#5 in my ranking of Ivan Reitman’s filmography.
I’ve had a soft spot for this movie for a while. It’s not good, but I get a certain kick out of it, especially its third act. It’s stupid, intentionally so, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with a whole lot of, “Why don’t they just do this?” moments to tarnish things. But, I chuckle pretty consistently. After the dreary messes that were Ivan Reitman’s previous three films, Evolution is something of a return to form. It still doesn’t work, but at least it mildly entertains without any pretensions towards pathos.
A meteor strikes near Glen Canyon, Arizona, totaling wannabe firefighter Wayne’s (Sean William Scott) car. This invites the attention of two professors from the local community college. Harry (Orlando Jones) is the geology adjunct and Division III Volleyball coach. Ira (David Duchovny) is the biology professor with a mysterious past. They quickly discover that the alien life on the meteor is both rapidly evolving from single-celled organisms into more complex ones in the matter of hours but also that they require non-oxygen dominant atmosphere to survive. They can’t keep this a secret, though, and the Army, led by General Woodman (Ted Levine) arrives to take over, the scientific efforts headed by Dr. Reed (Julianne Moore).
Now, for my relatively positive introduction, the first hour of the film is something of a drag. It’s two main things. The first is how Reitman filmed comedy. He set up the camera with a script that was never quite funny on its own and waited for his cast to provide the laughs. He thankfully has Orlando Jones in the cast who provides some small chuckles along the way, but Duchovny isn’t providing much and Scott only seems to work well while bouncing off of Jones, which doesn’t happen until the third act. The second thing is the drama.
In a silly comedy, does drama matter? Generally, yeah. Unless you’re going to go full skit-mode, the story pieces that connect to each other filled with funny bits still need to work. Throw in the fact that there aren’t many funny bits in the first hour, and all you’re left with is the drama. And what is the drama here? Ira and Harry being denied credit for their discovery (including a courtroom scene which just…it doesn’t make sense in the least) which drives them to break in. And…none of it matters. It consumes many minutes of screentime, but the machinations of how Ira is demanding to be taken seriously by the Army doesn’t affect the central antagonist of the whole thing: the rapid evolution and spread of the alien life forms.
Now, I’m going to script doctor here for a minute.
Instead of Ira getting kicked out, he keeps his original samples and experiments. He uses a series a chemicals and substances on his samples to try and figure things out. One experiment discovers that Selenium is deadly toxic to the alien, but Ira is pulled away, perhaps his samples are taken then by the Army, and he doesn’t know…yet. Meanwhile, Dr. Reed is taking over, trying to contain the mass but is being undermined by the General because he wants to believe that the cave system the meteor has crashed is something the Army has managed to close off. She goes to Ira and Harry because Harry knows the system being a geology teacher, and she needs their help to see what they’ve missed. She brings them in, Ira finds his samples, discovers that one of them has died, doesn’t know right away which one it is, and gets distracted by that. Their lack of cohesion allows for comic misadventure which…kind of lets the rest of the movie play out as is. You just don’t have that terrible, terrible moment where Ira figures out Selenium is deadly because of playing connect the dots on the back of Reed’s shirt.
It is once the third act starts that the film becomes more purely comic and works better. A large, flying alien gains the ability to breath oxygen. There’s an action bit in the mall. The general decides to napalm everything (without ever testing to see how the aliens would react to fire which is because the movie needs to happen), and Head and Shoulders gets a giant plug as the saving solution for all of humanity. There are special effects, a fun little role for Dan Aykroyd as the governor of Arizona, and funny things along the way.
Really, what nearly saves the film for me is that the third act is completely and totally free of any attempt at pathos. It is where the film fully embraces what it should be: silly nonsense. And it’s amusing. After the previous decade of Reitman’s career, it’s pretty obvious that this is a conscious effort to change course to where he was before he tried to go more serious, starting largely with Kindergarten Cop. It’s where the Ghostbusters comparisons get the most purchase. It’s sarcastic and special effects driven instead of earnest.
I just wish the script was better, especially its first two thirds which mostly feel like characters spinning their wheels for weeks in order to give the aliens enough time to evolve at a pace the film considers realistic for the situation. Reitman was obviously not a good judge of script, but it seems like someone helped save this production to some limited degree. The film does feel like something that was nearly twice as long in the workprint (a lot of early side characters just disappear by the mid-point), so maybe the original cut did try for something like redemption for Ira with weepiness. The script definitely needed another draft or two to make the human dramatic bits just make more sense and fit in better, but the end result is…mildly entertaining.
Originally published here
English (US) · 