Evolver
The 1995 sci-fi thriller, “Evolver,” was a film I bought during my “buy everything I like” phase of moviewatching. Watching the movie for the first time in, what, 15 or 16 years, I wouldn’t even consider renting this movie. Wow, this is cheesy.
To give you an idea of the type of movie this is, think “Wargames” meets “Cloak & Dagger” meets “The Terminator”; after all, “Evolver’s” tagline is, “It Was Supposed to Be a Game.” The premise goes as so: a teenaged computer whiz (Kyle Baxter, played by Ethan Randall) wins a video game contest revolving around the virtual reality game, Evolver. His prize? A real life Evolver robot, allowing for home gameplay with an advanced artificial intelligence machine. At first, it seems fun, but Evolver doesn’t exactly have a steep learning curve, and soon, his idea of a “game” gets deadly. Yes, it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.
In all honesty, this movie is ridiculously entertaining in a B-movie way. It’s not really what one would call “good” filmmaking– the script and dialogue by writer/director Mark Rosman is lame and cliched to the extreme, hitting all the bases in both teen movies and robots-gone-awry stories (Michael Crichton’s underrated ’80s thriller, “Runaway,” also comes to mind), and the performances are amateurish –but it is fun to watch. That doesn’t mean it’s much of a surprise that I haven’t heard much from anyone involved with this film over the past 16 years: only Randall (who now goes by Ethan Embry, and has had roles in movies like “Eagle Eye” and “Timeline”), John de Lancie (as Evolver’s programmer), and composer Christopher Tyng (who has done the music for “Futurama” over the years) have seemed to forge careers since their work on “Evolver.” I’m guessing no one involved with this looked at it as a stepping stone to a career; this is more a film one does to pay the bills.
