Hacker Cinema
Childhood's End
2015 · TV series · 85 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Matthew Graham
The peaceful alien invasion of Earth by the mysterious “Overlords,” whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.
2 positive1 negative4 neutralfrom 7 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
7 comments on Hacker News
Agree it seems odd. One thing the children in my life are NOT lacking is random interests. Sports books are a great avenue and often highly accessible for younger readers. Pretty much any hobby/niche interest has books that are suitable. Kid likes animals? Give them 'The Soul of an Octopus'. Kid likes scifi movies? Give em 'Childhood's End'. Its really not a challenge when you know them well.
Colossus, the film, was based on the first book in a trilogy.
It seems that by the Act III mankind does indeed prefer the benevolent guidance of Colossus.
Like the aliens that arrive in "Childhood's End", I sort of look forward to our AI overlords. (Looks over at war in Israel.) We seem incapable of managing ourselves.
>I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End_(miniseries)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End
I'm going to be Pollyanna and say that we might be at the cusp of a golden age of sci-fi adaptations. For decades people said that Dune was unfilmable and then Villeneuve went and done it and made it look easy, even conventional. (I actually have some additional thoughts on that- it could have been a little bit longer for greater exposition and characterization, and more weird.) So this should mean that any classic work of sci-fi should get some consideration. We're at a time in the industry where both visual effects and audiences (with the mainstreaming of nerd culture) are ready for such media.
That's not to say these adaptations will be good, but they're certainly filmable. Neuromancer gets a lot of cachet, but other IPs have been attempted already. Villeneuve successfully made a good Blade Runner sequel. Live-action Ghost in the Shell happened- it was execrable and wrapped up in controversy, but it still got made and the neon-soaked setting looked decent. They made a fourth Matrix. Stepping away from cyberpunk, Childhood's End got a miniseries. The Expanse got a full show.
So I doubt that there's anything inherently more difficult about Gibson's novels. If anything, the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Edgerunners anime has primed the public for '80s retrofuturistic cyberpunk, so they can choose to adapt this as a period piece if they wanted to, without "modernizing" its futuristic conceits. No need to add smartphones.
Call me when they start adapting John Brunner '60s new wave sci-fi. Now that would be a hard sell.
It's probably the Makoto Shinkai film the other guy posted but another book that uses time dilation is The Forever War. And there's the classic Childhood's End.
It's actually based on "The Sentinel". The short story is more or less the starting point for 2001.
Rendezvous with Rama would be an AMAZING movie. I only hope SyFy doesn't get to do to it what it did with Childhood's End.
Honestly I'm excited. 3001 was an interesting book, albeit very short.
So far we're getting a Childhood's End TV miniseries, and a 3001 movie. How long until we Rendezvous with Rama movie? I really would like to see that.