These movies might not have been a good idea to review.
Cocoon (Ron Howard, 1985)
Released in 1985, Cocoon was Ron Howard’s first film after he hit it big with Splash the previous year.
Basically The Exotic Marigold Hotel for stars of Old Hollywood, Cocoon is a sweet, simple little movie that offers the likes of Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn and Wilford Brimley a chance at centre stage.
Ameche was considered a lightweight heartthrob in his day (despite strong performances in the likes of Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait), and Cocoon cemented his comeback after his great double-act with Ralph Bellamy as the scheming tycoons in Trading Places (John Landis, 1983).
Hume Cronyn, one of the great character actors, had been delivering great performances going back to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). His on- and offscreen wife, Jessica Tandy, had played Blanche in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and would go on to experience her own late-bloom resurgence with Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989).
The main star is Steve Guttenberg. Fresh off Police Academy, Cocoon helped him consolidate his run as an 80s leading man. His everyman hero feels like a studio note - an add-on to appeal to a younger audience. While he is an entry point for the audience, there has always been something a little pointless about his subplot.
The story is relatively simple — a group of people living at an old folks home get a second chance at youth when they sneak into the neighbouring property for a swim and find that the new owners have filled the pool with the cocoons of the title — the cocoons contain aliens who have been in hibernation — the neighbours, led by Brian Dennehy, are of the same species, and have come to Earth to retrieve their brethren.
Eventually the secret spills out to the rest of the retired community and they all get into the pool. With so many bodies, the cocoons’ energy is drained and the sleeping aliens die.
Their mission having failed, the aliens prepare to leave. The movie ends with the old people joining the aliens on their return home...
This movie should be silly and mawkish — it should be completely and utterly ridiculous. And it is.
But it is also a testament to good casting and Ron Howard’s unironic approach to the material. In terms of drama, Cocoon is fairly light, considering the sci fi trappings and special effects. In this respect it is closer to ET, in that it is based around relationships between benevolent aliens and a small group of humans sympathetic to their cause.
While it is not straight-out classic, the focus on the relationships of these characters, and how they deal with age, makes it stand out from other major studio sci fi fare.
Cocoon: The Return (Daniel Pertrie, 1988)
After the cocoons’ resting place is disturbed, the aliens have returned to secure their sleeping brethren. Our octogenarian heroes hitch a ride back to re-connect with their old lives.
Complications soon arise when one of the cocoons is discovered by a government laboratory. While the aliens try to figure out how to save the captive, their elderly friends begin to lose the vitality their extra-terrestrial sojourn has granted them, and they forced to reckon with their own mortality (again).
Released three years later, Cocoon: The Return is a prime example of a redundant sequel.
Cocoon is a small, simple story built on a simple premise that can really only work for one story. Bringing back most of the original cast, Cocoon: The Return undoes the story of the original and runs through variations of scenes from the first movie, without adding anything that new or interesting.
Cocoon 2 adds its own version of ET’s military alien hunters, but it never comes off like a genuine threat. Possibly, the filmmakers felt that a subplot about scientists experimenting on the cocoons was too dark. Certainly, the sequences in the lab feel a little jarring.
The one scene that feels genuine and hits the same emotional high as the original is Hume Cronyn’s final scene - it helps that Cronyn is playing opposite his real-life spouse. There is an emotion and verisimilitude that the rest of this movie cannot match
In the end, while never actively terrible, Cocoon: The Return is a rote, copycat sequel that never justifies its existence. Stick with the original.
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