Let's note the positive things first: the Rose Center is worth a visit if only to take in its spectacular new public space. The dramatic sphere-within-a-cube somehow integrates with its venerable parent institution, the American Museum of Natural History, while also managing to stand apart as a sensational new addition to New York's Upper West Side. This integration works both outside—where the new glass cube jazzes up the museum's somewhat dowdy exterior—and inside, where traffic flows from the Rose Center into the museum's familiar exhibits (Space Show tickets include admission to the museum as well).

Much has been made of the new Zeiss "Mark IX Star Projector" and the high quality of the new planetarium's "virtual reality" tour of the universe, and we found some of this praise to be warranted—visually, the Space Show is extremely impressive. This is true regardless of where one sits in the sphere's capacious auditorium—every view is an ideal one, free of city lights.

That said, though, the show is a disappointment. The primary reason: it is simply too damned short, at twenty minutes or so. The subject matter deserves more, and the audience expects it—there was a palpable letdown when the show ended, after our rather abrupt return to Earth's vicinity via a by-now stereotypical trip through a black hole. Tom Hanks' narration is decent, although the script is somewhat superficial, but the show—dubbed "Passport to the Universe"—has a hokey, gimmicky flavor. At the beginning, for example, the Star Projector rises from the auditorium floor in a cloud of swirling, atmospheric smoke, and Hanks reminds us, in closing, of Carl Sagan's observation that we are all—because our bodies share chemical elements with the stars—"star stuff."

The Rose Center and its Space Show are trying to do something important, though, in helping people to understand and "appreciate" the scale of the known universe, and in this they owe a major (unacknowledged, as far as we could tell) debt to Charles and Ray Eames' wonderful, astonishing film, Powers of Ten. The ramp down from the sphere's auditorium takes many pages from this pioneering examination of scale, and so does the show itself, from the very first scene, zooming out from Manhattan (instead of the Eames' Chicago).

There is a secondary show (far briefer still) in a smaller space within the Rose Center sphere; this show is dedicated to the Big Bang. Here, the show's brevity is downright painful, particularly so in light of Jodi Foster's flat narration—we simply don't have the technology, or the knowledge, to convincingly recreate the birth of the universe.

Our criticism notwithstanding, the Rose Center is worth braving the crowds to see. We suspect future visits will be more rewarding, though, after those crowds have thinned a bit.

(Reviewed May 28, 2000)