Cinema
Evolution (12, selected cinemas)
Ambling aimlessly
Mark Steyn
Evolution is a comedy about primitive life forms who arrive as amoebas from outer space but evolve several millennia in just a few days. Paradoxically, if you happen to be an intelligent life form, you may find yourself regressing several millennia in the course of the film. The high point is the moment when the hero is stuck up the sphincter of a giant space monster, his little legs dangling helplessly from the alien orifice. Talk about boldly going where no man's gone before. This sequence culminates in the most spectacular and literal product placement in motion picture history.
That said, as an animatronic anus, I don't think it's as scary as . . . oh, I'm terribly sorry, I've made a syntactical error in the placement of the subordinate clause which could easily lead readers to believe that I am the animatronic anus. Let's start again. I don't think that, as an animatronic anus, it's as scary as the singing bottoms of Sir Richard Burton and a Canadian airline steward in John Greyson's Zero Patience (1994), which, if I recall correctly, had teeth.
There is perhaps a useful BFI monograph to be written on this subject.
Evolution is directed by Ivan Reitman and is a pretty shameless homage to himself, which is probably just as well because it's hard to see anybody else doing any homages to him. But, if you recall Ghostbusters (1984), this is essentially a pareddown bus-and-truck touring version thereof, relocated to Glen Canyon, Arizona. As the film opens, a dim wannabe fireman (Seann William Scott) is practising for his certification exam by rescuing a tailor's dummy from a blazing shed. As he's giving her the kiss of life, a meteor comes crashing to earth and totals his car. Two loser professors from a 'community college', Orlando Jones and David (X-Files) Duchovny, go to investigate and, discovering that the meteor seems to be 'bleeding' globs of alien life, figure this is their meal ticket to the scientific big time.
I see I haven't mentioned any of the jokes yet. That's because, although I saw the movie in a college town with a bunch of yahoos eagerly anticipating the flatulent alien gags, by this point no one had so much as tittered. Connoisseurs of Reitman's direction will recognise his signature slackness. Most comedy directors are obsessive, fussing and niggling over reaction shots and underscoring, prostrating themselves before the great god Tinting. Not Reitman. He doesn't deliberately kill the jokes, just steps on 'em casually as he's moving the camera around: the sort of thing a Naked Gun would fire off in a few seconds, he lets amble aimlessly around for five minutes.
But, after a while, the insane recklessness of Reitman's slapdash timing begins to assume a weird cool. After all, isn't there something a bit pathetic about the desperate pandering of most comedy, its feeble need to please? And then, just to cap the general anything'11-do approach, Oscarnominated Julianne Moore turns up as a bluestocking from the Centers for Disease Control whose only gag — indeed, her only character trait — is that she keeps falling over. Going upstairs, into hotels, getting out of cars, into cars, she falls over. It's hard not to warm to a film so cheerfully careless. It's not funny, but it's likeable. And its accidental disdain for Hollywood pieties is heartening: for example, 95 per cent of the aliens are harmless, which in Spielberg's hands would have had Duchovny and co. running around bleating that they're just misunderstood and we have to learn to love those who are different from us, blah, blab. Under Reitman, though, everyone just wants to kill 'ern.
The other odd quality about Evolution is that, unlike most serious space-invasion movies, the fake-science bits have a strange integrity about them. According to the special-effects guy Phil Tippett, the film is all about the theory of panspermia'. I thought Panspermia was that cream they used to give you before Viagra came along. No, hang on, wasn't it the Treaty of Panspermia that ended Ottoman rule over Serbia and Bulgaria? Ah, well. Even though Duchovny is trying to follow the periodic table printed on Moore's T-shirt and gets interrupted by a breast joke, the fact that the science seems important to him is strangely touching. As a film about alien matter, Evolution is no laughing matter. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter.
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