A
scifi/
comedy film released in
June of 2001.
Directed by
Ivan Reitman and starring
David Duchovny,
Julianne Moore,
Orlando Jones and
Seann William Scott. Also features
Dan Aykroyd.
The idea is that a
meteor containing
single celled organisms lands on
Earth. The
cells evolve at a
breakneck pace, and our heroes (a gang of college teachers, various losers and government dropouts) learn this could lead to trouble. Of course the
government then takes over
research of the aliens and our
heroes are kicked out of the loop. The gang then does all the
thinking and
figuring out while we never really see what the government does (doing
field maneuvers or something, I guess) and then they ultimately
triumph over the
aliens,
The Man, and
shoddy dialog to
save the day.
Subtle spoilers ahead
The movie looked good, but wasn’t
written very well. There are too many
dud scenes and poorly developed
character traits. Several scenes just left you thinking, “ok, thanks for showing us that, but…?”. Like when the heroes are riding around in a jeep singing “
Play that funky music” while the world is getting ready to end. Or how the weapon against the aliens is discovered on the back of a
t-shirt (?) and without even trying it on any of the many available aliens, the whole team arms up to combat the largest alien by shooting the
poison up it’s
ass (??). Out of all the
junk scenes they did include, they never really did show how they destroyed all the aliens in the end! Instead they concentrated on scenes with Julianne Moore falling down and Sean Scott
bumbling into most of the major
discoveries. And for some
awkward reason they found it
necessary for Duchovny and Moore to have a quick
hump in a
fire truck then add some unfunny
blatant, shameless product placement at the end.
I’ll
give it a break though. It is a product of modern
Hollywood. It did have a few good “
gotcha” scenes that made the whole
theatre jump. A huge alien fart at the end was kinda funny. The seemingly few visuals it had were very cool, the
dragon flying through the mall was great (too bad they
killed it). Some of the
science was even good. The aliens have twenty
base pairs in their
DNA while earth animals only have four, hence raising the chance of
genetic mutation and
evolution (
in theory). The slowly evolving aliens wound up becoming elaborate
dragons,
bugs,
amphibious critters and such, while quickly evolving
aliens, having no
specialization, just turned into blob type things. And Orlando Jones did manage to take a break from
comic relief in the end to actually lend some
scientific advice. And the door plainly is left open for Evolution Two, with the dragon flying away at the end.
In short, you might want to rent it. Maybe. They did have cool looking
dragons and
farting aliens.