It’s kind of a slow Saturday today, so Candice and I rented a couple movies to kill the day with. She’s working on homework while I watch the flicks, and the first one I checked out was Evolution.
David Duchovny and Orlando Jones star as a couple scientists/college professors who discover the crash of a metor in Arizona. The metor has punched through the surface into an underground cavern, and it brings a surprise package along with it — alien organisms that are able to evolve at a super-fast rate, letting them adapt to our atmosphere and threaten to overrun the natural life on the planet.
About three out of five on this one — cute, but it could have been so much better.
I first heard about this film on the Coming Attractions movie news site. Back in November of 1999, CA webmaster Patrick Sauriol posted a early script review of the then-current draft of Evolution (8/28/08 update: The Coming Attractions site no longer exists, but the early script review can be found on the DuchovnyNet fansite.). At that stage in the game, the story was being approached with an extremely different tone — rather than being the Ghostbusters-esque comedy that it turned into, it was a serious Sci-Fi/Horror piece scripted by Don Jakoby that Patrick described as “an interesting fusion of science fiction and horror; sort of like The Andromeda Strain meets Aliens“. He goes on to discuss in his column the pros and cons of the script at that early stage, but at that point it sounded very interesting — good thoughtful Sci-Fi is hard enough to come by in general, and a good Sci-Fi/Horror film that had a brain behind it could be a lot of fun.
Then, starting in June of 2000 (as detailed on CA’s news page for Evolution), reports started coming in that the film had been picked up to be directed by Ivan Reitman, and was going to be a comedy. This just didn’t seem to sit well, after the original script review. Again in the words of CA, “Stranger things have happened in Hollywood, but this one just kinda creeps us out. Like, how are they going to handle the calcium-eating worms that get under the skin of one of the scientists? Sounds like a gut-busting moment, don’t it?”
Eventually, however, Evolution hit the theaters in its present form…and, well, it’s not bad, just not what I think it could have been had it stayed true to its original form. David Duchovny did a good job with a fairly cookie-cutter role (and one can’t help but think that he was quite conciously spoofing his X-Files persona throughout), and Orlando Jones was a decent supporting character. The other two primary supporting characters were Seann William Scott as a wannabe firefighter and Julianne Moore as a bumbling government scientist who becomes the requisite love interest for Duchovny’s character. Again, neither of them were bad, but I can’t really say either of them really stood out much, either. Scott pretty much played the same lunkhead he did in the American Pie films as Stiffler, and I’ve seen Moore do much better work as FBI agent Clarice Starling in Hannibal (while I hated that film, I did think that she did a credible job in it).
It was also somewhat disappointing to me that the filmmakers/scriptwriters felt the need to base two major ‘comedic’ moments — an alien bug getting into Jones’ suit and then under the skin, and the climax of the film — around ‘butt’ humor. While I’m no big fan of the current ‘PC’ trend (I think it’s a decent concept that has gone way overboard), neither am I a big fan of the concurrent drive to compensate for political correctness by going the extreme other direction, which so many recent comedies feel they need to do. Fourth-grade humor is fine — if you’re in the fourth grade. At least for myself, I prefer something a bit more than jokes based around bodily functions, or the violation thereof, to get a decent laugh.
However, I don’t want to sound like I’m doing nothing but trashing the film. It was an enjoyable enough silly romp, and the special effects were certainly worth seeing — the creatures looked great, from the early insectoid things wandering around the cavern to the flying dragon-type creature that invaded the shopping mall. It’s worth a rent, and as comedies go, I got enough giggles to give it a decent three stars — but not much more than that.