusters" the team is made up of three men and a woman. David Duchovny gets the thankless job of playing the lead, an Arizona community college biology professor named Ira. He´s no Bill Murray, who deadpanned his lines with droll precision. Duchovny, a thoroughly pleasant chap, merely looks bemused most of the time, which is nonetheless a far sight better than his cohorts in the film come off.
Ira and his buddy, Harry (Orlando Jones), a fellow teacher at the college, go to the site of a recent meteor crash (or asteroid as it´s called in the movie; whatever) in the hope of winning Nobel Prizes with their find. Jones is assigned the bulk of the comic chores to Duchovny´s straight man, but Jones is given little material to work with and flails about trying to find something funny to say or do, without much success. His biggest moment comes when he gets an alien bug caught in his system and has to have it removed by way of a rectal probe. Nothing in the film gets any better.
The third male character is Wayne, played by Seann William Scott in another of his patented doofus roles (see "Road Trip," "American Pie," or, again, "Dude, Where´s My Car?"). He´s a fellow trying to become a fireman, and in his first scene he´s out in the desert putting a dummy in a shack and setting it ablaze in order to practice rescuing a body from a burning building. I think his dragging the dummy out of the shack was supposed to be the gag, but I wasn´t sure. Then the meteor hits nearby, and Wayne´s the first one to see it. Being a good twenty feet from an impact that should have left a crater the size of Arizona State´s football stadium, he is, of course, unharmed.
The final member of the team is Allison (Julianne Moore), a doctor with the CDC who arrives at the meteor site to quarantine any stray life forms the rock may be carrying. Naturally, all female scientists in movies are beautiful young women.
OK, so a few hours after the meteor hits, our heroes are up close and personal investigating it, touching it, and taking samples of the strange green moss that seems to be clinging to it. I mean, haven´t these folks seen what happened to Stephen King in "Creep Show"? Maybe that´s the joke here--doing a parody of a parody. Anyway, turns out there are organisms on the meteor (or more precisely, the meteorite, although in the film they keep calling it an asteroid, which is a much bigger rock than this, but who´s arguing? Any rock this size that hit the Earth would, as I said, leave a crater and continue to be too hot to touch for years).
Well, these organisms evolve really fast in our warm atmosphere, even though they take a while to get used to our air´s oxygen content. Before long the organisms are growing enormous, the U.S. army´s involved, and our heroes are kicked out of the area and have to resort to sneaking in and hijacking materials for their Nobels. It´s all preposterous and improbable, even for so silly and vacuous a movie as this.
There´s nothing worse than trying to watch a comedy with no laughs. Instead of the audience rolling in the aisles, the jokes die in the aisles. Nothing makes any logical sense, and nothing makes any farcical sense, either. The whole show appears to be an excuse to create CG effects on a grand scale and then find a place for them in the story line. But even at that, all the creatures just look computer animated. And once you´ve seen one thing blow up, the thrill kind of goes away in seeing it repeated, you know?
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[release]9080[/release]