Evolution (2001)

Sometimes, you have to wonder how a movie got made.  I think Evolution is one of those movies that looked good on paper.  It may have even seemed funny at the time.  However, it’s not one of those movies that holds up to repeated viewings.

It starts with a meteor innocently hitting the ground somewhere in Arizona.  In fact, it lands on Wayne Grey’s car.  When college professor Harry Block hears about it, he heads out, taking fellow professor Ira Kane with him.  At first, it’s innocent enough.  A purple goo oozes out of it, but wouldn’t seem to be anything significant.  Life forms evolve from the goo. Within a few days, multicellular organisms appear.  Within weeks, there’s a rainforest. 

And, of course, the military gets involved.  They even bring along the clumsy Dr. Allison Reed from the CDC.  The military takes Harry and Ira’s research and seal off the site.  Eventually, the Army decides to use napalm on the site to prevent the life forms from taking over North America.  Because that’s what the Army does.  When Harry tosses a match on a sample, he realizes that the napalm would be a horrible idea.  The napalm is used, which creates a giant organism that Harry, Ira, Allison and Wayne have to take care of.

The movie isn’t really big on science.  I’m not sure any of the writers even really cared enough to look something up.  The reaction to fire is said to be survival of the fittest, but that’s not how it works.  Survival isn’t a reactionary process.  Throwing a match at a Petri dish won’t force an evolutionary process any more than any other process.

Ira also deduces that selenium might be harmful to the creatures just because of its position on the periodic table relative to arsenic.  That’s bad for several reasons.  First, there are carbon-based life forms that can live on arsenic.  Second, the problems with arsenic tend to be long-term.  Third, why would it be arsenic just because of its position?  That’s an awfully big risk to take, considering that all life on Earth would seem to depend on it.  For that matter, how is life based on nitrogen in the first place?

My biggest problem is that the nitrogen-based life looks like the carbon-based stuff you’d find here.  There’s no reason to this.  Darwinian evolution proposes that life evolves in response to its environment.  Those that are best suited survive.  Those that aren’t suited don’t make it.  There’s no reason to think that the nitrogen-based creatures would evolve into anything that looked familiar.

I tend to see this as a lack of imagination.  Yes, I know that the creatures are there to pose a threat.  There’s no reason to think that they would spread quickly, either.  It’s just another way to put humans at risk.

I think the movie missed a really big opportunity.  As unrealistic as it is that live would evolver so quickly, what would have happened had the life been allowed to evolve at that rate?  Within a month, we had something looking like a primate.  That’s something that took billions of years on Earth.  The meteor gave us life that did it in weeks.  What would that life have looked like in another month?  The real threat would have come from a life form that would have greatly surpassed our own, both physically and mentally.

IMDb page

The Forgotten (2004)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Like some of the other reviewers on Epinions, I had such high hopes for The Forgotten. What I got from the trailers was that a mother finds out that her son never existed and that she’s the only one that remembers him. She goes on a wild chase to find out what happened. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’re going to feel betrayed, or at least grossly misled.

The mother is Telly Paretta, who’s married to Jim. The two had a son, Sam, who died in a plane crash 14 months prior to the time frame of the movie. He’s gotten over it, but she hasn’t. She goes into his room and looks through pictures and handles things of his, such as a baseball cap and glove. She’s seeing a psychiatrist and is making progress. That is until one day, all solid evidence of Sam disappears. Videotapes are erased. Sam disappears from pictures or the pictures disappear altogether. Telly is the only one that remembers her son. According to Jim and the psychiatrist, she had a miscarriage. Telly is certain that she didn’t make up 9 years of her life.

It looks at first like Telly is having a mental breakdown. You may have heard of Occam’s Razor, which states that usually, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Is she be delusional or could someone have changed or disposed of all of her pictures, erased the tapes and ‘gotten to’ everyone that knew Sam except for Telly? If so, why?

She eventually meets up with Ash, the father of Lauren. Lauren was one of Sam’s friends; they died in the same crash. The funny thing is that Ash doesn’t remember being a father and he certainly doesn’t remember Sam and Telly. Telly is able to get him to remember Lauren and the two go off together in search of answers. Along the way, they’re pursued by local police, the Feds, the psychiatrist and Jim.

That’s when it gets strange. We’re talking X-Files and Unbreakable strange. The problem is that we don’t get the same resolution we get with Unbreakable. In The Sixth Sense, there was this Earth-shattering, mind-warping twist that no one could see coming. It was similar for Unbreakable. With The Forgotten, I could very often tell what was coming next. The end left me wondering how much of it was delusion and how much was real, but that was because the movie spent very little time on the ending.

The advantage that the X-Files had was that it was a long-running series. That lack of resolution for many of the episodes played into the character of the series. That doesn’t happen here. I wanted more answers. I can’t really give you too many of the questions without giving away the movie, but I can give you a few examples. On is the psychiatrist. He knows more than he’s letting on. However, he says things to characters other than Telly that make you wonder. It’s also revealed who’s behind all of this, although they’re never actually shown nor is it explained why they were willing to go through so much effort.

The acting and direction are good. However, the writers could have done so much more with the premise and the story. I could see the movie being the basis for a TV series or a few other movies. At 90-something minutes, they could have at least added more footage. It’s not like they didn’t have the extra time.

In the end, the movie left too many loose ends and ultimately required too many leaps of faith. I can’t give this movie more than three stars. It’s entertaining, but not really satisfying. I didn’t come away from the movie feeling like it was worth the position in my NetFlix queue. 

IMDb page

Non-Stop (2014)

There’s not a whole lot you can do on an airplane.  With movies, any confined space is going to present problems.  It worked in Exam.  Several people are competing for one job.  When the turn on each other, not being able to leave the room adds to the suspense.  With Non-Stop, you have a similar problem.  Liam Neeson plays an air marshal named Bill Marks.  He’s not the best person.  He drinks.  He argues with people.  He even sneaks a smoke on the lavatory.  The good news is that he gets to travel a lot.  The bad news is that it’s the kind of work that can take a strain on you and your family.

It’s shaping up to be another routine flight when Marks gets a message over the secure network.  The person on the other end threatens to kill passengers at regular intervals unless money is transferred to a specific account.  He initially assumes it to be a joke by the flight’s other air marshal, Jack Hammond.  Hammond denies everything, even showing Marks his own pager.

It doesn’t seem like it would be that easy to pull off something like this.  There are several suspects, though.  Could it be the friendly woman that put forth some effort to sit next to Marks?  It would be too obvious if she took out a pager.  Could it be the angry guy that talks back?  Maybe it’s the token Arab/Muslim guy that everyone’s ready to point a finger at.

It doesn’t help that Marks has no proof.  At best, he looks paranoid.  Things get worse from there, especially when people actually start dying.  You’d think someone would notice a fellow passenger sending texts and turn them in.  The movie manages to go on for 1:46 with the bulk of it in the airplane.  You’d think Marks would be able to see the person given the right vantage point.  It’s never that simple.

That’s the big problem I had with the movie.  The movie is entertaining, but requires a certain suspension of disbelief.  You’d think two trained air marshals could figure out who one person is when the person they’re looking for is typing something on a wireless device.  It shouldn’t take that long to figure everything out.

It’s as if someone got the idea and tried to get it as close to two hours as they could.  It’s interesting to see how the next person will be killed, but that’s not really exciting enough to carry the film.  There is also part of the movie that would be a good candidate for Mythbusters, assuming there’s a way to test it at all.  Knowing that there’s a bomb on board, Marks proposes that they bury the bomb in luggage at a weak point in the plane to direct the blast.  I’m not sure that it would go down as expected.

This is one of those cases where I’m glad it was a free rental from Redbox.  The premise wasn’t enough to get me into the theater, but I did want to watch it.  The movie came off as a little too cliché to me.  If you can get it through Netflix, I’d say go for it.  Just don’t ask too much of the movie.