It’s that measure of the commitment on every creative count here that makes COSMOS new again. So even more astonishing than having COSMOS appear on the inquisition thinking Fox network is hearing Tyson take off with all the power, and grace of CONTACT (let alone carrying aboard the touching innocence of Silvestri’s Oscar-nominated FORREST GUMP).

Sure “nature” documentaries have had lavish orchestral scores done for them, though most seem to have come from BBC’s shores. Truly scoring this COSMOS is the right decision, especially given a composer of Alan Silvestri’s caliber. It’s that music’s touching quality of intergalactic hope that now infuses COSMOS’ pretty terrific reboot, which places Sagan’s acolyte Neil deGrasse Tyson aboard a significantly souped-up spaceship OTM, whose new model’s cinematic aspirations are achieved by Silvestri’s music at all of its symphonically sweeping, big screen sci-fact majesty.įor the original COSMOS, Sagan innovatively chose such artists as Vangelis, Vivaldi and Goro Yamaguchi, a mix tape that mirrored the recordings for an album that’s still spinning somewhere in the great unknown with Voyager.

So it’s only natural that Silvestri now gets to board a spaceship of the imagination first piloted on TV 24 years ago by Carl Sagan, whose film adaptation of CONTACT ranks as one of the composer’s most awe-inspiring scores. Few composers have conjectured about weird science with Alan Silvestri’s sense of cosmic wonder, whether it’s been seeking alien life inhabiting our inner space in THE ABYSS, time travelling BACK TO THE FUTURE or talking with an intergalactic craft voiced by Pee-Wee Herman for FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR.

Cosmos a spacetime odyssey fox