The Kim Newman Archive: Cocoon: The Return [1988]

Those old-timers who got taken up into space to live happily ever after without illness, war and poverty are back, and immediately you're wishing they'd go away again as soon as possible. There are five or six plots to follow, none of them interesting. Miseryguts Jack Gilford is being persuaded to romance leotarded widow Elaine Stritch. Wilford Brimley is teaching his grandson not to be a putz at baseball. Oceanographer Courtney Cox has found an alien on the seabed and doesn't want to give it to the Air Force. Hume Cronyn is dying of leukaemia. Jessica Tandy gets hit by a car. Don Ameche and Gwen Verdon are going to have a baby. Alien Tahnee Welch wants to get back together with Steve Guttenberg to sling special effects around a French restaurant in lieu of sex. And Maureen Stapleton doesn't seem to have had a part written for her.

Directed drearily by Daniel Petrie, replacing Ron Howard, this is even more mawkish, anodyne, boring and wasteful than the not very inspiring original movie. Okay, so you don't expect much from Guttenberg, Welch or Stritch, but the rest of the cast are first-raters and it's genuinely depressing to watch them stuck with some of the most glutinous dialogue in recent memory. On balance, I think I hated the scenes with Stritch and Gilford moaning at each other more than anything else, but the a-man's-gotta-play-baseball sequences run a close second. The science fiction aspects are laughably stupid, with a race-against-time-to-save-the-exploited-alien plot that everybody forgets in order to get on with their geriatric soap opera. Buy the big band score album, and stay at home.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: City Limits [issue unknown]

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