Cosmos [DVD]

One of the best movies I've ever seen - very clean, all while having a minimal budget. Congrats to those who made this masterpiece!

Wow...it's almost scary that a movie about a bunch of geeky scientists chilling in a Volvo is more entertaining than a $200,000,000 Hollywood flick.It's honestly a bit of irony how I came upon this movie. Being a sci-fi author myself, I was searching for a cosmos book when I came upon COSMOS. When I read that a mother and her sons created it, I just had to check it out. And holy smokes, that was $13 well spent.This movie, despite being on an extremely low budget, was simply phenomenal and better than 99% of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood. It is truly a love letter to dreamers and night sky gazers like myself, who go out there daily (or at least when weather permits) to take a look into the infinity of the universe (or as one of the characters says it, "Some look to Earth, others look to the sky for answers" or something like that). The actors were actually really good, and I enjoyed all their interactions. The dialogue was simply wonderful, the lighting was very professionally done, and I really questioned nothing that happened in the plot. I really loved those shots of a character (s) with space in the background. It was so relatable. I feel like some great ambient tracks would work wonders with this movie too (Maybe Eureka by Huma-Huma, The Mighty Rio Grande by This Will Destroy You, etc.) despite the fact I really dig the music.This movie is a great example of how good character-driven stories can be. The writers obviously took time to flesh each one out--they all feel different with their own pasts and goals. And the plot is no slouch either. But they take time to develop the characters so that when the real fun begins, we care for them (take notes, Hollywood directors/writers).I do think, though, that it didn't need to be so long. The last 25 minutes/ending was still good but just didn't have the same "feeling" from the other parts of the movie. But maybe that's just me. I think there could've been at least 8-10 minutes off the runtime.With that said, this is still an astronomical 5 stars from me. If these guys are doing this kind of work NOW, I can't wait to see what they put out there in a few years' time. Keep up the great work, this is going to be rewatched probably another 100x!

This is the nerdiest, most geeked out movie I have ever seen. It's well done,cinematography is a 10/10,acting is 10/10,drama is 10/10,script writing is 10/10,premise is on the border of science fiction and non-fictionIt's got cheesy moments, character development, and it is really really about astronomers making a discovery. So, I mean, it's exciting in a theatrical sort of way, but like, otherwise realtively normal vangaurd of discovery in a science field - just dramatized.And boy, did it dramatize well.. Like I feel like someone made a bet, and the director/writer/screenwrite/whomever was like, "Just you watch..." and produced this stellar piece of theatrical entertainment. Someone definitely lost a bet, and kudos to whoever advocated for the making of this film. It's amazing.It is essentially about scientists making a scientific discovery and mucking about their equivocal benchwork, so it's not for everyone. Unless you're a film student - film students need to take note here.

TLDR: They ripped off the signal acquisition part of the screen adaptation of Carl Sagan's "Contact", stretched it into 129 minutes, completely butchered the science and technology involved, and then added insult to injury by naming it after Sagan's best selling book and documentary series.How does this movie have such a high rating?I'm no astronomer, so maybe I'm WAY off here. But so many things jumped out at me.- They're going to look at the stars with an optical telescope, but leave the car headlights on, contributing to the light pollution and ruining their own night vision.- This is okay, though, because the telescope now has a camera on it which means they can just sit in the car and look at the images on a laptop. Apparently you can see just as much through what the camera captures as you would through the actual telescope lens. Not an expert, but call me skeptical of this.- Our intrepid hero spends the whole night listening to the exact same spot in the sky. Unlike what the movie leads you to conclude, it's not just what frequency you listen to, but you have to point the antenna in the right direction. The whole point of a parabolic antenna is to capture very weak signals and you can only doing that by pointing the antenna at the right place. This signal is so weak that they have to perform some technical magic to actually pick it up better. Yet despite not moving his primary antenna (he only scans the frequencies), he pointed to just the right pinpoint in sky to receive this signal in the first place. Oh, and we'll ignore the fact that every time they got in and out of the car, they would have cause the roof-mounted antenna to deflect from what it was pointing at.- Skip forward a bit and we get the spooky return message via what seems to be a copy/paste job of the original outgoing message. The little green men got the message and replied! They were able to translate English enough to rearrange the message in an intelligible way. Cool! What do they do a little later? Send a binary image based on a 45-year old transmission sent out from Earth. Really? The only radio message they've intercepted and recorded while sitting in a low-earth orbit is this one guy's welcome message? They didn't have a huge array of TV and radio signals that this presumed advance civilization could have hacked together to form a more informative first contact message?- Then things get dicey! Some black magic causes the system to fry and wipe the hero's hard drive of all the data he's collected so far. This event definitely wasn't somehow caused by the ETs amping the signal up to 11, more on this later. So he has to start from scratch. But then, oh no! His battery starts to die! Not only that, but his system is incapable of gracefully shutting down when the power gets low! All the data he has recorded so far will be lost if the battery dies completely! His only chance is to start copying it off to external drives. This process will somehow cause the energy usage to increase, draining the batteries faster. He doesn't know if it will finish before it's completely dead. Inexplicably, there is an exact countdown to when the batteries will die, but no estimate on the time remaining to copy the data, only a file count. There's also no explanation as to why 414 files copied off to two separate drives (the first one ran out of space, of course) would be rendered completely useless if you somehow missed the 415th.- But good news, they realize there is a power supply option that they may be able to reach in the 18 minutes (!) before "Total Memory Failure". Now remember, backing up the files is drawing more battery power, so they could presumably delay the failure by NOT backing the files up, leaving them more time to get to the spare power supply. Somehow that's not an option. They have to both try to back up the files before the battery dies AND get to the spare power supply.- So now the clock is ticking, right? Despite the fact that they appeared to be driving deep into the country side at the beginning of the movie, with one guy sound asleep in the back seat during a lengthy conversation between the other two, they're actually only about 15 miles away from a major population center. Well, as they demonstrated with the car headlights, light pollution is no problem for their magical optical telescope. Anyway, time is of the essence. Yet even though they're clearly no more than a 36-minute round trip from wherever they need to get the batteries from (remember, they only have 18 minutes to get there), it's somehow imperative that they spend the next 6 freaking minutes packing up all their crap, including a heartfelt goodbye to the magical telescope that they couldn't manage to get back into the car. This is opposed to maybe having one guy sit out in the woods for less than an hour so you don't lose proof of the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.- We start getting into the realm of parody when they're finally ready to go and the late-model Volvo they're in suddenly won't start! Of course not. Despite it being a Volvo station wagon with automatic transmission, there's all kinds of absurd pumping of the gas pedal and an imaginary clutch while moving the shift lever around. I guess the film makers confused a car not starting with the procedure for popping the clutch to start a manual transmission car when the battery is dead.- To top off the growing absurdity that is this movie, the place they go to get the spare power supply is.....an observatory with 2 radio antennas the size of New Jersey. Despite not being picking up on this signal with the antennas where the receiver is bigger than hero's whole antenna, now that the heroes have arrived, the whole world is now aware and listening in.There is so much more that is just terrible about this movie. The actors are actually pretty decent and there's some decent character interaction to start, but by the end it's all dramatic speeches and heroic poses that are just over the top. Top it all off with how slow the damn thing is to develop and move forward and it's just bad.

This is a great film. I’ve also, good quality