Cosmos (2019)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes rated 6.0 by 6067 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA: England.
Verdict: Compelling.
Tagline: It’s really happening!
Three young men sit in a Volvo station wagon and talk. The result is a far better movie than Blade Runner (1982), Avatar (2009), The Arrival (2016), and much else.
These three are amateur astronomers, an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a radio telescope technician who together drive to a hill top in Sherwood Forest away from light and other interference one night a month to star gaze each in his own way with the gear crammed into the car. These are the self-styled Astro-Nuts.
Though cold, it promises to be an especially good night with no atmospheric disturbances. The weather inside the car is chilly, too, because there are tensions among them that (very) slowly emerge. The pace is deliberate, leisurely even, but that makes a nice change from Hollywood harm scarum tempo used to conceal shallow characters and plot holes.
As they banter, doze, take leg-stretching and bladder-emptying breaks and drink more tea, amid the static the radio technician is scanning appears an anomaly. Well that happens and he tries to correct it while being teased about his past mistakes. Earlier a routine image of a weather satellite disappeared for a minute or two and then returned. That had never happened before. Later there is shadow detected by the (barely) portable telescope they have set up. One, two, three something is up the tree!
When scrubbed the radio signal persists. Huh? How can that be? Good question, Galileo. The satellite image loss recurs. Using infrared settings on the telescope the shadow look like…. [no one says it but we all think it].
Is ET calling? Just maybe. Better to be sure than sorry, so they pick up…. It ends on an upward positive note!
A recent Brit film I watched had a big name cast, location shooting in Wales, sex, and some flashy special effects with kindergarten science. Only a brave person or a fool watched to the end as I did. Hmmm.
This film has none of those things but it has a script and the car interior, two first-time film actors, and no special effects apart the grandeur of the night sky. The result is a far, far better thing than most I watch. The film school graduates who produced it could not find anyone to fund it, so they did it themselves. Chapeaux!
It is too long. The car chase at the end seemed needlessly attenuated, and there was just too much of the bromance. A producer not emotionally invested in it would have cut it by 30 minutes and improved it to get focus on the really big picture. Really BIG.
I shudder to think what Pox News would make of a first contact. The movies Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) got the reception right – Madness times N. Panic, denial, fear, nukes would be round one though the image of a President Trump meeting an alien to sell state secrets sprang to mind.