Cosmos 2000 Collector’s Edition DVD
Originally posted a long time ago on Paul’s Reviews Page
I’ll be rating movies on a three zone, 5-star scale. Each movie will be rated
on “Visual Appeal”, “Audio Appeal” and “Story Appeal”. Each of these three
zones can be rated up to 5 stars (or asterisks…. they load faster than
.GIFs)
Cosmos 2000 Collector’s Edition DVD
V: *******
A: *******
S: *******
Synopsis: Life, The Universe and Everything…. By the way, there are 21 asterisks up there!!
Thoughts:
When I was a kid, around 13 or 14 years old, I saw the science series “Cosmos” on PBS, presented by the late Dr. Carl Sagan. As a much younger boy, I had been exposed to some scientific thoughts and notions which set me off on the course of curiosity and a quest for understanding. Science fascinated me. It still does. When I first saw Cosmos, something else in me was awakened, beyond scientific curiosity. I became aware of the interconnectedness of everything. A sense of abject humility as well as a seemingly contradictory feeling of pride permeated me. In the years since the first time I viewed Cosmos, I have read the book of the same title by Carl Sagan, as well as several others of his books.
Carl Sagan was much more than an extraordinary popularizer of science. He made science universally and irrefutably relevant. He was ridiculously intelligent, frightfully passionate and dangerously engaging. He understood history, biology, religion, physics, planetary science, mathematics, cosmology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and any number of other disciplines, but what was, to me, most extraordinary about Carl Sagan was the way he could connect all these understandings and construct an enormous, beautiful, joyful and compelling comprehension. Cosmos weaves all the aforementioned disciplines into thirteen broadly appetizing narratives, each with striking imagery and surprisingly emotive music. Cosmos is neither condescending nor dumbed-down. It requires your attention, but its meaning is not elusive or buried in jargon and technobabble.
The thirteen episode series Cosmos were written and produced during a time of great discovery (the Voyager and Viking missions, among others) and great peril (lest we forget the Cold War). Fortunately Dr. Sagan dwelt much longer on the discovery than on the peril, although he did not dismiss the possibility of human self-extinction. Instead, he occasionally made remarks which indicated that our continued growth and discovery was contingent upon our refraining from blowing ourselves up.
If you have never seen Cosmos, see it as soon as you can. If you have seen it, it is time for you to see it again. If you don’t already own the seven-disc twentieth anniversary DVD release of Cosmos, you must buy it now and watch it often.
Kudos to Ann Druyan (Dr. Sagan’s widow) and company at Cosmos Studios for the remastering and re-release this beautiful and important work.