Harry takes a look at Ivan Reitman's EVOLUTION!!!

Hey folks, Harry here with a look at EVOLUTION. After my Loscon duties, Saturday Night, I decided to hit the ol Sunset Blvd for a poke about town and a looksee at all the dragsters hunting for the spandex poon walking up-n-down every which way, when I found myself in front of the infamous WHISKEY A-GO-GO… one of the greatest legendary haunts that… well anyone has ever haunt and what should I see?

Well, Right there underneath their sign, was MY HEAD staring at me. A ghoulish creepy visage in orange and black… like some sort of missing link in the evolution of man… speaking of which, next to my head was a similarly Halloweenish in design slap of paper with the illuminated form of DARWIN… Laughing to myself, I asked the Darwin poster, "What is Evolution?"

The poster seemed to shimmer a bit and suddenly there was weight in my right hand, and in public even. Now it wasn’t a Pee Wee moment, but rather the script for Ivan Reitman’s big Dreamworks SKG project… EVOLUTION. I stared at Darwin, saw him blink, and then rushed back to my hotel for a long read… The SHOOTING DRAFT, August 30, 2000…

This draft was written by Don Jakoby (BLUE THUNDER, LIFEFORCE, ARACHNOPHOBIA, INVADERS FROM MARS and JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES), with polishes by David Diamond and David Weissman, who as a team co-wrote the upcoming films FAMILY MAN and GUAM GOES TO THE MOON.

We have all heard the basic premise of the film, or if you haven’t… here’s a brief looksee… Like in the beginning of WAR OF THE WORLDS, a small community in the middle of nowhere (this time Arizona) there is a object from up above that crashes into the earth. Now, in this particular case… the ‘meteor’ crashes through the ground into an underground cave. Local scientists discover simple one cell organisms in every fiber of a sample they take… an hour or two later, there are multi-celled organisms… then flat worms, then… well you get the idea. Soon the entire ecosystem of Earth is in danger as Alien lifeforms are on the loose.

Well… there are two basic directions you can go with the science fiction from this point… the extinction of man… or the perseverance of man.

The film will be starring David Duchovny as a scientist that has had enough of the ‘official’ scientists duties and has crawled into a teaching position in a small Arizona Community College to… rot. His best friend, Harry, played by Orlando Jones is a Geologist professor at the same College, and he’s there to scope the babes and do just enough to stay on staff. He coaches the girl’s volleyball team… signed up online to be a member of the United States Geologic Society… but just because it’d look good on his resume. Then there is the military CDC scientist, Allison.. played by Julianne Moore, that believes Duchovny’s Ira character has wasted his talents out here, and is possibly a dangerous scientist, who does not take the proper precautions.

The script reads like GHOSTBUSTERS and THE MUMMY meeting THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS or MONOLITH MONSTERS. There is the part of me that would love for this film to have gone the serious science fiction route… The End Of Man On Earth. But that isn’t the film Ivan Reitman wants to make, that isn’t the big Summer hit that Dreamworks wants… INSTEAD we will be getting this very entertaining and fun-filled juvenile film that we should all really enjoy.

Now, I’ve heard some sites claim this is supposed to have creatures that have pre-existed on earth… but this isn’t true. If my memory for DNA science is accurate every living thing on earth is made up of 4 base pairs… and the stuff coming out of this meteor and reproducing has 10 base pairs… There is a metallic look (according to the script) for these creatures… And we’ll be having multi-legged things with circular mouths… Flying monster things… Tentacled creatures… killer plant life… all sorts of goodies that Phil Tippett’s folks can bring to life for us.

My only worry is that this can be played too broadly and with out a serious concern for the danger involved. As I read it, there were two ways that Ivan Reitman and his actors could go… The GALAXY QUEST route, which is where these goofs have to suddenly come to grips with the seriousness of the situation and the inherent danger to mankind… or where it all becomes a joke, where the danger never feels tangible and the situations are played with no weight or fear and we come away feeling detached from the film completely. That is a danger. And on ARACHNOPHOBIA it happened. It became a subpar spoof type of film, and didn’t have the heart or weight that suddenly grabbed me in GALAXY QUEST.

EVOLUTION could be a major launching film for Duchovny. The script does give him the sort of room to match his Mulder style with some big screen heroics and I really do feel this could be huge for him. It might come away next summer feeling like the dessert you will need after the feast called JURASSIC PARK 3.

Now, my fears… J. Michael Riva is the Production Designer… and frankly I have never been impressed with his work in the past… CONGO, NORTH, SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS, THE GOLDEN CHILD, SCROOGED and so on… All of his films have a very slick cheap gaudiness to them… and this film calls for GREAT PRODUCTION DESIGN. Combine Riva with the Art Director… David Klassen (HARD RAIN, SPACE JAM, WATERWORLD, NORTH, LEVIATHAN) and my confidence does not soar.

Now what I hope has happened is that they have given a vast amount of control to KNB and TIPPETT STUDIOS in not only the execution of creatures, but also their design. The world of a Community College in Arizona… I could see in Riva and Klassen’s hands… but the alien world look of the cave and the lifeforms that spew forth… that has to be in better phantastic hands. This could be the first really wonderful film from Ivan Reitman since his days in the early eighties. I want this to be great fun… the script has the potential as does the cast… Let’s hope they pull it out on July 13th, 2001… also the teaser trailer for this film should be hitting in the first couple of weeks of December… or so I have heard.