Evolution is a hit-and-miss movie that works very well initially, but peters out in the end.
Ira Kane (David Duchovny) and Harry Block (Orlando Jones) are two professors at the local Glen Canyon Community College. They are alerted to the crash of a meteor and soon discover it is a form of life from an alien planet. The life form is primitive initially but evolves rapidly and begins posing a threat to not only the Glen Canyon community, but the entire world.
Needless to say, the army is called in to handle this, led by Alison Reed (Julianne Moore), who is the love interest for Duchovny's character. And since Kane knows these guys well, they butt heads and are shut out of the project. But the government screws up in its typical manner and it's up to Kane and co. (with a large supply of Head and Shoulders) to save the day.
Lame scientific inconsistencies aside (confusing bases with base pairs, for example, which is trivially correctable), the movie is fun to watch. Casting David "Fox Mulder" Duchovny as the one who fights the aliens is definitely a master stroke, as is the presence of Dan Aykroyd. Orlando Jones is funny. Julianne Moore is not someone I'd have expected to star in this film, but she does an awesome job and illustrates a side to her talent and charism that I hadn't seen before. Sean-William Scott as a wannabe fireman who first sights the meteor is out of place with the other characters (which means that he been typecast)..
Director Ivan Ritman, who also did Ghostbusters, doesn't pull any punches and the scenes do indeed get pretty gross (though still funny), but I thought the effects somehow wimped out in the end. Worth the matinee fare.