Evolution
Australian Reviews and Articles

Evolution (M)

General release

Evolution, directed by Ivan Reitman, harks back to the days of Reitman's 1984 Ghostbusters: a film about comic slime and a possible end to human life on earth, with only a trio of well-intentioned guys (plus a chick) to save it. In Evolution, the danger comes not from the supernatural realm, but from a meteor that lands on Earth, carrying alien life forms, which immediately engage in a kind of accelerated Darwinism. Evolution at fast forward: within a matter of days, they'll be able to take over the world.

Dan Aykroyd, co-writer and star of Ghostbusters, has a cameo as a politician anxious to clean up the mess and ready to let the army do it for him. The army, of course, only makes things much worse.

It's the motley crew of alien-busters that know, in a blundering kind of way, what they're doing. The trio consists of science teachers at a local community college (David Duchovny and Orlando Moore) plus a goofy pool attendant and wannabe fireman (Seann William Scott).

The Sigourney Weaver chick role goes to Julianne Moore, who looks exactly like Clarice Starling in Hannibal, and is called upon to act clumsy and provide some sort of Duchovny love interest. She's not particularly good at pratfalls, and seems embarrassed and uncomfortable throughout.

Duchovny appears more engaged with his role, which is basically that of a straight man, a kind of unlikeable Mulder: it's no Bill Murray performance, and it's hard to imagine that this was the kind of role he detached himself from The X-Files to do.

The best part of Evolution is the special effects; the fun that's to be had from fast-evolving worms, pterodactyl-like creatures winging through shopping malls, dangerous amphibians in the water hazards on golf courses. But most of the stuff involving actors is weirdly perfunctory, cartoonish or just plain incomprehensible. The scene in which the team cruises around in a jeep singing along to Play That Funky Music (White Boy) rates as one of the most enigmatically annoying in recent cinema.

Rating: ¤¤

If anyone, over the past 20 years, has had Hollywood laughing all the way to the bank it has been Ivan Reitman. His hit films - particularly the more daring ones like Ghostbusters, Dave and Animal House - have brought in enormous amounts of funny money. Take his latest, Evolution, which aims to shows the funny side of David Duchnovy and Julianne Moore.

The original tone of the script was one of impending doom worthy of the Twilight Zone - or, better yet, a sequel to Deep Impact - with a meteorite that, to co-opt a Ghostbuster-ism, slimes the earth with a fast-mutating extraterrestrial life-form. But in Reitman's hands the narrative aims to do for Charles Darwin and natural selection what Ghostbusters did for Casper and white sheets.

"The writer, Don Jakoby, had worked on the script for a long time and I was very upfront about what I wanted to do before we purchased it," Reitman says.

"There was a very original idea for a very original threat to the planet and that's hard to come by. But the characters were not that good and, even for a dramatic film, there were far too many of them."

But after 20 years in the laugh business, the big danger with being Ivan Reitman is that you might find your own comedic template, or your own gags, funnier than everybody else does. Evolution could be a case in point. In America, its box-office take fell by more than half after its first weekend in release, a sure sign that word of mouth is not particularly good.

The genre-shift, from drama to comedy, did not work out quite as well as an experienced hand like Reitman might have expected. The movie's formula of a Men in Black-style white guy/black guy heroic duo (Duchovny and Orlando Jones) struck many American critics as derivative. And the movie's reliance on bodily humor (aliens included) was a bit overdone, too.

Apart from clever, computer-generated apparitions, the most obvious nod at the Ghostbuster films was the presence of Reitman's fellow Canadian, Dan Akyroyd. This time, though, he's a fairly incidental character, a local politician in the hot zone who's not so much up to elbows in slime as trying to put the right spin on it for the cameras. His presence seems more evocative than crucial.

Given that Reitman's last couple of movies, most notably Father's Day and Six Days, Seven Nights, were duds, it looked as if the director might be trying a bit too hard to recapture former glories.

"I'm completely unapologetic about casting Dan," Reitman says. "I like working with people I know and with whom I have a track record. We have matching sensibilities. And he seemed right for this character."

Reitman was born in the Czech Republic during World War II, grew up in Toronto, moved south to Chicago's theatre scene and finally ended up in Hollywood.

If he is having something of a creative crisis in trying to keep an edge in a film comedy genre that has become coarser than in his prime directing years it doesn't seem to be showing today.

We're in a Los Angeles hotel room and Reitman, at 54, seems comfortable laughing off unfavorable comparisons between his recent films and those of the "gross-out" directors like the Farrelly brothers (There's Something About Mary, Me Myself and Irene). His production company, after all, does that sort of fare with other directors and turned out the recent hit Road Trip.

As it happens, Evolution has an obsession with what might delicately be described as the rectal probe. Both a lost insect sequence and the film's denouement involve inter-species field trips into proctology. The tone is further rear-ended when Duchovny's character moons some of his antagonists.

Reitman is best known as the dean of a school of comedy that has as its alumni people like Billy Murray, Harold Ramis, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd and the late John Belushi. He has made such gems as Meatballs (1979) and Stripes (1981) as well as Ghostbusters and Animal House.

Reitman is also the man who made a comedian of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, Twins and Junior. Ramis was Reitman's co-writer on Ghostbusters and also acted in it. He has since gone on to become an accomplished director in his own right with Groundhog Day and Analyze This.

In fact, the success of the latter film - which, like Reitman's Father's Day, starred Billy Crystal - led one unkind critic of Evolution to conclude that Ramis must have been the brains of the team.

"Doing comedy is basically very hard and you get no respect," Reitman says. "It's the only type of film that, unless you get a physical reaction from the audience, is judged a failure. The responsibility of doing the scene is exactly the same as for a dramatic film. You have to find a realistic way, you have to find the right tone.

"And when you finally get all that right, if you're doing your job well, your work just begins. Suddenly there is this big pressure on you to make sure it is funny as well.

"Every movie I've made - whether it's Ghostbusters, Animal House, Stripes, the movies in the past few years - there are always people who don't think it's funny," he says.

If nothing else, Reitman's decision to redraft the script, and play it for laughs, probably helped ensure that he got his leading man. As Duchovny puts it: "I think if it had been a straight alien invasion picture it would have been a little too close to X-Files for me. I told Ivan at the start I wasn't overjoyed that it was about aliens but at least, as a comedy, it was a different genre."

But in a comedy you have to do anything for a laugh and at one point Duchovny's character tells buddy Orlando Jones: "Don't trust the government. I know those people." Given his experience as X-Files' Fox Mulder - stymied and manipulated by slimy FBI bureaucrats in Washington - the line tends to get one of the movie's big laughs.

The genre shift to comedy also helped to induce Julianne Moore - fresh from her series of eye-catching dramatic roles in Hannibal and The End of the Affair - to make a rare foray into comedy.

In Evolution she plays a distinctly secondary role as a bumbling health department bureaucrat who falls for Duchovny. In theory the idea of X-Files' Mulder meeting Hannibal's Clarice Starling should be pretty compelling. In reality, though, the script doesn't serve Moore particularly well. Some US critics were left wondering "what was she thinking?"

"She's a very charming and warm person and I think she was starting to feel that audiences did not realise that about her," Reitman says. "She enjoyed my films and we met to talk about maybe working together sometime. She had just come off this string of serious movies and wanted something lighter."

As far as the idea of comedies being more coarse now than when he was making films like Animal House, Reitman thinks it is more a question of the "vocabulary of the day" than a rush to be cruder and ruder.

"I don't think what is funny changes but the vocabulary of the form changes," he says. "I think when I started out in the 1970s, movies like M*A*S*H and The Graduate were starting to speak to the Baby Boom generation in its own language. Prior to that it had been Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller. Now it has shifted again to a younger generation.

"What we accept on the screen is not much broader than we could when we made Animal House. The first bunch of drafts of Animal House were grosser than the movie turned out to be and much grosser than, say, Road Trip. We could have made it that way but the film would not have been as good. I never think in terms of, 'What are the boundaries and how can I push them?"'