In short: Cosmos (2019)

Being critical towards a film like Cosmos, that was made with little to no actual budget whatsoever, with actors and what little crew there is beyond directors/writers/everything elses Elliot and Zander Weaver working for free, and that still manages to look and feel like a professionally made film in all regards, seems a bit like kicking a puppy, or being like one of those guys (and it’s nearly always guys) who can’t help but tell you your favourite movie/band/book sucks.

Things aren’t made any easier for me by the fact that the film’s as likeable as they come in other ways too, with its love for all things outer space, as well as a tone so hopeful, people more cynical than I am might call it naive.

I even love the basic idea of telling a Big Hollywood story of first contact through a more down to Earth lens, through the eyes of three British hobby astronomers (though they are all academically close to the field) as (well) played by Tom England, Arjun Singh Panam and Joshua Ford out on a nightly exploration mission with their private, cobbled-together equipment (that still manages to contain a device that can predict the loss of battery power on the second exact) who will be the first to pick up a very strange signal from space.

The film’s big problem is that it takes the basic structure of a Big Hollywood Blockbuster, hitting the same beats at the same moments, clearly following the same script writing handbook that has been en vogue for at least the last decade or so, without seeming to realize that you can’t simply take the structure of your typical Marvel movie and use it for your film about three guys in a car. Big cheesy emotional moments and speeches – capably written in the style as they may be – simply don’t work in the film’s more quotidian environments, really pointing out their silliness and their cheesiness, and frankly wasting the opportunity to tell the story of these less traditionally heroic guys in a way that’s truer to what they are supposed to be. There is certainly a degree of charm to the film’s staging of three guys’ search for a replacement battery (spoilers?) as if it were some grand heroic finale, but the film lacks the self-consciousness to see the irony in this, instead simply using the Big Hollywood beats as if that were an effective way to tell its story.

The film’s also about half an hour too long, with a couple of scenes of guys having heart-to-hearts too many, and a slowness of pace that suggests one of the traps all of us doing things on a non-professional level step into from time to time, the inability to see which of our darlings really need killing rather badly. Self-editing is hard, as we all well know.


Still, having said all that, I also have to emphasise again how likeable of a film Cosmos is, how much of an achievement despite its flaws it is for its makers, really the sort of thing director careers would be made from in any sane universe.