Childhood's End
Season 1 Premiere:
Dec 14, 2015
Metascore
Generally Favorable
61
User score
Mixed or Average
5.7
My Score
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Metascore
Generally Favorable
61
47% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
47% Mixed
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
5% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Dec 15, 2015
83
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.
Dec 10, 2015
80
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.
Dec 10, 2015
70
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.
Dec 9, 2015
60
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]
Dec 14, 2015
50
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.
Dec 11, 2015
50
Childhood's End is more thought-provoking than many Syfy miniseries of the recent past even as it stumbles through plot holes.
Dec 10, 2015
30
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.
User score
Mixed or Average
5.7
54% Positive
43 Ratings
43 Ratings
18% Mixed
14 Ratings
14 Ratings
28% Negative
22 Ratings
22 Ratings
Oct 14, 2023
2
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.
Dec 30, 2020
2
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.
Production Company:
- Universal Cable Productions
Initial Release Date:Dec 14, 2015
Number of seasons:1 Season
Rating:TV-PG
Awards
Critics Choice Television Awards
• 1 Nomination
Visual Effects Society Awards
• 1 Nomination
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
• 1 Nomination
