SummaryThe adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction novel where aliens called Overlords, led by its ambassador Karellen (Charles Dance), promise through human liaison Ricky Stormgren (Mike Vogel) technological advances for the planet.
SummaryThe adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction novel where aliens called Overlords, led by its ambassador Karellen (Charles Dance), promise through human liaison Ricky Stormgren (Mike Vogel) technological advances for the planet.
Ultimately, Childhood's End is a successful adaptation of a much-beloved novel that will satisfy fans and newcomers alike--wrapped nicely at both ends with colorful characters and effects, but faintly lacking a little something in the middle.
Childhood’s End is great enough that nitpicking feels unwarranted.... How Graham and company made such endearingly dour worldviews into a rollicking six hours of layered complexity and B-movie schlock is beyond me.
For all its running time over three consecutive nights, Childhood’s End leaves a sense of a story not quite told--the result, largely, of the fact that it deals so much in large themes and generalities and provides so little of character and detail. Even so, it’s entirely compelling drama, with a uniformly fine cast and dazzling special effects.
Like a deluxe edition of The Twilight Zone, with echoes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Children of the Damned and even Rosemary's Baby in its sprawling and (at first) quietly sinister narrative, this fable reminds us that something looks too good to be true, it usually is. [7-20 Dec 2015, p.17]
At times the production can seem underbudgeted, the direction overwrought. Here and there, the dialogue sounds as if it had been written by an alien who picked up English from broadcasts of B-pictures. As the series' resident alien, Charles Dance--both as a disembodied and later an elaborately embodied, commanding voice--gets the best of this business.
Syfy’s adaptation plays with Clarke’s plot and themes but does so in such a leaden, DOA way that it’s almost like a grade-school paper from someone who didn’t read the assignment.