Contrary to the promise of its title, Evolution does not represent a leap forward–not for summer movies, and certainly not for director-producer Ivan Reitman, who represents the summer movie tradition about as well as anybody, having given the world two Ghostbusters movies. People who’ve seen the latter will experience deja vu while watching Evolution. In fact, they’ll probably feel such deja vu that they’ll want to leave the theater and rent Ghostbusters, which was a pretty shallow movie–a wiseass, widescreen, baby boomer variant of The Ghost Breakers–but at least it had a fresh sensibility, a few great gags and an inspired lead performance by Bill Murray.
Evolution has none of those things, but it misses Murray the most. It misses Murray so much, in fact, that I spent part of Evolution’s running time thinking that many of the qualities Hollywood praises in Reitman–a sly weirdness coupled with an elusive generosity of spirit–are actually Bill Murray’s qualities as a performer, and that without Murray, Reitman stands exposed as a solid but uninspired comedy director with only one story to tell (slobs against snobs), only one agenda to pursue (defanging counterculture comedy and making it kid-friendly), and only a certain number of tricks in his creative bag. (Yes, Reitman’s Dave was an anomaly, and I’m still not sure how to account for it.)
Sans Murray, Evolution gives us David Duchovny as Dr. Ira Kane, a formerly important government scientist who’s now teaching biology at Glen Canyon Community College in Arizona. Orlando Jones, actor, writer and spokesman for 7-Up, is Kane’s best friend Harry Block, a geology professor who doubles as girls’ volleyball coach and takes the second part of his job much more seriously. When a giant meteor lands a few miles from the college, Harry, who’s a member of the United States Geological Survey team (you can join over the Internet, apparently), goes to check out the disturbance and brings Ira with him. They discover the meteor has punched through the ground into a cave, which soon becomes a makeshift incubation chamber for interstellar critters. First come single-celled organisms, then multi-celled organisms, then flatworms, then insects and so on, until the film’s title is explained.
This meteor carries the seeds of life, but evolution is all sped up; the alien creatures die as soon as they try to breathe earth’s atmosphere, paving the way for the next wave of organisms. Each successive wave is more suited to life on earth than the one that came before. It’s also bigger, scarier and more deadly.
This is a dandy idea for a sci-fi comedy; couple science fiction’s potential for allegory with the (literal) monster budget of a Hollywood blockbuster, and you have a concept that, in the right hands, could have been both a satisfying piece of escapist entertainment and a moderately thought-provoking one. Imagine what, say, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the writer and director of Being John Malkovich, might have done with the same material–or David O. Russell, who proved with Three Kings that it’s possible to combine the bruising mechanical madness of a Hollywood action movie with the sting of revisionist war movie satire. One can imagine all sorts of fruitful possibilities; the creatures emerging from the meteor could have been crazed reflections of the bland suburban communities of the American southwest, adapting to suit life in a land of shopping malls, interstates and chain resturants. Or the movie could have reflected deeper, more general patterns in modern life: the urge to procreate, or the urge to conquer and acquire. All these things could have been encoded in the same spectacular creature-driven action sequences required to justify a big budget and a summer release date, and the result might have been something memorable, or at least honorable.
Instead, the creative minds behind Evolution–writers Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman, and Reitman–must have made a decision to ignore the potential for social satire and go for the most obvious kinds of surface excitement. Notwithstanding the occasional witty moment–notably Ghostbusters alumnus Dan Aykroyd as the governor of Arizona, a strutting dolt who demands hot chocolate and a pair of opera glasses to watch the final showdown–the film amounts to what the disaffected space marines in Aliens called "a bug hunt." Every 15 minutes or so, a new type of creature arises from the meteor and has to be snuffed out by Ira, Harry and their allies. It’s too much like a videogame, or that el cheapo syndicated cartoon version of Ghostbusters that had wan, two-dimension versions of the movie characters starring in a high-tech combat equivalent of Scooby Doo. (Evolution’s creature effects start out terrific and get worse as the film goes on; the giant protoplasmic beast that rampages across the desert at the end of the picture–a less interesting cousin of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters–is as grainy, pale and unconvincing as one of those planet-eaters from the original Star Trek series.)
The fact that the scientist heroes of Evolution offhandedly slay these creatures–a stark contrast to Ghostbusters, where the heroes captured their enemies or sent them back to the netherworld–gives the whole thing a sour aftertaste. Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, a subversive, satiric bug hunt movie that critiqued fascist tendencies in modern society, Evolution can’t even be bothered to provide a touch of monster movie poetry–a moment of fleeting sympathy for the rampaging beasts, much less an unsentimental, warrior-like sense of respect for their fierceness. A long, admittedly exciting sequence where Harry, Ira and a goofy young firefighter (Seann William Scott) track a flying dinosaur through a shopping mall and kill it with shotguns could have worked as a knights-killing-the-dragon setpiece and an acknowledgement of the brutal price of defending one’s planet. Instead, it’s just one more level on the videogame.
The cast does what it can with what it has–and what it has is a bunch of recombined bits from the Ghostbusters characters. Harry Block isn’t a token black man in quite the same way that Ernie Hudson was in Ghostbusters, but Reitman still saddles him with a number of fraidy-cat Negro moments, and humiliates him in a rectal operation scene. (What’s a Hollywood comedy without anal humor?) Duchovny, an underrated comic actor who was very funny on both The X-Files and The Larry Sanders Show, is charming enough, but he keeps reminding you of Bill Murray, which isn’t good for the movie or for his career. As a disease control scientist in league with the government suits, Julianne Moore is given running gags (clumsiness, a hidden sexual appetite) in place of a character, and unlike Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, she isn’t allowed any quiet moments to develop chemistry with Duchovny. Scott has a few choice moments as the intrepid young fireman–the best is when he tries to summon the flying dinosaur by making bird calls–but you might not be able to avoid noticing that if this were 17 years ago, his role would have been played by Rick Moranis. As a matter of fact, 17 years ago, it was.
It’s probably wrongheaded to wish too hard for Bill Murray in a film like this, considering he’s moved on to real films like Rushmore, Groundhog Day and Hamlet. Yet his absence hangs over the entire running time of Evolution–and over big-budget comedies in general. During his blockbuster days, Murray’s wry, not-quite-there brand of clowning simultaneously exposed the mechanical cyncism of money-chasing blockbusters and purified them–made them seem light and cheery instead of heavy and oppressive. He put a smiley face on the machine. Evolution has a smiley face, but only in the marketing campaign–a three-eyed smiley face that’s obviously meant to evoke the symbol from Ghostbusters. This is what’s known as devolution.
Atlantis
Directed
by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
It’s nice to see Disney getting away from formula, even if it means reaching back into the company’s cinematic past to embrace another kind of formula. With no songs, no cute animals and a gadget-packed widescreen canvas, the adventure movie Atlantis–in which a bunch of explorers in 1914 delve into the briny deep to find the lost continent–is a throwback to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney’s first live action movie. There are also echoes of George Pal spectaculars, Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsterfests and the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg reworkings of same.
Technically, the result is impressive–and I don’t just mean the animation itself. Although the running time is short–less than 100 minutes–Atlantis manages to articulate a fairly complex plot and breathe life into a rainbow coalition of refreshingly tough, quirky characters who may remind you less of Disney than of 1960s tough-guy ensemble action pictures like The Magnificent Seven and The Guns of Navarone. (My favorites: a seen-it-all military commander, memorably voiced by James Garner, and a deadpan Italian explosives expert, voiced by Don Novello, whose blank reactions would do Warner Bros cartoon ace Chuck Jones proud.)
The film dissolves into Japanimation murkiness during the final 20 minutes, which has an important Atlantean transformed into an energy being who controls the destiny of Atlantis, or something like that. But between the sturdy characterizations, the retro-Jules Verne vehicles and the rough-edged, spiky design scheme (courtesy of gun-for-hire comic book artist Mike Mignola) you probably won’t care. With a little more oomph–a stronger plot coupled with more emotion–it might have been a classic, but that’s okay; in an era when Evolution passes for acceptable summer escapism, the cool professionalism of Atlantis seems like brilliance. Kids will dig it; if I were eight, I’d want the toys right now.
