John Powell is probably one of the more popular up and coming composers working in Hollywood today. The reason being the highly praised collaborations with Harry Gregson-Williams on the scores for Antz, Chicken Run and Shrek. Member of the Media Venture gang of composers, Powell (and Gregson-Williams) has succesfully seeked new ways, leading away from the traditional Media Ventures sound, proving that the Media Ventures composers are far from untalented hacks, despite what many like to claim. No, I'm not one of them.
Evolution is director Ivan Reitman's big return after several years of silence, the successful Ghostbusters films being his last films before his long absence from the Hollywood scene. Evolution is very much in the same vein as those films. Although, this time the ghosts have been replaced with aliens, and Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis with David Duchovny, Orlando Jones and Julianne Moore.
The score for Evolution can be described as a mix of Chicken Run and Danny Elfman's score for Men in Black. It shares orchestrations and thematic resemblance with the former, but has the same quirky, twisted sound as the latter. It is a nice mixture, actually, and makes for a score that is quite entertaining, even if some cues are far too short to actually be interesting, others being a little too slapstick and "Mickey Mousing" oriented and some too... dull.
A typical John Powell theme enters in track six, "Fruit Basket for Russell Woodman". It's a upbeat march with a very playful theme, that very well could have been written for Chicken Run instead. Short, but great. It's followed by some lively action music in "The Water Hazard". Although with the cue being only 47 seconds, it doesn't last very long. "Cutie Pie" is quite nice, with some slow, attractive lounge music, followed by a short, but bombastic, fanfare sounding outburst by the entire orchestra. "The Mall Chase" offers some really entertaining action scoring, with lots of brass and percussion. For fans of Antz and Chicken Run, without doubt. The closing "Our Heroes" is the highlight of the entire disc, giving the listener one, final bombastic version of the main theme and other major themes.
Over all, Evolution is a rather entertaining score, with some really great tracks. Putting together a ten to fifteen minute long suite based on this material wouldn't be hard at all.