Review of Cocoon (1995) by Henrik H — 09 Jan 2010

One of the best movies ever made. Simply because I hate getting old myself (even though I'm only 28 when writing this, but still!), I love sci-fi and the story is so damn heart-warming I gotta admit that if I was even a notch more sentimental, I'd cry my eyes out.

Usually all the alien and ufo -movies are starring young people doing heroic deeds and fighting the monster from outer space. Not this time and this is what makes the movie really interesting. I'm gonna spoil the whole story here, but that's mandatory in order to understand the greatness of this masterpiece.

The story is about some old people finding out that aliens have a fountain of youth next door and all they wanna do is get young again.

It turns out to be that the aliens have come to pick up their friends and they're just keeping the cocoons holding their friends inside in a pool. The old geezers drain accidentally all the lifepower from the pool and thus from the cocoons and the aliens are forced to move the cocoons back to the ocean to gather more energy into themselves thus postponing their plans.

The aliens offer the old people a change to follow them into the stars and live forever since. They accept the offer and are granted the eternal life and unimaginable knowledge beyond the stars.

My god I love this movie. It's a perfect setting for a sci-fi fan who's interested in astronomy, knowledge, eternal life and the mysteries of the universe. It's not a story about religion and it does not play around with the theme of god or heaven existing at all. It's a goddamn happy and morally satisfying story about old people wanting to live forever and their decisions of accepting the offer or not.

Ron Howard, you're not a bad guy after all.