MovieChat Forums > Childhood's End (2015) Discussion > I cannot addequetly express the depth of...

I cannot addequetly express the depth of my hatred for this

posted 9 years ago by siaryl
27 replies | jump to latest

Dark movies and tv shows have their place, and I can sometimes even enjoy them.
But this was like a 4 and 1/2 hour meditation on predestination and oblivion, it served no purpose whatesoever accept as an ALMOST-documentary of humanities extinction and even that....with a whimper and not a bang...so it cannot even be called entertaining by those standards.

Excepting the actors, everyone involved with making this should be burned alive, they obviously have nothing left to contribute to this world.

And the parents getting all suicidal...are you kidding me...(pun intended), sure maybe 1 in 50 or 1 in 500, but all of them suddenly lose all sense of self-preservation....hahahahahahaha...

I don't have kids and probably never will.
I don't hate them, but I could go on all my life never seeing another one again and I wouldn't die of sadness.....what about those people, the childless...

And the devil looking people.....when Karrellen revealed himself I was like WOW....they could have taken that concept and it could have gone in about a billion different directions, all fascinating and exciting and instead we get this documentary like funeral procession into oblivion of humanity, even the scientist in the end does nothing with his life but surrender it...pointless.

This is by far the greatest (and I am not being hyperbolic) dissapointment for a TV movie I have ever watched...I thought they would go somewhere interesting with it up until the end of the 2nd part in the 3 peice, and then they do nothing but run out the time until the producers cash their checks......F#CK YOU ALL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Only 2 books have I ever thrown to ground because I could not believe what I was reading, one book about half way through and another at the end....there was just something fundamentally wrong in it I could not articulate, only emote in an aggressive refusal to accept what I had been dealt....and if this had been a book, it would be my 3rd, I think I would tear this one up, the spit on it, then get some gasoline, and have my first official book burning, then for the first time in my life, I would write a letter to the author and wish him a long slow death by anal cancer....the kind that gradually destroys any sense of human dignity and makes us wish the world would end...

I hate this, I will always hate this.....in my last moments of life after I have reflected on all the good things in my life, I will save a moment to come back to this and hate on it for a minute and hope that all the people that made it happen had lives of incomprehensible misery and never recovered from the shame that their families felt at being associated with them...

I hate it that much.
And I'd like to shout out a last but least bit of hatred for SyFy for this attrocity....I hope your channel dies and all of the execs go bankrupt....you imponderable scum.......

[–] objviewer 9 years ago

So you didn't like it?

[–] MELlSANDRE 9 years ago

:D 

I do not have Attention Deficit Disor ... Ooooh, look at the bunny!

[–] capcanuk 9 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and presume that you are really taking this far too seriously.

It's an excellent adaptation of a difficult book to adapt, and a book that is considered one of the seminal pieces of sci-fi literature and one of the greatest sci-fi books ever written.

So you hated it. I'm really sorry to hear that. Really. It happens, there are lots of good things that I've been unable to appreciate... I loathe Mahler, and yet, I understand that Mahler is pure genius. It simply doesn't speak to me.

I'm not saying that this mini-series was genius, but your complaints appear to be more with the actual source material rather than with the adaptation itself.

I suspect that there are a lot of issues in the story that may have flown right by you, from your comments. It really appears as though a large part of the story escaped your grasp, and I guess this is a legitimate criticism of the material: it may not be quite so easy to grasp the full meaning of it at first glance. Ergo the book has been considered one of the more difficult to adapt to film.

Again, I'm really sorry you didn't like it.

But I loved it, and for me it was a 10/10.
I walked away from that last episode with my heart pounding and my eyes full of tears.

[–] lynxx55 9 years ago

Nevertheless, the plot was incomprehensible and boring. Save your tears for something better.

[–] chinaglenn 9 years ago

I am a very casul watcher of Sci-Fi, and this series piqued my interest, as I never read the book (dislike reading fiction, good enough make a movie!) I thought it was Ok. Since I never read the story, what kept me going was how Kerellen and his race were going to turn on humanity, after creating a Utopia for them. I was thinking more on the lines of that Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man".

The Devils and the Overmind turned on the humans by stealing the kids, and causing them not to reproduce. Was that evil or the naturla evolution of things, since on this Universe, the Overmind is basically God. I thought it was an interesting story, and sad at the end that everyone else had to die and en blow up the Earth.

I liked it, you might now. Better to be baked and watch it, I did.

[–] capcanuk 9 years ago

if you think the Overlords and Overmind "turned on the humans and stole their children" then there's something fundamental about the story that you didn't understand.

[–] BenJeremy 9 years ago

You missed the point.... the psychic children weren't created by the overmind and the devils... they were already on their way as part of mankind's evolution. The "devils" came because the overmind wanted to at least make sure the children with god-like powers weren't raised in a war-like environment, so when they finally ascended to join the overmind, they didn't decide to be a destructive force in the universe.

Childhood's End.

It's kind of in the title.

It wasn't explained well enough in this series, they probably should have been more direct, but the clues lie in the way the Overlords observed the Greggson's children.

The whole hi-tech Ouija board thing didn't help. They could have changed the mechanism by which Milo discovers the Overlord's homeworld and saved a lot of confusion, likewise, the Earth isn't supposed to blow up like it did in the show (more like "winks out of existence in a flash of light" - which doesn't play as well on screen, I guess)

[–] Angie_MJ 9 years ago

I don't know if the book addressed it but was infertility a natural phenomenon? If all women had stopped getting pregnant that would be one thing, but in one scene, a woman who presumably was very far along completely lost her unborn child without the biological process of miscarriage (I'm basing this on absence of blood and stomach mass). Was that in the book? Also, karallel (sp?) explained to Rick and his wife that he inhibited their ability to conceive to save them from the pain of losing the child later. Having not read the book I pretty much knew they were taking the children at that point. But, I thought it odd that if that was his kind act to a 'friend' then it technically wasn't that special because they bestowed that upon everyone eventually to not reproduce beyond the current generation of children. I assume that was because the next generation would have been born under the stresses and conflicts created by the loss of their siblings and whatever conditions were created when the earth stopped spinning and vegetation starting dying out.

Lastly, is it addressed in the original piece that earth was always going to die at that point in time and in that way? Meaning the overlords did not cause the planet's destruction, they just harvested it for animals before it happened.

[–] Ronin-Trap 9 years ago

a book that is considered one of the seminal pieces of sci-fi literature and one of the greatest sci-fi books ever written.

Really? I find that hard to belief, not that I would contest it necessarily. Though hyperbole is strong with this one (OP, that is), I have to agree that the story was full of pointless fatalism and gross determinism. Not exactly traits I'd identify with what I have over the years believed to be Sci-fi classics. This felt much more like a religious movie then a sci-fi movie.

[–] Spongeyone 9 years ago

IIRC, the religious elements are mostly from the adaptation, not the book.

But all I really remember from reading the book decades ago is "aliens show up, super kids are born, they transcend and the Earth is destroyed"

Death to shakeycam directors!

[–] pleavenworth1492 9 years ago

If you hate it. Too bad.

[–] nikkiten1979 9 years ago

And the parents getting all suicidal...are you kidding me...(pun intended), sure maybe 1 in 50 or 1 in 500, but all of them suddenly lose all sense of self-preservation....hahahahahahaha...

I don't have kids and probably never will.
I don't hate them, but I could go on all my life never seeing another one again and I wouldn't die of sadness.....what about those people, the childless...

Well you are not a parents, so don't give a point of view of how parents would feel knowing they will never see their young children again. You have no experience on what types of emotions are involved when it comes to your children, never will since you never want to have children and have no love or empathy for them. You have zero qualification as a human being in this department.

Yeah the ending wasn't great, but the movie was still good even though a lot of pointlessness happened.

can't outrun your own shadow

[–] CaraBelubin 9 years ago

Good rant - 10/10. 

-------
sorry for bad spelling and grammars, english isn't my language

[–] Spongeyone 9 years ago

And the parents getting all suicidal

The parents got suicidal? When? You realize everyone would have been over 100 years old by the time he got back, right? They'd be dead of natural causes.

Death to shakeycam directors!

[–] TotheWatersandtheWild 9 years ago

I love the passion of this rant.

~
Once you choose hope, anything's possible -Christopher Reeve

[–] spocktom 9 years ago

Well your rant has elicited a lot of debate about the series and that's a good thing, imho.

For me the final ten minutes of the series was worth the entire wait through the show.

Milo's predicament, his choice and his stubborn refusal to allow humanity to pass quietly into oblivion really got to me...so much so that I was in tears. That Karellen understood Milo, his request and his striving to remain human was a great compliment to our brilliant but flawed species.

The choice that Milo made to represent humanity as beacon in the universe for ever more really floored me. The piece of music was written by Ralph Vaughn Williams. It is called "The Lark Ascending" and is a moving and truly beautiful homage to an earlier poem of the same name. If you know the poem and what it represents and what it says about humanity, about being alive and living within the great biosphere that is earth you will understand Milo's choice and the director's brilliance in choosing the piece.

[–] Fusion72 9 years ago

Take a bow, son. Apart from the doom & misery to Executives, I agree with what you wrote.

[–] Madeline5 9 years ago

Lastly, is it addressed in the original piece that earth was always going to die at that point in time and in that way? Meaning the overlords did not cause the planet's destruction, they just harvested it for animals before it happened.

I wish that this presentation had clarified the time line.

Did the aliens accelerate the process because they just happened to be in the neighborhood and it was more efficient?.."Oh, hey Fran, we happen to be in this galaxy/solar system, what say we scratch this particular task off our TO DO list now, no sense in returning 7000 years later using up "space gas" since we're here anyhow..."

Or, did they arrive at the exact time when the children were ready to evolve and drain the energy for their transformation etc...thus draining the earth's energy/destroying it--when it would have happened anyway, and they just want to harvest the evolving children before that happens?

Or was it because as Karellen said, earthlings were on the threshold of attaining the technology for inter-stellar travel (and more)...but still haven't evolved in controlling their tempers and biases and their tribal war-like nature, wasn't happening at the same time...so they showed up a bit earlier (how many millennia or centuries earlier?) to prevent earthlings from destroying themselves and the "Natural" evolution, so that they could procure the children beforehand?

Seems like the whole process was forced before its time in their interests (by whom? well, the aliens visa Overmind superior being--no matter the reason), since they were obviously able to know the future, right? any way you look at it...by the human evolutionary timeline, it happened before...it's time, and the Overlords accelerated the process.