Childhood's End

The disturbing alien plot unfurls through a wondrous, hours-long act of dramatic magic that draws together elements from ancient religions and modern science. This is heady stuff--but it's relayed with such intensity it'll sweep you along. The last act is a gut punch.

It’s been brought into the present (Clarke’s jumping-off point was the Cold War space race), but the depth and ambition are still there.

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.

Childhood’s End is great looking, with impressive special effects. It’s also extremely slow, at least in the two hours previewed, and none of the characters is especially engaging.... But with just six hours (4.5 minus commercials) start to finish and dark clouds looming before Night 2, the miniseries could be just the antidote viewers need to counter Christmas sugar and spice.

Graham has updated the story pretty well, while overstuffing it a bit. Nevertheless, the miniseries keeps the novelist’s questions about mankind’s destiny percolating throughout and never really lets you lose interest.

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.

The premiere prologue gives away too much, and the mini’s pacing­ drags at times.... It’s a tale that never gets old.

There are too many characters, too many points of view, all subservient to big ideas that don’t even begin to come into focus until late in the second part--just as the unwieldy story starts to go out of focus.

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]

The miniseries is certainly watchable, and the experiment represents a valiant effort. But in TV terms, Childhood’s End ultimately feels trapped between worlds--a program that’s alternately oversimplified and perhaps a bit too evolved for its own good.

There’s a certain loss of dramatic tension that comes with any direct translation of twists from an original work, but it’s heightened here--especially because the adaptation is a victim of the source material’s success.

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.

The miniseries’ balance between individual narratives and humanity’s collective destiny remains a bit wobbly throughout.

The opening night of this three-part miniseries sets up a standard genre premise: Aliens contact Earth.... These productions [The Expanse and Childhood’s End] suggest there’s now more to Syfy than Sharknado sequels, so that’s encouraging.

Childhood's End is more thought-provoking than many Syfy miniseries of the recent past even as it stumbles through plot holes.

When it's up and running at full power, Childhood's End is as intriguing, provocative and unnerving as any visit to the "fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man." And there are many such stretches in these six hours. Yet there also are slow, padded, uninvolving stretches when the direction and dialogue wander off course. Ragged in structure and pacing, the miniseries is a slick-looking vehicle that occasionally stalls and sputters toward an uncertain future.

Even in its special effects, Childhood’s End looks chintzy and unimaginative.