Film Review: ''Evolution''

IMAGINE gluey goopy things mutating into weird looking creatures - they overflow and spill into homes and buildings and shopping complexes and then there is this mad rush to contain this multiplying menace. Ah but there is a solution - an ingredient in a popular brand of shampoo has destructive properties - and pumping gallons of it into the heart of a ballooning mutant saves the world!!

Comedy, satire, spoof - call it anything. Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks' ``Evolution,'' is one big laugh at alien life forms and their presence on earth. But the humour notwithstanding, some of the scientific theories upon which the film is based are sobering.

Some scientists venture to dabble in the theory that life travels from one planetary system to another by way of meteors that crash into another. In this case the result is bubbling primordial ooze that is pretty nauseating to watch. Science is twisted and exaggerated because it is a mixture of fiction and a comedy, the line between the absurd and the fantastic really thin.

Ivan Reitman who made ``Ghostbusters 1 and 2'' takes a look at the theory of evolution. The comedy that follows and the chaos that ensues when a meteor hits the earth carrying alien life forms give new meaning to the term survival of the fittest.

Dr. Ira Kane (David Duchovny) is the first to discover the meteors alien stowaways and the first to understand the significance of their rapid development. He is a former government scientist who has fallen from grace and winds up as a teacher at a community college. He feels this discovery could put him back in favour and perhaps change his life. He might have preferred to save the world on his own but it becomes impossible to keep a discovery of this magnitude under wraps and it is not long before the government swoops in to take over. Leading this move is Allison (Julianne Moore) a beautiful but business like epidemiologist who has scant respect for this scientist. But soon she discovers that they wont have a future if they do not join forces.

Screenplay for the film is by Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman and it ranges from the trite to sensitive. Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott play significant roles in this science fiction.

CHITRA MAHESH

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Section  : Entertainment
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