Aug 08, 2001 07:20 PM
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The science fiction comedy Evolution carries the faint but unmistakable whiff of the sort of cosmic xenophobia that permeated Men In Black: The illegal (space) aliens are coming, and if we are not ever vigilant they will soon be eating our lunch and possibly our heads.
Call me hypersensitive, but consider some of the dialogue in this nominally lightweight Ivan Reitman comedy. Underacheiving working stiffs-a Reitman staple going back to Stripes-discover that a meteor crashed in the Arizona desert is oozing life. Granted biologist Ira (David Duchovny) and geologist Harry (Orlando Jones) are community college profs, bur neither is very ambitious, and Ira used to have a much better job. When Ira notes with a surprise that the formerly one celled organisms residing in the meteor ooze have rapidly become multi-celluar, he likens their striving to ''the American dream.''
Later still, when the aliens have evolved into flying, oxygen-breathing carnivores and Sasquatch-like predators, a government epidemiologist named Allison (Julianne Moore) presents a map of the life forms' migratory pattern, which radiates from rural Arizona across the whole state , then the entire Southwest, and the nation. ''We'll be extinct!'' she predicts. And as Ira confronts an even larger menace, he asserts humankind's right of place: ''But we were here first.''
Reitman's third hero is Wayne (Seann William Scott), a resentfully underemployed dude who wants to be a fireman but fails the test; Ira himself later admits he's just watching the world pass him by. The aliens, meanwhile, progress relentlessly, getting stronger and more wide spread every minute. The more you think about it, the more the fear of a rapidly evolving interloper taking over the country-from the Southwest, no less-starts sounding like a global economy, post NAFTA nightmare in disguise.
That might have made for a cutting film from someone with a satiric turn of mind. But that is not Reitman's style-feel good is more like it-and unfortunately Evolution isn't funny enough to compensate. The film is aimiable to a fault: There is virtually no conflict between Ira and Harry, which is perfectly congenial but makes for bad cinema. Instead, all the tension amongst the heroes is simply shunted off into a perfunctorily prickly courtship between Ira and Allison. And while Duchovny's deadpan delivery works well enough at times, Jone's role seems the victim of bizarrely divided racial concsciousness: Harry bristles at being mistreated because he is Black, but at least in one scene he jives like he is trying out for a minstrel show.
The story and dialogue are by Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman, but really Evolution is assembled from earlier Reitman movies. We've seen it before, and even Reitman has done better.
