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Old 03-09-2014, 09:49 PM   #1
Talon87
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Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey


Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, is the 2014 reboot of 1980's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage hosted by Carl Sagan. It airs Sunday nights at 9 EDT on Fox or Monday nights at 10 EDT on the National Geographic Channel. It's said that the National Geographic broadcasts boast additional footage not seen in the earlier Fox broadcasts. The subject matter will cover just about everything in creation -- from the outer reaches of the Universe to the inner workings of our bodies, from the Big Bang and the evolution of species to mankind's present perils and future goals.
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Old 03-09-2014, 09:53 PM   #2
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I know several people who are really, really excited about this broadcast. I also know several people who have already made their minds up that this is going to be a terrible show and they don't want to watch it. Torn between such parties, I found myself tuning in tonight more out of trepidatious curiosity than anything else.

I didn't expect to learn much and, aside from a crash course on the life and death of Giordano Bruno and a smattering of friendly reminders in other areas, I didn't. But I thought it was a decent first episode for a series that has promise to become much better. There were a few things which gave me cause for concern, however. Hopefully most of them were just quirks of the introductory episode. If they persist, however, they could ruin this series for millions.

First and foremost, the visual spectacle. There is just far too much of it, to the point that it is both obnoxious and distracting. The Prince of Egypt-ified story of Giordano Bruno was bad enough, but I would have been able to roll with that one case of an animated segment for a variety of reasons. But the show just kept going on ... and on ... and on with the unnecessary and copious amounts of visual spectacle. So much cartoon animation. So much 3D CG effects with planets and stars and such. I can tell that it was meant to perpetually seize viewers' 10-second attention spans but for me it did quite the opposite: it kept distracting me every ten seconds, making it difficult to really pay attention to what I was watching.

Second, the first episode was unapologetically brutal in its depiction of the Roman Catholic Church during the story of Giordano Bruno. I'm not saying that I'm on the Church's side on this one. Far from it! I just feel that the only way the Cosmos episode could've made the Church's seniority seem any worse than they already did would have been to draw red devil horns growing out of their heads. This isn't good. The original Cosmos didn't feel like it judged you for your religious beliefs, and that was what allowed it to have such broad appeal and to reach out even to those who had subscribed to religious dogma from a very young age. The 2014 reboot, on the other hand, is going to amount to little more than pointless preaching to the choir if this keeps up. Don't expect throwaway nods to religion ("This is the second that Moses was born ... and this is the second Buddha was, and this the second Jesus was, and this the second Muhammad was, and ...") to satisfy the religious zealots you're supposed to be trying to reach out to. I'm not saying to hold back with the truth. I'm not saying you should depict the Roman Catholic Church of the 17th Century as the leader of fair and open intellectual discourse. I'm just saying that you could be a little bit less abrasive about it.

Aside from these and a few other, smaller complaints, I am hopeful for the remainder of the series. I'm already cringing at the thought of next week's episode (on the origin of species and evolution) since Tyson is neither an educated biologist nor an authority on the topic and, unlike Sagan, seems to have something of an axe to grind ... but once we get back to space (past, present, and future), I think things'll be good. I sure hope so. (Just to clarify: I doubt Tyson will express any views which contradict my own. My reasons for cringing are simply that I worry he will present evolutionary facts in an incredibly heavy-handed and, ironically, dogmatic fashion. And coming from an astrophysicist and not an evolutionary biologist, that can do more harm than good. )
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Old 03-09-2014, 09:56 PM   #3
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It's good to see Sagan's series get a remake! But my only problem with this - maybe I'm too old for it. I already know the theories from Wikipedia, probably better than the Cosmos series would be able to communicate to me, and CGI lately has failed to impress me in any respect.

For example, I thought Avatar's Pandora was an exceedingly fake world. It felt like something out of the human imagination, not 'real'. Lately I have been craving a lot of 'real' things, so I'm not sure if I'll have the patience for this.
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Old 03-17-2014, 09:30 AM   #4
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I watched the first episode and it left me nearly in tears.

I am a ridiculous sucker for science programming and the mix of nostalgia for the original Cosmos and the beautifully explained content made me more emotional than it should.

I'm excited for the rest of this series!
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