Cocoon - Review

For the USA, Ron Howard is a national treasure. For the rest of the world, he’s an absolute crowd-pleaser: films like Splash have marked him out as a master of light entertainment, while Apollo 13 had the awards klaxon calling. This success has been thanks in no small part to his level of filmmaking craft, and a sensibility for creating images that linger in pop culture. Like his contemporary Robert Zemeckis, he can take a familiar subject and breathe fresh perspective into it. In Cocoon, the question of old age is given a supernatural spin – but the 1985 film film simply lacks the storytelling chops to lift it to the classic heights it needs.