My Review of "Evolution"

Evolution is a product of the time that it was made. There are a few jokes and trends in this movie that I don't think kids nowadays would understand. I have heard of this movie when it first came out but never got around to seeing it until now. It's a pretty cookie cutter comedy of the early 2000s so it's a nice walk down memory lane for me.

In the simplest way of explaining this movie, it's basically an alien invasion comedy. the movie starts off in space where a giant meteor is headed straight for Earth.

While on earth there's a minor character named Wayne attempting to train to become a fireman. His training technique is really unorthodox and you can quickly tell this guy is the goofy comic relief character. He's played by Seann William Scott, many people will quickly remember him as Stiffler from the American Pie series. I guess you can already tell they're trying to ride the wave of his popularity at the time.

The meteor crashes into Wayne's training area. This ruins Wayne's training, his car and his "training partner". It's a really wild situation and it's only written so that Wayne is in the movie.

The main characters are Ira and Harry. Ira is played by David Duchovny and Harry is played by Orlando Jones. I started to clue in immediately that some of the names are obviously joke names because Harry's last name is Block. They play on his name a lot in this movie. I thought it was hilarious that they would have David Duchovny as one of the scientist investigators because at the time he was one of the stars for the popular show X-Files. It made sense and I got the joke but again some people today wouldn't understand these little things.

Ira and Harry hear about the meteor fall and go to investigate the meteor. They discover that there is actual alien life on the meteor that is evolving at an alarming rate. Instead of thinking to stop it they wanted to capitalize on the discovery so they can make names of themselves.

Unfortunately for them the military quickly gets involved preventing them from doing further research. In fact, the military breaks into the school to take all of their research information and samples of the meteor.

Ego's are egos, so Ira and Harry plot to get their discovery back. Everything from there goes a little haywire. They even get a few of their students to help them with their plots. Nothing goes according to plan and they finally discover maybe they should be getting rid of the aliens rather than research them.

There are a lot of elements of a lot of movies that came out at the time like Independence Day, Liar Liar and Jurassic Park. The 90's had just ended and movies in the 2000s were just starting to create their own identity. This is very much like a lot of early 2000 comedies that were cookie cutter and predictable but that's kind of why I liked it too. It felt very familiar because of the nostalgia of the movie.

The one thing that was super blatant in this movie was the obvious product advertisement. I forget that Wayne's World kind of did this too but in this movie the solution to the problem was an actual product placement. I haven't seen such a horrible product placement since I watched Power Rangers movie made in 2017. It was just as bad in this movie. I guess this movie did it way before Power Rangers though.

Overall, I did enjoy some parts of the movie and the nostalgia feeling of the movie. There really were a lot of moments that I kind of wasn't paying attention because it was kind of dragging along. Still it's not that bad of a movie. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. I wouldn't recommend this movie to people that weren't around in 2001 to understand the context of some of the jokes and it's not a very re-watchable movie.