Second childhood

COCOON

1985

Directed by Ron Howard

Written by David Saperstein and Tom Benedek

*BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

1987

Directed by Matthew Robbins

Written by Mick Garris, Brad Bird, Brent Maddock, S.S. Wilson, and Matthew Robbins

Spoilers: moderate to moderately highish

Since, really, not any time later than the 90s—the rapidity with which it set in says something by itself—there's been some measure of nostalgia for the pop culture of the 80s, higher or lower as the case may be, and while it is (finally) attenuating, it's never, ever really gone away, and I don't think we'll ever quite get to the bottom of why, though we can perhaps make some guesses.  One thing is that it's getting close to the end of the last period of marked originality in American culture; another is that possibly the truest signature of American popular filmmaking 1980s is its enormous capacity for uncomplicated wish fulfillment, which is a little different than "escapism" or "fantasy," which American popular filmmaking obviously not only never gave up but doubled and trebled down upon (and accordingly it's not especially difficult to find somebody claiming the 80s ruined American movies, and they'd have their point), and which maybe gets overthought and overcalculated in these latterdays, or else we're all too conscious of how movies are just bullshit, but either way contemporary cinema isn't that good at it, even if occasionally something accidentally 80s in its fundamental philosophy like Project Hail Mary comes along to remind people of one of the main things that the movies are for.

A perennial criticism of the 80s, of course (probably getting itself formulated almost as soon as the decade started), is that the wishes it was fulfilling were pretty narrowly channeled in precisely whose got granted, though, from time to time, Hollywood did in fact offer something to people who weren't adolescent and probably white boys; and if our twinned subjects today are at the business of offering a fantasy for elderly and probably white men, well, it's my blog, and what I wanted to talk about was a pair of movies that I think are fascinating twists on genre concepts that seemed like they'd already been nailed-down, and both pretty weird, if in ways that still wind up normalized because they are, after all, simply what we think of when we think of "what the 80s were like."

Cocoon came first, in 1985, following a relatively protracted development process under Robert Zemeckis, originally hired by 20th Century Fox to direct, but fired because his early career had been pretty much one flop after another (even responsible, one might've assumed, for Steven Spielberg's own first underperformer with 1941), things coming to a head after Fox executives screened Romancing the Stone, and—clearly not realizing that some choice wish-fulfillment for middle-aged women was a whole rich revenue stream of its own—decided they abhorred it even though they were contractually obliged to distribute it.  Evidently, they weren't in a position to rehire Zemeckis after Romancing the Stone became the hit it was destined to be; they were stuck, for a certain value of "stuck," with Ron Howard, who was in a very watery phase of his career at the moment having just delivered Splash for them, and thus presumably considered a suitable director for another movie about littoral non-humans.  (You know, it occurs to me that Howard could be accused of having a preoccupation with water that's some fraction of James Cameron's, just no one's noticed because Howard produces very few fans—a little unfairly, I find, though shit like a J.D. Vance biopic doesn't help the case—but anyway three of his last six movies have been on, under, or next to the ocean.)  Well, everybody came out looking good in the end: Zemeckis obviously had the career he had, and Cocoon was a big hit too, a cultural touchstone of sufficient size that one of the things it's actually most famous for in 2026 is its incomprehensible state of official inaccessibility, vaulted for decades by Fox and later Disney for what seems like no earthly reason.

What it is, at heart, is basically a knock-off of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, albeit late-coming and indirect enough that one may only occasionally be reminded of Close Encounters while one's watching it; and this goes to my thesis, the knock-off being its own kind of originality.  (Consider: these days, if you're a film executive who wants to copy what's popular, you don't even knock it off if you can possibly help it; you simply reboot an adaptation of similar preexisting IP.)  It is, of course, a knock-off of Close Encounters with old, rather than middle-aged, people, and while we begin looking up at the night skies alongside David, one of those old people's grandchildren (Barrett Oliver)—for we should not discount how much knock-offery of 1982's box office champion E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is also at play here—which gives us (though not David) an opportunity to transition to the POV of an alien spacecraft bearing down on the Atlantic Ocean to the excitement of many dolphins, our story actually starts the next day and slightly inland, at the Sunny Shores Villas retirement community.  Here lives Art (Don Ameche), Ben (Wilford Brimley), and Joe (Hume Cronyn), amongst a number of others—Joe's wife Alma (Jessica Tandy), Ben's wife Mary (Maureen Stapleton) (for the record she and Ben are young David's grandparents), and Art's girlfriend Bess (Gwen Verdon, not precisely as the dancer-choreographer-Fosse-divorcer's return to movies, but close enough), as well as stick-in-the-mud Bernie (Jack Gilford) and his wife Rose (Herta Ware)—but for our convenience as well as the film's, we start with those first three, who have made a habit lately of absconding into the neighboring abandoned mansion's still-functional indoor swimming pool, in no small part because it is "forbidden" and essentially as a way of keeping themselves feeling young.  This is about to become more literal.

For meanwhile, loser boat operator Jack (Steve Guttenberg) has just gotten a miraculous offer from a bunch of slightly-off strangers for whom money seems to be no object, led by "Walter" (Brian Dennehy) and "Kitty" (Tahnee Welch, daughter of iconic sex symbol Racquel and making a highly credible go at such a thing for herself here); their purposes are awfully mysterious, and all Jack can initially determine is that it involves collecting something from the ocean floor at a specific set of coordinates, and just as mysteriously the group has also rented that mansion, and used its pool to store what they've told Jack, not very persuasively, are "giant snail shells."  I mean, you already know: those are the cocoons of their alien friends, left behind in suspended animation on Earth during the fall of Atlantis and the evacuation back to their homeworld of Antarea, and Walter and company have finally returned to rescue them (Cocoon seems to posit comparatively slow interstellar travel, so slow that you could start asking questions about the geological wisdom of storing alien cocoons like this*).  What this means for Art, Ben, Joe, and eventually many of the rest—whose curiosity about these big rocks in the pool tops out at "huh, those sure are some big rocks"—is that their swimmin' hole is now full of alien life force, which they absorb, and suddenly realize they feel decades younger.  Ultimately, this is going to put them at odds with Walter's group (for his part, Jack is going to find out what they look like under their human suits even sooner, in a peeping tom phase to his interplanetary romance with Kitty that plays on the basis it does at least traumatize the weak-willed pervert), and for a brief spell things maintain their balance, but while the humans obviously eventually fuck it up, there may still be a way forward for our elderly heroes and their new friends from beyond the stars.

Cocoon's a very nice time, and it's easy to see why it was a hit even if it's also kind of easy to see why it hasn't inspired the most outsized passion beyond its year of release (it got a sequel in 1988 that made less than a third what the original did; in fairness, possibly no 80s hit asked for a sequel less than Cocoon, and it's not very good, a watchable but fundamentally contemptible movie that's pretending it's just doing a victory lap while actually repudiating almost the entirety of the first film, starting with matters as minor as the implication that it must take millennia to reach Antarea but soon enough repudiating its entire ethos, and we'll get to what that particular ethos is shortly).  Howard worked out fairly well for it, with a subtly aggressive false naturalism to the treatment of a beachside community whose geography, accidentally or otherwise, manages some nice metaphorical resonance; by "subtly aggressive" I suppose I mean it's a cinematographic effort from Donald Perlman a little overly in love with afternoon filters without matching that with any too-precious camera direction.  But the odd colors and misty wombspace of the pool room have their value, and Howard is pursuing it with a sense of mystery on one hand and vibrancy on the other, notably in all the film's numerous 80s montages of old people who don't feel quite so old any more (also its obsession with dolphins as some kind of visual motif, but, hey, it was 1985), the most blatantly charming of which is almost certainly when Art shows up all the young bucks at the disco.

As for whether the movie deserves its Oscar win for Best Visual Effects, I found that very difficult to believe even before I looked to see what other special effects movies came out in 1985, but it's a perfectly likeable piece of visibly-seamed composited holy glowy crap, bolstering that whole "mystery" thing though the collaborator doing the most heavy lifting on that front is James Horner, whose characteristic cosmic hymnal style is the key to Cocoon avoiding the fate of falling apart into a bunch of high-concept sitcommery.  Still, let's not discount Howard here, who's doing a fine job of keeping the movie's potential weaknesses from ever overwhelming it or even seeming like weaknesses, managing a screenplay that—I imagine wholly on purpose—so completely lacks any kind of real center that they didn't even bother with an opening credits sequence and the closing credits list the ensemble in alphabetical order.  Though it's also bizarrely true that even in alphabetical order it's five names deep before the credits start deviating from the movie's own apparent estimation of its participants' importance.

So as far as its other Oscar winner is concerned—for Cocoon was so-honored—it's sure got to be one of the most in-your-face "it's actually a lifetime achievement award" Best Supporting Actor wins the Academy ever gave, because unless Ameche really did do his own breakdancing, which I am confident he did not (even if it's pretty cannily-staged), the best performance just in this film very obviously belongs to Dennehy's kindly alien immortal—the beat where he communicates wordlessly but with crystal clarity that his human suit's working tear ducts are a bafflement to him, in preparation for his later explanation that he doesn't even really understand loss, is only the most salient example of Dennehy's physical burliness being used to underscore his beatific sensitivity—while even out of the "old man" cast list, Brimley and Cronyn have more-or-less objectively more to play than Ameche, whereas I honestly think a colorable argument could be made that even Guttenberg is doing more in his cross-species romance.  (He's leavening a sense of awe with corny humor, anyhow.)  It isn't really germane to a Best Supporting Actor discussion, even in this "oops, all supporting actors!" movie, but a number of the female supporting turns—arguably including Welch too, though I mainly mean Tandy—who did not get any nominations would've deserved them more in their category, not to say they'd have deserved them in an absolute sense.  And I say this as an Ameche fan, and in the belief that he is doing completely splendid work as the least dramatically interesting and most "protagonist of an advertisement for an erectile dysfunction medication" character in the ensemble.  But for all that I evidently want to take Ameche down a peg, it is certainly one fine collection of old workhorses—plus the infamously not actually-that-old Brimley—that they put together.

It isn't without problems, clearly: for a surprisingly long while, I had to wonder why none of these dudes were inviting their significant others to the cocoon pool, at a minimum out of pure self-interest to keep Jessica Tandy's pussy wet (drawing a sexist line at saying "Jessica Tandy's wet pussy" might even be the reason for this—because they'd have had to, this movie being what might well be your actual ground zero for the whole "old people saying words like 'boner' = humor" strain of modern comedy, which I'm not including as a "problem," to be clear), and while this is obviously eventually resolved, the climax feels desperately kludged to give the movie any kind of climactic complexion at all, but that only has the effect of emphasizing and reemphasizing that absolutely any normal person's first thought when given the offer that our heroes are offered would be to try extending it on behalf of their child and grandchild.  Cocoon really hopes you won't notice or at least won't care about its core unfairness: the movie very nearly operates under the notion that unless you are already a senior citizen, you would have no thoughts about your mortality, nor even an awareness that one day you will die, while the senior citizens likewise all act like the non-senior citizens somehow won't.  It's awful distracting, but then, so is the U.S. military (well, the Coast Guard) responding to the apparent emergency of a bunch of people deciding to, uh, go on a damn boat ride.  (Not to rewrite a forty year old movie, because I'd suspect they avoided this kind of climax on purpose, but given how "life force or some shit" is the organizing principle of the science fiction here and the currency in which they seem to be trading, I think any viewer today would already be concocting a less messy third act for Cocoon in realtime as soon as some of "Walter's" friends' cocoons failed.  It doesn't go this way and I'm fine with it, coming down to that "ethos" thing I mentioned.)

Besides that—and even all that is easily forgivable, because the movie has such an odd structure or even anti-structure that I think that trying to impose a climax on it was always going to be a terrible challenge, but of course it does require something, and I'm frankly happy it didn't take recourse to an evil government subplot**—it's really quite cool, very earnest and charming and sometimes even emotionally tough in its exploration of morbidity and what kind of folly "youth" can get you into, without being mean about any of it.  And, as I said I'd reckon with that ethos, what Cocoon has is some unusually pure wish-fulfilment even for the 1980s, with the curious courage to take its fantasy all the way to its logical endpoint, absolutely devoid of any interest in teaching you some lesson about life*** and deciding it best to honestly concede that aging, and dying, actually suck, and aren't preferable.  The 117 minute runtime is a slight eyebrow-raiser, especially given how rapidly it becomes clear that a leisurely pace is going to be its speed, but that isn't even a problem, since it arises pretty naturally out of how much it plainly loves its (pretty loveable) characters.  It really must've been startling, just two years later, that somebody so quickly managed to take Spielberg's Twilight Zone: The Movie segment, and deshittify it.

***

In fact, amongst those startled into action must include Spielberg himself, because that's surely the best way to explain the existence of *batteries not included.  Spielberg must've concluded that turnabout was fair play, so if Cocoon could rip off Close Encounters he was justified in immediately ripping off Cocoon, not too terribly much in plot but in so many production details that it's kind of stunning, for it must have conceived of itself as Cocoon's spiritual successor.  So I'm going to need you to name the movie about the old folks meeting aliens that stars Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy—they play a married couple—with music by James Horner and special effects contributions from Ralph McQuarrie; you would need more information to identify this movie.  Having free reign to imitate himself all he wanted, Spielberg's dictate might well have been that Cocoon didn't rip off E.T. enough, though for all that this finds the executive producer in his most imperial phase, when the movies he presented under the Amblin banner were at their most thoroughly indebted to his aesthetic and narrative preferences, *batteries not included somehow placed itself near to the origin of a shockingly large collection of talent whose names would only be important later: second unit director Joe Johnston; co-writer Brad Bird; scenarist Mick Garris; and while we could quibble regarding Garris, who's a horror guy whose name is known mainly because he's attached himself to too many Stephen King projects, I think the filmmaking personalities at work are noticeable even as they blend together within the abiding Spielberginess of it all.  Our list of subsequent-notables, weirdly enough, doesn't include actual director (also a co-writer) Matthew Robbins, for I cannot tell you why that man's directorial career seems to have flung itself directly into the gutter after this, a movie that proved itself a solid and profitable crowd-pleaser.  (In fact, it came pretty close to Cocoon numbers, albeit on a significantly more expensive production.)  Robbins was scarcely some nobody in 1987—he'd directed The Legend of Billie Jean, he'd directed Dragonslayer, and he'd continue as a screenwriter—but he has only one feature directorial effort left afterwards and it's called Bingo, with a logline that includes the phrase "a runaway circus dog"; it's very inexplicable.  But to stake a position, in case it wasn't clear, I love the movie he directed here: it'd be a joke, but I could say my least favorite thing about it is that its title stylization, *batteries not included, is obviously very annoying to keep using in a written review, but it's so actually cute I couldn't in conscience refuse to faithfully render it.

So we begin with a kinestatic montage of doctored photos of Cronyn and Tandy in their youths—they're not supposed to be doctored—that I guess we have to take as a product of the state of compositing technology in 1987, that underneath Horner doing some big band jazz delineates the history of a place, a highrise on Manhattan's East Side, and two of its long-time inhabitants, Frank and Faye.  But in a pretty dazzling set of transitions (I feel like the movie is doing its best to remind you of Soylent freaking Green), those black-and-white photos of the past segue into color and the present day and the present day is not good: the highrise is the only remaining structure standing on its block, the rest having been ripped down in pursuit of "progress" as defined by a rarely-glimpsed real estate developer by the name of Lacey (Michael Greene).  817 East 8th Street is the only thing standing in the way of his plan of cyclopean urban renewal, and probably not for long, as soon it shall remain occupied by only a scant few tenants besides Frank and Faye (I don't know who the heck owns the thing, it's never brought up; it might be Frank and Faye, who maintain a restaurant on its ground floor, though it probably is not).  These tenants number pregnant young woman Marisa (Elizabeth Pena), pining after the peripatetic musician who knocked her up; slumming artiste Mason (Dennis Boutsikaris, potentially a clone of Michael Douglas frozen circa 1979), described by his exiting girlfriend as the "Andrew Wyeth of the East Village [pejorative]"; and, in the superintendent's quarters so maybe he's the superintendent, Harry (Frank McRae), the ex-boxer and present-tinkerer, with a movie-movie cognitive disorder so he almost never speaks and when he does it's only in soundbytes from TV commercials, such as the film's title.

Lacey has deputized a certain Carlos (Michael Carmine) and his gay gangsters (alternatively, there was a brief moment when sweaty skinny men in mesh T-shirts didn't code as such) to lean on our heroes, offering them a "generous" buy-out, though as they're all unwilling to take the money, Carlos escalates to breaking into their houses, smashing up their stuff, and, in Frank and Faye's case, wrecking their diner.  Yet that night, perhaps even because Frank prayed for it, a miracle occurs: a pair of very distinctive extraterrestrials—tiny robotic flying saucers ("aliens... from a very small planet" Frank theorizes)—come down to Earth's East Side and make their nest (quite literally) in the building.  They're discovered because in their explorations and scavenging for parts and electrical "food," they've fixed everything Carlos has busted, for such is their nature; and the inhabitants of 817 East 8th protect the brooding couple, and their offspring, though the threat of Carlos and Lacey, and destruction, encroaches ever nearer.

If Cocoon presented an 80s kids adventure for 80 year olds, *batteries not included is very much doubling down on that, and to some degree building itself out as a kids adventure with 80 year olds instead, which, whatever else, is still a much sturdier structure on which to hang an actual plot; and either way, it's outrageously good at it.  The aliens—McQuarrie's concepts, though he didn't stick around to oversee the special effects this time—are almost unbearably adorable little things, and I do suppose they could be held to be unbearable.  It's entirely possible, I think, to object to certain elements of their design: the "male" is pretty perfect; the "female" (in any case, the gestating one) has as part of her design working eyelids, which is probably overdoing it in terms of readable expressivity (the male doesn't have these, and is quite a bit more rewarding to suss out); the little ones are kind of egregiously cute.

But these are very minimal complaints, and I love how off-the-beaten-track this E.T.'s E.T.'s get to be, undoubtedly making things much harder on the effects team, Robbins, Johnston, cinematographer John McPherson, and the actors than they strictly had to be in order to get some very unique visuals onscreen; their work pays off handsomely, and this concerningly-expensive movie—the $25 million budget this children's film was afforded puts it in a class above things like Aliens or Predator, and I believe it was the third-most expensive movie (in nominal dollars, anyway) with Steven Spielberg's name on it to date, after Temple of Doom and the farrago of 1941—looks pretty much like all of what it cost, not seamless by any means (it is, after all, 1987, and as noted they can't even put Cronyn's head on some other dude's body entirely persuasively in a still photograph), but with maybe hundreds of effects shots of varying type, and some of them are astoundingly good, especially the ones where they're throwing altogether unnecessary challenges at themselves and the aliens have to be reflected in water or metal.

The least effective thing is Robbins somehow flubbing their very first appearance, where we just cut to one of them sitting (hovering) outside a window without build-up, though this still becomes a mysterious and enchanting little setpiece (Horner is still doing a great deal of heavy lifting, just not the majority of it) with a choreographed camera through Frank and Faye's apartment that's terrifically well-designed and carefully-lensed.  McPherson makes the movie look good all over: it's not afraid to err a little on the side of overlighting, but in the best 80s tradition of that (the color reproduction of late 80s movies is one of my favorite things, and the neutral, usually-brown interiors of the highrise prevent things from becoming too bright, except on the soundstage roof where suffusive light is the point), but also as part of a smartly deliberate scheme, allowing the nighttime domestic interiors to be a little less overlit, and hence cozy, and saving the really aggressive shadows almost exclusively for Carlos's scenes, as he skulks through basements and corridors—he's staking 817 out, of course, but he almost seems to be living in the ruins of another highrise—not even content to merely identify Carlos as the villain, but to quietly emphasize what isn't even quite present in the script yet, his own dim awareness of the moral rot that he's allowed to overtake his soul.

That's not even the impressive part of the film's visual construction, which is down to production designer Ted Haworth and set decorator Angelo Graham, the latter filling up those aforementioned domestic spaces with our heroes' personalities, and the former tasked with the pretty monumental challenge of building this whole damn building, which he basically did—it obviously wasn't functional, but it's an amazingly believable facade they put up in this vacant lot (amidst the kind of family movie urban decay that includes graffiti such as "BUCK YOU CASHOLE," which I find pretty funny).  It's just such a stunner of design (it's also a beautiful building, even in its dilapidation, justifying at least to us Mason's quixotic attempts to have it declared a historical landmark), as well as location management and beefy production; besides eventually setting the mother on fire, there's also the constant reminder of the threat in the adjoining lots outside, the huge yellow vehicles and their sympathetic-but-powerless blue-collar minders seen in establishing shots—often even through the windows—milling about, waiting for the signal to destroy five lives.  The final shot, regarding the ultimate fate of our highrise—after a beautiful reversal of a climax—is breathtaking in how willing it is to yoke the concept of an editorial cartoon into children's picturebook storytelling, and it's the perfect way to end this film.

It's just such an effortlessly loveable thing, with meaningful stakes (it might be my single favorite movie about gentrification, in part I guess because it's so dopily manichean; I do, anyway, like it even better than Spielberg's own rather visually-similar directorial take in his West Side Story) combined with the tenor and fancy of the best kind of kid's adventure flick, unafraid to get downright cartoonish with those stakes (Carlos's first face-to-face confrontation with the aliens leads to the comic anticlimax of the thug getting electrocuted into a fright wig, and I did laugh).  But the screenplay is remarkably careful, either for a special effects family movie in the 80s in general (or a Cocoon knock-off in particular), or just any movie, and especially one as heavily-rewritten as this one evidently was.  (The screenplay credits are a bit of a labyrinth, the ands and ampersands indicating at least one more-or-less discarded alternate version of the movie.)  And it is careful all over, and thoughtful and even subtle about its subtext.  It's the text, after all, when I say the movie is "about gentrification," and that a bunch of aliens who might as well be angels come down from what amounts to heaven to save some crappy apartment building, but what's left to indirect implication in just the way some of these tenants who have clearly been there for a while, having organically replaced elderly (or dead) former residents of Frank's close acquaintance, are basically complete unknowns to Frank and he even has to ask them their names; without making any overt deal about it, a big part of the real magic of *batteries not included is that the alien situation regenerates the multigenerational community that had been lost—indifferently abandoned, in fact—long before the building ever was, even identifying this as the cause, not the consequence, of our heroes' declining fortunes.  By the same token, it gives you just enough character exposition—this isn't so artful, but at least it's brief—to understand where Carlos is coming from, which tends to make his increasingly-flailing malevolence as sad as it is detestable.

And what I haven't mentioned is what always keeps this tethered right to the ground even amidst the higher-flying nonsense of robot aliens making hamburgers (the movie has a whole middle act to occupy, after all, not that I would 86 robot aliens making hamburgers).  The movie is able to encompass sadness; it pulls some of its punches, especially an alien "miscarriage," but even then it pulls that punch after such a long wait that you get to feel it anyway; and, as a matter of basic constitution, maybe it's not so surprising that this family movie is not willing to contemplate any character, including metallic ones, actually dying.  But it does have Cronyn and Tandy, soaked more through with age and depressed nostalgia than their corresponding characters in Cocoon—these are fantastic performances—and those performances include a certain heartwrenching factor that Cocoon, despite all its old people, did not; Faye is, in fact, dying hard, at least in the ways that matter for being human, with an illness not precisely-defined—the movie would obviously not benefit it from being pinned down to a diagnosis as Faye must still serve the needs of the plot, but it's basically dementia pointing towards Alzheimer's—and the angels can't fix that, as she wanders about in an alternate reality that includes some elements of psychosis, constantly confusing her movie's villain for her own long-gone son, and, if you're not a hardened sociopath or a very jaded hater of manipulative bathos, making you cry a fair amount.  It's a sort of mean trick for a family film to play on you, but it works, and justifies the arguably risible-sounding idea, "what if we exploited Cocoon's success by making E.T. but with olds?", and turns the emotional arc of what basically still is a kid's adventure film completely on its head: Frank and Faye are much closer to their end than their beginning, but, with a little help, they've left a legacy that matters.

Score, Cocoon: 7/10

Score, *batteries not included: 10/10

*This is the premise of Cocoon: The Return.

**This is also the premise of Cocoon: The Return.

***This is, unfortunately, also the premise of Cocoon: The Return.  No official review, but I guess if you're inexplicably curious.