Buy it... if you seek what essentially sounds like a faithful extension of John Powell's contribution to Chicken Run the previous year.

Avoid it... if you value consistency in your large-scale comedy scores, because outside of ten minutes of strong highlights, this music is all over the map.

Powell

Evolution: (John Powell) The idea of combining Ivan Reitman, the reliable director of Ghostbusters, with the comic book, alien appeal of Men in Black must have seemed like a winner before production began. Billing itself as the biggest alien invasion comedy film of the summer of 2001, Evolution unfortunately failed because of its poor casting and jokes that weren't funny enough to sustain the picture. Reitman's attempt to substitute a group of professional ghostbusters with a group of professional alien investigators fell flat, greeted with half-hearted enthusiasm by audiences and generally poor reviews. The film features a John Powell score that slipped below the radar of most film score collectors who looked upon the predictable music with much of the same indifference. The previous summer's major film score surprise was the wild Chicken Run, which Powell co-authored with Media Ventures associate Harry Gregson-Williams. With addictive enthusiasm, Chicken Run offered a glimpse at a maturing composition style that combined the traditional electronic and mixing elements of a Hans Zimmer-student score with a more energetic and fuller orchestral sound. Powell alone continued to elaborate on this evolution of his scoring techniques, utilizing both a very reasonably sized orchestra and his typical synthesizers in an extension of that same sound for Evolution. While this score, in the coordination of its parts, may not be as refreshing or impressive as Chicken Run, the two scores could easily function as companion pieces for one another in your collection. The music for Evolution is a less complicated effort, catering towards three or four basic kinds of scenes in the film with workmanlike efficiency. It can easily be divided into cues which accompany chases, awe-inspiring revelations of alien life, and the pseudo-scary scenes of close-up investigations of those creatures.

Everything else in Evolution is somewhat incidental, with the exception, perhaps, of the heroic finale cue. While Powell uses three distinct themes in the score, only the title identity hinted at after about a minute in "Cells Divide" is memorable. It takes so long to develop to satisfaction that only in "The Mall Chase," "The Fire Truck," and "Our Heroes" is it employed with any distinction. The chase sequences present the best of Powell's ideas for the film, with "The Mall Chase" representing the finest assembly of performance and theme that the score has to offer. These cues allow the composer to do what he does best: carry hopping rhythms and continuous, elaborate themes of harmonic clarity with the orchestra through multiple minutes of nonstop aural ruckus. Absent a cue such as "Building the Crate" in Chicken Run, Powell's Evolution never pulls a lengthy enough performance of such attractive cohesion to really elevate this score's memorablity. Most of the cues in Evolution are too short for such development to take place, likely due to the frenetic pace of the film. Outside of the thematic statements, Powell does well in making the scarier moments sound comical at heart. The opening tracks present a few cues that might frighten young children, but they do so in the same overly dissonant fashion as the slapstick portions of Danny Elfman's Men in Black. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that the Evolution is a true blend of the music from Men in Black and Chicken Run, with the former really showing up in the first half of the score and the influences of latter emerging later. Powell seems to have a Western spirit built in to the rhythms of his action writing of this variety, portraying the main group of characters in this film as faux cowboys on the Western frontier. It wouldn't be surprising if some listeners considered this spirit to be swashbuckling.

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On the other hand, the use of heavy bass elements for many of the cues is a clear hold-over from Men in Black, for which Elfman's thumping bass was a primary resource. The chorus is used very sparingly in Evolution, with no real thematic accompaniment and definitely no finale cue like that which blessed the end of Chicken Run. Muted trumpets create mock suspense that pulls, perhaps, from the Bernard Herrmann classics of the genre. Powell employs a waltz rhythm for a short minute in the middle of the score, and it would have been interesting to hear him elaborate on this flavor to represent the aliens as they grow throughout the film. Overall, the boldest statement made by Evolution is that Chicken Run wasn't a one time fluke. You could already tell at the time that Powell was indeed branching off from the typical Media Ventures/Zimmer sound into a new area of style that others in that group (with the exception of Harry Gregson-Williams) had yet to readily explore. His collaboration with Gregson-Williams for the concurrent Shrek was one last hurrah for that duo before Powell's solo career truly took flight. The integration of vibrant orchestral elements into the synthetic base at the core of these artists' work was an experiment that Powell was beginning to excel at beyond most others. This recording of Evolution serves its purpose with a sense of exuberant style, and although the Los Angeles performing group wasn't as crisply mixed for Evolution as it had been for Chicken Run (which features a sound quality far superior to nearly every other score in the composer's career), this performance still exerts enough energy to capture more fans of this music. The one problem with Evolution is that it lacks a cohesive overarching personality or the consistent thematic zeal that it really needed to maintain interest outside of its obvious ten minutes of highlights. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.05 (in 38 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.05 (in 42,939 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.