I'm sure some of these threads will get picked up in the days ahead...
Twin Towers? Check.
Siren? Check.
Ron Howard's 1985 Cocoon followed hot on the heels of his 1984 commercial breakthrough as a director, Splash. That film told the story of a mermaid who takes human form and takes up with a bachelor played by Tom Hanks. The film ends with the couple swimming to Atlantis.
In this regard, Cocoon can be even seen as a sequel to Splash, since the story revolves around an alien rescue operation of hibernation pods from the ruins of Atlantis. A lot of the extraterrestrial theorizing having to do with Atlantis has revolved around Sirius - associated with water and flooding itself - but the aliens in Cocoon don't hail from Sirius.
Rather, the aliens hail from Antares, a star known as "the Heart of Scorpius" (15ยบ west of Galactic Center) whose name means "Opposed to Mars." That connection is especially tantalizing, given some of the Atlantis/Mars connections we discussed in the livestream.
In ancient Egyptian astronomy, the star Antares was associated with the scorpion goddess Serket, representing her in the night sky and marking the dawn from her temples during the autumn equinox between 3700-3500 BC. Temples were often aligned with this red star's rising, which is linked to the scorpion goddess, a protector against stings.
As you probably know, Ron Howard is a major power player in Hollywood and his films have featured multiple esoteric thrulines, both hidden and overt (such as his Dan Brown adaptions like The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons).
With Cocoon, Howard wandered directly into ancient astronaut territory, even though the film doesn't make a big deal of it like so many other directors have. Part of that might be the fact that's it not a franchise film with need for a mytharc, but it also may be that Howard travels in circles that take AAT and the rest of it for granted.
Either way, there's a whole host of memes very familiar to regular Secret Sun readers in the film, so let's first dispense with the plot first...
