Flak Magazine: Review of Evolution, 6-11-01

You'd be foolish to go see Evolution because you want to revel in either its plot mechanics or the science part of its science fiction. Because of that, I'm going to discuss freely what happens in the last act, making this what's commonly known as a "spoiler warning." You have my personal guarantee: This review's impact on your enjoyment of Evolution will be negligible. Why? Because what's not predictable is totally irrational, meaning you never run the risk of being legitimately surprised, and thus there are no surprises to ruin.

So: A meteor strikes Earth teeming with the fundamental stuff of life. As our cadre of heroes discovers (more on them at the end), the stuff is evolving at a dizzying speed, from single-celled organisms to fungi to worms in a matter of hours. The Army takes over the impact site, evicting our heroes, who soon realize that the creatures are not contained but are instead spreading through the catacombed caverns beneath their Arizona town. When they convince the government of this, the Army plans to carpet the town with napalm to kill off the beasties.

That's the prologue to this last act: The heroes are lamenting this rash incineration — it's not known how the organisms will react to fire. It's at this point, in fact, that an inadvertent test shows that the primordial goop reacts really well to fire; it catalyzes the evolutionary process. Napalm, it's realized, would be bad, but those firebugs in the Army won't return the heroes' phone calls. How, then, to kill these aliens?

While looking at the periodic table — this is the best part — our professor protagonist makes the following pronouncement: We're carbon-based life forms, and "our poison" is arsenic; these are nitrogen-based life forms, so if you make the same carbon-to-arsenic knight's-move across the periodic table starting at nitrogen, you would therefore arrive at "their poison" — in this case, selenium. How to find a sufficient quantity of selenium? Why, selenium sulfide is the active ingredient in anti-dandruff shampoo! This directly results in 7-Up pitchman Orlando Jones standing halfway inside the anus of a giant pseudopod with a hose connected to a fire engine filled with 500 gallons of Head & Shoulders.

Reading that summary, it doesn't seem so bad — sort of a junky Mars Attacks! or Arachnophobia throwback to monster movies. But it is so bad, achieving the spirit of those films only occasionally. It's as good an example as any of a movie ruined by script monkeying and special effects.

It may be unfair to assume that the movie was reaching for a retro monster movie flavor and failed; maybe it was going for something else entirely. But it doesn't really succeed at anything at all, and considering the widespread reports that the original story by Arachnophobia scribe Dan Jakoby was comedied up by other writers for Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, it's easy to imagine the original skeleton of a smarter story with actual wit instead of scat jokes. (The volume of ass-oriented humor in the movie is smothering.) Evolution crashes recklessly from scene to scene, smashing not just logic but any sense of internal consistency. Two examples from the synopsis above: They couldn't get the Army to test the napalm after they determined how catastrophic its effects were? And, on the flip side, how about testing their selenium theory before driving underneath a monster the size of a small lake? We can't ask for rocket science, but comedy is always better wound up and tight versus aimless.

And, unlike Ghostbusters, in which the creativity used to make the most of their limited SFX technology is apparent, the lassitude provided by modern technology runs away with Evolution, as if Reitman just gave up the reins to effects supervisor Phil Tippett. Is the most impressive way to show a mosquito attack with the camera on the mosquito's back? Yeah. Is it the funniest, or the most interesting, or the one in best service to the story? No. My favorite effects moments in the film by far are the last shots of the big final blob creature, and from a technical perspective, they might also be the worst; the thing is just too large to have a realistic texture applied to it when shot from a distance, and so it looks like it's been composited in at the wrong scale, like in any cheesy old sci-fi flick. Computer graphics are now used to make something outrageous look as normal as possible, but it's this mismatch that makes the effect look special.

What Evolution does have going for it is the easy chemistry within its cast; in their interactions, there's a reminder of Reitman's famous grace with his actors. David Duchovny and Jones star as community college professors looking for their moment in the spotlight; Seann William Scott is the dim-bulb pool boy who's repeatedly involved in alien attacks; and Julianne Moore is the brilliant-but-clumsy CDC scientist who breaks from the government.

Is it less than Reitman's Ghostbusters ensemble, which is its obvious inspiration? By a mile; these characters aren't really foils for one another. But the ensemble cast — which is one of the most peculiar recently assembled — riff off one another well, and they all exude a genial charm that makes you glad to be sharing the theater with them.

Amiability alone does not a summer comedy blockbuster make, though, and the rest can be pretty painful. There is a magic mix of sci-fi/horror, action and comedy — a perfect Venn intersection in which all the other films mentioned here happily reside, as well as winning movies like Tremors, Gremlins and the Evil Dead trilogy. But here Reitman force-fits incongruous parts of those genres together: inconsistent science, brutal violence and fart jokes — all the primordial pieces, desperate for a little sophistication.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)