SEE Magazine
Issue #393: June 14, 2001
Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved
On Screen
REVIEW
by Fish GriwkowskyEvolution
starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones and Julianne Moore
now showing
Cineplex Odeon?
** (out of five)"We’re talking a disaster of biblical proportions, BIBLICAL.... Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!"
–Dr. Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters
Um, who you gonna call? Not Agent Mulder, if that’s all right with you. Because Ivan Reitman is director and Evolution is a team-based, world-saving special effects comedy, how can we do anything but think of Ghostbusters? Perhaps alongside the South Park film, Ghostbusters was the funniest action movie ever made, its charm decades ahead of its time. In fact, it’s pretty much never been beat. Let’s paste Evolution to the reject pile and hand me a match, will you?
Like Men in Black, a funnier, more original film than this, Evolution deals with the fact that we’re not alone in the universe, with an opening sequence involving dumb people and a meteor… just like The Thing, now that we’re into it. And John Carpenter’s horror movie not only had soooo much more tension than this visual pudding, never mind a production design that puts Evolution to shame, it also sure as hell never climaxed inside a giant, dripping anus as this film does. Literally. But let’s quit talking about other movies.
Even in a vacuum, Evolution barely develops into a multi-celled organism. The meteor crashes and a pair of juvenile, sex-hungry university geology profs (sound familiar?) are immediately on the scene. They are Ira Kane (Duchovny) and Harry Block (Jones), and here they meet up with their goober would-be fireman sidekick, Wayne Green (Seann William Scott), whose presence in the film is decapitatingly pointless. Taking a sample of the meteor, Kane soon notices that not only is the rock alive, but it’s green, goopy and evolving at a rate of 10,000 years an hour, first from single cells, up to flatworms as the film drags on by its teeth and tongue. By the time the ambitious geologists get back to the crash site, the military’s already taken over with a massive compound. Luckily, and there sure are a lot of "luckilies" in this film, Kane used to work for the army and sure enough his dinkish old commander welcomes him in with a smile, if only to shame him and remind Kane that he caused a syndrome that caused HAHAHAHAHA erectile dysfunction in its military test subjects. Not to sound like a Sahara-pantied feminist, but enough with the winking tit and fart jokes, already. Use broader strokes, and either go all the way with it or save the toilet satire for the masters (though the two best laughs do admittedly come from anus comedy). Duchovny and Jones can both make you laugh, and do in this movie, but so rarely it’s a shame, unlike Bill Murray’s brilliant Venkman, who they’re clearly based on. Dan Akyroyd even shows up as a verbose senator, just to rub the comparison in.
Sure enough, the mytopic flatworms evolve into insects, spiders and, eventually, big freaky dinosaurs, and some of the effects here are all right at best. One sad, pug-doggy monster is memorable, though predictably vicious. The creatures leak into the nearby town and actually kill a few folks, but this is never handled with either humour or even shock, it just sort of happens. The military predictably doesn’t know what it’s doing, the cops are so dumb even my pal Spider-Man shook his head and the two best characters in the movie, this pair of fat ugly brothers, are barely used, though they do show up in the end when all hell has, yawn, gigantically broken loose. Don’t even get me started about the science of Evolution; Jerry Falwell has a better grasp of empirical logic than Duchovny’s character here.
As the creatures turn into primates, what would have been really interesting is if they became smart humanoids and stopped killing everyone, perhaps duking it out anyway due to the aggressiveness of the human military. Instead, it’s just a yahoo gutbath with Julianne Moore Jack-Trippering onto the floor, excitable Jones making honky jokes and Duchovny looking like he’s just had 300 gallons of Head and Shoulders pumped into his ass during a "ain’t we havin’ fun?" musical scene. No real characters to latch on to, dull music, no sense of danger and a nutsucking sense of déjà vu that only retarded cats could miss. It just proves once again that Hollywood is the last petri dish from which to expect any decent progress, especially when fast-evolving big budgets are involved. Given its somewhat warm reception in the payola media, Evolution is all about survival of the shittest. Yes, "shittest."
| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |