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.

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The Time Machine (2002)

Alexander Hartdegen would seem to have it all.  He has a nice house, a job teaching at Columbia University and a girlfriend that’s crazy about him, even if he is absentminded.  He wants to ask Emma to marry him.  Shortly after popping the question, they’re mugged and Emma is killed.  This prompts Alexander to build a time machine to go back and save her.  He makes exactly one attempt to go into the past.  He’s successful in avoiding the mugger, but Emma is still killed.

He instead decides to go into the future to see if there are any answers.  The first few stops show the normal progress.  We build bigger and flashier buildings.  We go to the moon.  But that progress comes at a price.  An accident causes the moon to fracture.  Some people go underground while others stay on Earth’s surface.

Alexander goes forward to the year 802,701.  There, he finds the Eloi, who somehow speak English.  One Eloi, named Mara, cares for him.  As in the book and the 1960 film, the Eloi are ruled by the Morlocks.  Both are descendants of modern-day humans.  After seeing what becomes of the Eloi and Morlocks, Alexander takes it upon himself to destroy the Morlocks and free the Eloi.

This is one of many cases where I’d say the first attempt was better.  In fact, this interpretation was unnecessary and has a few issues.  It doesn’t really improve upon the first movie, nor does it really update it or the book.  It’s more a vehicle for flashy special effects and makeup that doesn’t quite work.

The biggest plot hole is that not only do the Eloi look human, but they’ve managed to keep English alive all these years.  Consider that the human species is about 200,000 years old.  We’ve changed over the millennia.  It doesn’t make sense that we’d retain that form 800,000 years from now.

Modern English is much more recent.  We’re talking centuries.  How is it that the language was preserved for so long?  Why would anyone go through that effort?  Again, look how language has evolved over the centuries.  The Über-Morlock, I get.  It’s said that he was bread for his mental abilities.  It makes sense that he’d be able to pull some sort of mental trick or something.

Another example of sloppy writing is that Alexander sacrifices his time machine to save the Eloi.  He has no way of checking to see if it worked.  He could have gone back in time to get help.  He could have done just about anything else.  How does he know that it worked?  For that matter, how does he know that this is the only group of Morlocks?

In the book and the original movie, the time machine was built to see what becomes of humanity.  By making it a way of saving a loved one, it takes a lot of the academic aspects out of the movie.  The technical aspect is secondary.  It’s just another way to have neat visuals.  The movie almost comes off as some sort of action parody of the book.

IMDb page