EVOLUTION Eek, a giant starfish! In the weeks since I've seen this movie, I've barely been able to string a few words together about it. Maybe I just suck at writing about comedy, I dunno - it's impossible to argue what's funny and what's not. But, here goes... I don't know about the rest of you, but when I hear that a band I'm a fan of has decided to go "back to their roots", I cringe. No four words so clearly signals that a band is out of ideas and is beating a retreat to where popularity is more easily assured. Once in a while a band is actually able to pull it off, but usually, they just come across as a pale shadow of their former selves. I felt quite similarly when all the hype around Evolution centered on how director Ivan Reitman was returning to his Ghostbusters-style roots (mind you, Reitman had been directing for some time by the time he made Ghostbusters, but since when did facts have any place in hype?). Not that Reitman has exactly set the world on fire since then with films like Six Days, Seven Nights and Junior. But, much like with the bands, I don't often see a director able to pull off something like this without just going through the motions. Evolution is, unfortunately, just such a case. David Duchovny and Orlando Jones star as two professors at an Arizona community college with dreams of getting out of there and hitting whatever "big time" there is for community college professors. A spike-shaped meteor conveniently crashes into an underground cave nearby, and they're the first scientific personnel on the scene when this meteor (which bleeds blue goo) starts setting off super-rapid evolution of life forms in the cave, from single-celled organisms, to flatworms, and up and up the food chain. Needless to say, they think that this is their ticket to the Nobel Prize, though I think you have to do something more ambitious than stumble across something that crash-lands into your community to win one of those. Anyway, the life forms start evolving into larger, more oxygen-tolerant and carnivorous species, until it becomes clear that something has to be done before they start eating us all. Story-wise, Evolution is not particularly inspired. The creatures are often fun to look at, and sometimes it's a real hoot to watch them fill their own particular ecological niche (especially when they're still in that cave). When they start busting out, though, they basically just take whatever form is convenient for the story. Some of the designs are supposed to be surprising, but they're really quite obvious (for example, the "cute" creature that looks like a cross between a bulldog and a, uh, bullfrog, keeps its mouth shut for all but the last few seconds of its scene - gee, I wonder what it's hiding). When one winged creature grabs a girl in a shopping mall, it just spends its entire (very lengthy) scene flying around with her, its intentions completely unclear; if it was going to eat her, shouldn't it have eaten her by the time this very, very long scene has wrapped up? The science behind this movie is almost beside the point, but some things are still annoying, because they rely on scientific problems which have been waded through before and you'd think these writers would've learned by now. For example, a petri dish with half a centimeter of blue goo turns into what looks like about sixty pounds of living biomass in seconds; where did this mass come from? It might be an alien life-form, but it shouldn't be a magic life-form. And it's almost a foregone conclusion in this kind of movie that there's some kind of "silver bullet" to use against the aliens; while it does manage to work in a fairly amusing product placement at the end, the logic behind this weapon is pretty silly: since we're carbon-based life-forms and arsenic (which, of course, kills us) is placed on the periodic table of elements a certain number of spaces away from carbon, then the element that kills a silicon-based life-form (I don't recall any previous mention to these creatures being silicon-based) must be in the same relative position to silicon. Uh-huh. And don't get me started on how much I HATE "silver bullets", which are lazy writing unless they're used (or not used) in an inventive way (here? No.). The cast has its moments, though. If there was ever any doubt that David Duchovny can play a role other than Mulder, those doubts won't be assuaged by Evolution (somebody hold a mirror under this guy's nose). Aside from some way-out-of-left-field acting non sequitirs, he's basically playing this role the same way he plays Mulder in the more offbeat, stand-alone X-Files episodes. Even though those are the only X-Files episodes I like watching anymore, a little more energy would've been appreciated, and those non sequitirs are pretty distracting, like one scene where he moons somebody through a car windshield. Jones is very funny in his role, with maybe one too many references to how he's the black guy (yes, thank you, we noticed), and the mega-sphincter joke just doesn't have anywhere to go, but still, he's a gifted comic actor and a lot of fun. Less successful is Julianne Moore as a klutzy scientist, who brings nothing to the movie that I remember. Tone-wise, pace-wise, and story-wise, yes, Ghostbusters is the closest reference point for this one, but Evolution lacks that movie's zip and consistently amusing characters, making up for it only with some excellent CGI creature effects. Yeah, it's safe to say that Reitman was completely on autopilot for this one; Kindergarten Cop wasn't exactly a classic, but at least he was trying, and "It's not a tumor!" will be remembered long after anything you hear here. This one even substitutes the giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man for the most uninspired "giant monster at the climax" I've ever seen, a starfish the size of an aircraft carrier, which basically spends the entire climax sitting there, looking blubbery. It's only fitfully amusing, and thrills-wise, it's a complete failure (there isn't a single scene in which anybody seems to be in the slightest danger, even that one scene where somebody gets killed), but still, it's fun often enough for a matinee, if you're not feeling particularly demanding. And I'm definitely glad I saw this instead of Swordfish, which looks like every frame was filtered through somebody's urine sample (a cinematographic decision which seems to be disturbingly gaining in popularity). But Evolution is never anything much more than by-the numbers summer fare, and nothing you're going to remember 20 minutes later, unless you're like me and trying to keep it in your head until you write a review. BACK TO THE E's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE