Cosmic Dawn (2022)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, what a terrible film. I don’t expect other people’s reaction to Cosmic Dawn to be quite as negative as mine, but it just happens to push a few of my buttons. For one thing, I’ll remind everyone again about the inverse relationship between serious SF fans and paranormal credulity – one of the reasons why SF fans enjoy the genre is that they know fully well the distinction between reality and woo-woo: It’s hard to find more skeptics than those in attendance at a Science Fiction conference. So, when you’ve got something like Cosmic Dawn merrily making a film about alien abduction that clearly believes in alien abduction (as writer-director Jefferson Moneo affirms in the film’s promotional material), there’s little space for dramatic tension. But that stance could have been excused had it led to something more gripping in its execution. Alas, it takes the patience of a saint (or a true believer) to sit through Cosmic Dawn’s purple-tinged duration, whether it’s an endless prologue about a girl whose mother gets abducted, repetitive scenes of weirdness in a cult housed in northern Ontario, or an overdone ending that has no surprises whatsoever. I did like a few things – most notably the idea of a used bookstore run by Emmanuelle Chriqui. But in many ways, I see in Cosmic Dawn an unimaginative deployment of several low-budget Science Fiction film clichés – weird visuals without coherence, fake-ambivalent plot developments that merely prolong a foreordained ending, a pretentious tone that is absolutely not justified by its content, “clever” twists that don’t hold up to closer scrutiny, and half-baked ideas offered as meditative. Cosmic Dawn is obnoxious when it’s not being boring, and a disappointment when it doesn’t lead to anything.