hyped garbage

Fresh and Exciting

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Metaphor, my rear end. Regardless of how the director came up with the idea, Evolution is a straightforward science-fiction horror film, and very satisfying. Any philosophical symbolism you wish to read into it is just an added bonus.Of course it's uncomfortable, kids are in peril. And the boys do seem somewhat interchangeable. They should, since interchangeable kids perfectly suit their role in the adults' scheme. And yes, the kids seem to lack joy and vitality -- that is exactly how kids raised in an emotionally and physically dull environment develop. Kudos, Mme. Hadzihalilovic!I do enjoy films like Home Alone, but portraying the kids in Evolution as precocious conquerors would have been absurd. Instead, after the underlying premise is accepted, we get a very credible sequence of events. Not everything that's going on is obvious at first. Horror - in the classical usage, creating a sense of dread - continues to build, and the story concludes in a believable way.What becomes obvious after reading other reviews is that a number of televisions, movie screens, and possibly eyewear need adjusting so viewers can actually see what's going on. Where the boys came from is obvious from Nicolas' drawings from memory, and from the final scene. Where the "women" came from is not; this is science-fiction, we accept their existence as an initial truth. That the women are not merely "disfigured" is obvious both from Nicolas spying on one through a door, and from a night-time scene that is sexual only in the purely biological sense. From this scene and subsequent developments, any birder ("birdwatcher") recognizes the obvious parallel with Brown-Headed Cowbirds (Cuckoos, to our European colleagues). So, only modern technology makes possible the women's activity? Wrong! Cowbirds use multiple hosts, and life evolves.A non-trivial percentage of the movies I enjoy happen to include sex, violence, profanity, inebriation, and irreverent crassness. Evolution has none of that, and it was a pleasure to experience.

I see some of the negative reviews tend to point on the fact that it is something of a quiet, pretentious art-type film. I have no problems with quiet, pretentious art-type films, so long as, much like any film, they either have something to say or show, are interesting, or otherwise entertaining in some way. This film is none of those.It is very low key and moody. There's very sparse sound going on, with a lot of shots that are almost entirely silent and almost reflective... But it's never clear what it's reflecting on. The implication by the movie is there is something odd going on in a small village apparently made up entirely of women and young boys. At some point the boy protagonist and some of the other boys end up in an incredibly decrepit looking hospital being looked after by nurses who stare wide-eyed and speak very little. This would normally stand out except everyone in this film stares and speaks very little. The boys inexplicably piece together the idea that their mothers are no longer their mothers, and there's a general sense of creepiness and unease all around. But that's pretty much the only thing this movie has going for it; a general sense of creepiness and unease. Little actually happens and little is actually explained throughout it. Stuff happens and it's unclear if its actually happening or if it's part of a dream or hallucination. I tend to really like stories that do not fully resolve a mystery, but here there's so little of everything (characterization, story, pies to the face, dialogue, cinematography, anything) that ultimately I just didn't care about anything or anyone in the movie. It was all a colossal waste of time that didn't even have the decency to be absurdly bad or So Bad Its Good.

A little like an abstract painting that refuses to represent recognizable subject matter in favor of expressing a "mood." Contrary to what others here have said, there *is* a story-line. The problem is that the underlying narrative structure is too basic to support so many elaborate, mystifying trappings. It helps to know that the director based the movie on the experience she had when she was 10 and went to a hospital to get her appendix taken out. So given the main character's nightmarish attempt to figure out what's happening to him, we're basically seeing an elaborate series of puzzling visual metaphors for the director's disorienting personal experience as a child in hospital. This movie isn't hiding anything or failing to be coherent. It just wants to be a darkly evocative visual collage instead of a straight-up narrative. Accordingly, it's rewardingly rich visually, but it's like a poem that sounds great but doesn't involve you in anything really important. All of the many unanswered questions it raises make it hard to let the visuals just wash over you.In other words, behind all the evocative, disturbing imagery (again "unsettling" is the best word) it's *just* a retelling of a personal experience; there isn't a deeper message than "fear of the unknown." For me that wasn't enough. The mood is conveyed. The story is told. It's just not terribly profound.

This is not a movie for everyone - or at least - you should be aware that it's not a Sci-fi nor a horror movie as we know them - before selecting this movie. The movie is beautiful - it is just like meditation at the sea. I guarantee lower blood pressure after watching this move. I loved it. (It almost reminds me to the universe of Myst - the old computer game from the 90s- where you are totally alone on a abandoned Island and you don't know how you got there.)Furthermore - the move makes you think. It may be a far future situation or it may be a dream of a child. As children we can have fantasies or anxiety for loosing our parents - or we may misenterpret a situation as dangerous etc. this movie may be a dream or a post apocalyptic movie. Either way - this movie works, but I understand that some people don't like it. This is like entering a gallery. Sometimes you are not in the mood. But, if you are - this movie is unique and genial.A true artwork.