Childhood's End (2015)

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

As a sci-fi enjoyer I was suprised that I have never heard about this. Now that I have seen the first 30 minutes I understand why. The CGI looks cheap, dialog is atrocious, why because between every sentence there is a solid 3 seconds pause. It's like "What happend to you?" [two people staring at each other], [zoom on the guys face] [return back to the previous sceen], [sunshine bloking half of the screen, blinding anybody who tried to watch this show at night], "I don't know". It's almost like if they had 30 minutes of dialog an had to stretch it to fit the 90 minutes. Obviously every scene without a dialog suffers from the same problem. Example: a random definitely crazy mother holds her crying baby, of course we have to zoom onto the baby's face to confirm yes indeed it is a baby. The same scene is then repeated 2 minutes later... This is not a show for normal viewers and I struggle to believe it's for the critics, since there is not enough virtue signalling.

One of the worst book adaptations ever. If you read the book stay away from this garbage. If you didn't read the books it is probably a mediocre sci-fi miniseries.