Critic Reviews

Will Smith added little to my enjoyment and became a high energy annoyance. I lead this review with my frustration with Will Smith--David Attenborough for the Mountain Dew Generation--because otherwise One Strange Rock is frequently spectacular, delivering the same sort of bringing-science-to-life thrills for Earth as Cosmos did with the universe and Blue Planet and Planet Earth have done with myriad lifeforms.

You might come to One Strange Rock for its host, Philadelphia’s Will Smith, but you’ll stay for the astronauts. ... The visuals in One Strange Rock, are beautiful, occasionally strange, sometimes even otherworldly. Rock’s true stars, though, are people like Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station.

One Strange Rock has its heart in the right place. Does it have a head? This is a nonstop parade of vibrant images, a “visual learning” attention-deficit assault.

One Strange Rock ultimately has an identity crisis in what it wants to cover and how, and it ends up as a mishmash of stories, scripted vignettes, aerial footage, and conjecture.