Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Episode 1

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” – Carl Sagan

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is the standard to which all scientific television programming is held.  In 1980, Carl Sagan took audiences on a thirteen week journey through the story of everything.  The result was one of the finest television documentaries ever made, joining a pantheon including David Attenborough’s Life on Earth and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.  But that was 34 years ago.

In 1980, the majority of today’s television audience (myself included) hadn’t been born yet.  The Space Shuttle program had not yet resulted in a space flight.  The Hubble Space Telescope did not exist.  The Voyager probes had not made it to Saturn, or the outer planets.  The Venera 13 probe had not yet landed on Venus, so no color photographs of its surface existed.   The concepts of dark matter and dark energy had not even been thought of at that time.  The scientific discoveries of the last generation have made the universe so much grander and more mysterious that was thought at the time of the original Cosmos.  Hell, the idea that three decades later the entirety of human knowledge could be accessed from a pocket-sized device was unthinkable.

The computers of the time were so much less powerful than today.  The above screenshot is what computer graphics looked like in 1980.  The original Cosmos utilized stunning paintings and artwork along with special camera techniques to simulate the journey of the spaceship of the imagination.  In 2014, a team with sufficient time and sufficient talent can use computer animation to produce absolutely anything imaginable on screen.  And it is because of these things that it is the perfect time to update Cosmos.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey looks absolutely stunning.  The love that was put into this program is palpable before Neil deGrasse Tyson has finished his opening monologue.  If there is any modern scientist fit to take Carl Sagan’s place as the helmsman for the series, Neil deGrasse Tyson is the man to do it.  I’ve seen him on television since I started watching Nova years before I was old enough to fully comprehend much of what the show was tackling.  His presence as a scientist in popular culture is rivaled only by a certain Bill Nye, but NdGT has more physicist cred, so he’s got that going for him.  It also allowed for a touching moment at the end of this episode where Tyson opens up an old datebook of Sagan’s and points out a memo regarding a meeting between Sagan and a 17-year old Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

This first episode of the series, “Standing Up in the Milky Way”, also features an examination of the scale of human existence in terms of both space and time.  The spaceship of the imagination travels to the end of the observable universe to show just how much space there is.  The show gives a sense of time scales using the metaphor borrowed from the original Cosmos in which the entire history of the universe condensed into one calendar year.  At that scale, all of human history fits into the last few seconds of the last minute of the last day of the year.  Even like that it’s almost incomprehensible to the human mind how short we’ve been here.  And even more amazing that modern science began and developed into space travel and the information age in the last second of that year.

The episode also features a prolonged animated sequence about the story of one Giordano Bruno,  a philosopher who wrote about an infinite universe before the discoveries Galileo and Newton shook up the scientific dogma of the church in Europe at the time.  This sequence is one that didn’t quite work for me, as I felt it took up too much of the episode and the animation was rather dull and ugly, especially in context of the rest of the show’s stunning CG work.  There are problems with doing historical recreations, and not using realistic CG avoided the uncanny valley gracefully.  Live-action re-enactments would have been better, but that may have been too expensive.  The writing was also unnecessarily blunt and ham-fisted when presenting Bruno’s struggles against the religious establishment, which does not feel like something Sagan would have done.  But, it was one of the few moments in the show thus far where I learned something new, so that was nice.

I’m a very fickle man, and one of the ways that this manifests is that I get very annoyed and pessimistic about hype.  In the buildup to Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I held a couple of reservations about the series. Namely FOX.  As far as I am concerned, Cosmos belongs on public broadcasting.  I have to acknowledge, that it wouldn’t have gotten the funding and outreach it deserved on PBS.  But the commercials breaks were off-putting and had a tendency to break the flow of the episode.  I’ll just have to bear with it and hope that the DVD cut fixes that and maybe adds some extra content (please?).  I also had reservations about Seth McFarlane’s involvement in the project, but he clearly loves the show just as much as NdGT does, and none of the off-color content I was half-expecting found its way into the show.

One scientific problem I was quick to notice and absolutely can’t go without mentioning was the portrayal of the solar system’s asteroid belt.  The asteroid belt looks nothing like it does in this show, where its appearance seems more inspired by The Empire Strikes Back than by actual astronomy.  The total mass of rock in the asteroid belt is somewhere in the range of 10²¹ kilograms, which is similar to the mass of Earth’s moon.  The problem is that the planar area encompassed by the asteroid belt is about 10¹⁸ square kilometers.  This corresponds to about 1000 kg of rock per square kilometer, which, assuming the average asteroid has a density somewhere in-between iron and silicon dioxide (quartz), works out to one fifth of a cubic meter of asteroid per square kilometer.  Basically the equivalent of a handful of marbles in a football field.  And most of the particles are quite a bit smaller than that.  Hardly the labyrinth of massive rocks we saw in the episode.  (Incidentally, if you like having science fiction ruined for you, pick up a copy of Philip Plait’s excellent Bad Astronomy.  Or go read his blog at http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html)

When it’s all said and done, I enjoyed this episode and have high hopes for the rest of the series.  Despite my couple of complaints, I think it retains the sense of wonder and optimism of the original, and is very accessible without becoming overly pedestrian or modifying the truth to make it more interesting.  It’s a worthy successor to the original, although I would say that so far it’s not quite as good as the original.  If you didn’t see it last night, I heartily recommend watching a rerun or catching it on Hulu.  If you want to see the original, well, it’s not on any major streaming service currently, but you can find the DVD set (which is updated somewhat from the original release) or use your google-fu to find it elsewhere online…

Well, that's all I have for now. See you next time.

The 86th Academy Awards or: BRB, going to rent Dallas Buyer's Club

It almost felt like I wouldn’t get to watch the Oscars this year.  For some reason, I was never able to get the cable box in my apartment connected properly to the TV, so the obvious means of watching the awards was right out.  I could have gone to someone else’s place and was, in fact, invited to someone’s Oscar party.  I didn’t because: a) I’m a lazy sod, b) I was wearing my pajamas and didn’t want to change, and c) it’s cold outside.  So I tried to stream it over the internet.  Because the major media companies that own the broadcast stations resoundingly refuse to join the 21^st goddamn century, I was forced to do this by some more questionable means.  This naturally, also meant that the video quality was poor and the lag threatened to end my night early.  I persevered, and fortunately, the stream got better and my neighbors only had to hear me curse my way through the red carpet footage and the first 20 minutes of the awards.

I’m a film enthusiast, and the films are why I watch the awards.  The Academy Awards red carpet, on the other hand, is the most insipid piece of television I voluntarily sit through on a yearly basis.  It is literally a group of grown men and women applauding a different group of grown men and women for being able to dress themselves appropriately for the situation.  Yes, the dresses are gorgeous in most cases, but these are Hollywood celebrities, most of them could show up in a potato sack and still be beautiful. There is only so many times I can listen to these people say “who made your dress?” and “are you excited?” and “Oh, I loved ‘Gravity’!”  So did everyone else on the goddamn planet!  I really only turned it on early so that I could make sure the stream was working.

Enough of my bitching, on to the main event.  I didn’t bother making a ballot this year, because I hadn’t seen most of the movies that were front runners for awards this year.  And as it turned out, of the four movies that won multiple awards yesterday, the only one I had seen was “Gravity”. As it was, I should have done one anyway, because the speculation for which movies would win proved to be remarkably accurate and there were nearly no upsets.  Gravity dominated the early part of the show, sweeping the technical awards (Visual effects, sound editing and mixing), alongside best editing, original score, and cinematography.  Alfonso Cuarón was also awarded Best Director, a title he should have gotten back in 2006 for the un-nominated “Children of Men”.  If you haven’t seen that film, go and watch it.  It’s an excellent sci-fi film and the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and honestly better than that in “Gravity” because it wasn’t as reliant on green screens.

“12 Years a Slave” was awarded Best Picture, which meant I continued my four-years running streak of not having seen the film that won best picture before the awards.  Hopefully the DVD is coming soon.  Lupita Nyong’o was awarded Best Supporting actress for her role and left one hell of an impression.   It also was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay, which it probably deserved.  

I don’t recall hearing anything about “Dallas Buyer’s Club” when it was first released, but I am absolutely chomping at the bit to see it now.  Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey both won awards for their acting, and gave fairly memorable speeches as well.

I have a huge crush on Cate Blanchett, who won Best Actress for “Blue Jasmine”, but I’m probably not going to see it because I don’t really want to spend money on Woody Allen.  I do, however, think it’s unfair to criticize her for thanking Woody Allen in her speech, because, pervert or not, she wouldn’t have won that award (this year) if he hadn’t made the movie.   But what do I know?

“Her” was the only other movie I saw this year that won anything.  Spike Jonze very much deserved to win the award for Best Original Screenplay.  “Her” was my favorite among the films that I saw during award season.

I have every year since 2009 gone to see the animated and live action short films that are nominated for academy awards, and I’m almost always wrong about which ones will win.  I thought for sure that the Disney-made nostalgia trip that was “Get a Horse!” would win Best Animated Short Film, but instead it went to the French steampunk movie “Mr. Hublot”.  My favorite of the live action short films was “The Voorman Problem”, which was a clever and short comedy.  My least favorite was “Helium”, a movie about a creepy janitor who breaks into a children’s ward at the hospital and is sentimental (Not necessarily an objective plot summary).  That movie, naturally, won Best Live Action Short Film.

Meanwhile, “The Great Gatsby” has two academy awards while “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” both have none.  There is something wrong with the world.

I haven’t seen any of the other niche category films (foreign films, documentaries) this year, so I have nothing to comment on them.

I thought that Ellen DeGeneres was a competent host, and was reasonably funny when she needed to be, although some of the gags went on too long.  This seemed like a year where they really played it safe with the host, the production, and the theme (Heroes of Hollywood). 

One of the main reasons I keep watching this show is the annual In Memoriam segment, which this year seemed to be particularly rough.  Among the people honored this year were James Gandolfini (“The Sopranos”), Jim Kelly (“Enter the Dragon”), Peter O’Toole (“Lawrence of Arabia”), Shirley Temple (“Bright Eyes”), Harold Ramis (“Ghostbusters”) stop-motion effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, Elmore Leonard (one of my favorite authors), writer Richard Matheson and the one and only Roger Ebert.  It ended with the still painful image of Philip Seymour Hoffman. RIP.

That’s about all I have to say on that. We’ll see what lies ahead next year.

PS:  I’ve spent far too long agonizing about what I should do with this blog and trying to work up the desire to actually write something.  I’m going to try to just write about whatever comes to mind in an effort to get something out.  See you soon.

Hello!

Hi! I'm The Walrus. Goo Goo g'Joob.

I created this on a sort of a spur of the moment idea, so hopefully this will develop into something interesting. Anyway, my current goal is to share my thoughts on things I'm doing, and hopefully be fun and interesting about it.  I have a couple of things lined up so there'll be some actual content in the next few days.  At some point, I might even design this page to be nicer looking!

Until then, I am The Walrus, signing out.