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petrillijack1
Reviews
Childhood's End (2015)
Not true to the novel
Warning: contains spoilers.
This was a terrible adaptation of a classic novel.The directing was so bad that my wife who had never read the novel had a hard time following story despite the fact that she has a high IQ.
I can certainly understand that changes have to be made when you're creating a screenplay from a novel. What I can't understand is the rationale behind completely changing the dominant philosophy of the original novel.For those of you who have not read the novel, the screenwriters have needlessly demonized the overlords. The overlords were not responsible for changing the children. That was going to happen as a cataclysmic evolutionary event (Clark's words) whether the overlords came or not. They were merely following orders from the over mind not to allow this change to destroy humanity or damage the over mind.
The overlords did not sterilize anyone in the novel. They also did not cause the children to leave. The children left on their own volition.And it was the children who destroyed Earth in the end, not the overlords.
The overlords home planet did not look like hell.And no one in the novel hated the overlords. Most realized by the end that the overlords were merely safeguarding an evolutionary event, and were doing so under orders. In fact, sympathy was expressed for the overlords because they could not evolve in the way humanity was.
Finally, the movie's final message was a sad and bitter one: the end of humanity mostly aided by the overlords. In contrast, while the novel expresses a bit of sadness for the end of humanity, our evolutionary descendants are seen as joining a vast and powerful over mind which controls most of our galaxy.
I was so looking forward to this TV series and was so bitterly disappointed in it. And as someone else on this message board commented, there were far too many commercials. I understand that money has to be made but this should be balanced with some consideration for the viewer.
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Weird and unrealistic
Walking 9 miles in high heels and a tight dress after being in an accident is not realistic (Mulholland to Sunset). Dreaming a scenario and having it come true exactly as dreamed is not realistic. Dying from a heart attack when shocked is very unusual for a normal healthy male. Drinking an espresso and spitting it into a napkin because you don't like it is just plain stupid.
I just wish people would stop highly rating movies where characters act in weird and unusual ways. It's a cheap trick and very easy to do. It's also incredibly unimaginative. I could do it and so could you. It's much more difficult to have people behaving within the human norm and still keeping it symbolic or metaphoric. (The scene in "Saving Pvt. Ryan" comes to mind where the Jewish soldier is being killed by the SS soldier, and the gentile Upham does nothing about it when he could have saved the Jewish soldier. Realistic and brilliant in its metaphor of Nazis slaughtering Jews while the gentile world did nothing about it.)
These so-called artistic movies that depend heavily on weird-acting characters for their art are simply not art in my estimation. They rely on cheap tricks which are simple to come up with.