Paolo wrote: Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:39 pm Dave confesses his sins! Independence Day? I never would have guessed.

LOL

INDEPENDENCE DAY is just so awful in so many ways.

First, even if I watch a few minutes of it depends on if I can take Randy Quaid's character.

Second, the absolutely idiotic attempt at Jewishness in it. I have too many Jewish friends I respect to say the words that truly trash that part of the plot. Another person who deserves to have his Jewish credentials beaten into bloody mush is Harvey Fierstein. What a cardboard pile of excrement.

Three, the cheesy and nonsensical argument between Pullman and Goldbloom characters. The world is being invaded and these two assholes are playing "Quien es has macho"?

Four, Brent Spiner deserves to burn in hell forever for that pile of ignorant, from hunger horseshoe performance.

I like the action parts and hate the exposition parts.

Vivid Fox is the only intelligent person in it...

You two both missed the whole point of one of the best Sifi comedies ever made. If you took it to be serious you missed the whole point of the movie. I loved this movie and watch it every 4th of July or there abouts, now go back and look at the cast again, there all noted for comedy, not serious drama.

Sometimes I wonder about you guys.

Now put on a new set of eyes and go watch it again and find all the laugh points as there are more then you can count. Add the laugh track and make some popcorn and enjoy one of the greatest movies made. It has so many bad one liners in the movie and you guys missed it. Or maybe you didn't lol, but really. It is such a good movie.

R

I didn't say that I didn't enjoy it. I still watch it on occasion and I laugh at most of it.

However, it hurts my eyes as they keep rolling to the ceiling at the sheer silliness of parts of the plot.

I view it as a "snack movie" comedy. Nothing more.

There are movies I watch for the same reason. Not to take them seriously.

I'm sure there are many I enjoy that others won't, and I'm not mentioning what I'm going through now critiquing.

To return to CHILDHOOD'S END...

Part One took its time to develop the story.

Karellen's reveal and his appearance in the book is a huge dramatic high at the end of "phase 1" is as startling as the opening sequence of the arrival of the aliens.

This is a story like Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS or Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES. It opens with little or no prologue and hit a high dramatic point immediately. "One Morning Gregor Samsa woke to find himself transformed into a giant insect" or "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero." Typically stories rise to a dramatic point but certain ones, do not. This is hard on the author because if Shakespeare had begun ROMEO AND JULIET with the phrase "The lover die" that play and subsequent story would fail.

So now we have a climax that opens and a second climax that closes Part one of the story.

Note #1: that in a rather odd and unusual bit of dialogue, Karellen says "You are not the first race we have helped" in response to Ricky Stormgren's question and request to reveal himself. IT wasn't a dodge or an evasion. It was an honest answer. Stormgren doesn't recognize it as such. It is, however, important to understand that the "Overlords" or "Supervisors" have done this before many times. The Aliens know what will happen if they reveal themselves too soon.

Note #2: Milo Roddicks delivers a monologue to a machine at the very beginning. The world around him is wasteland, nothing remains but ruins.

That is a reveal of a portion of the end of the story. Remember it.

There is a question, however...

Is Utopia the final destiny of mankind or is it more terrible a trap than near extinction?

What thrives in Utopia?

Would Beethoven's Ninth symphony ever be written in Utopia? Who would be the Hero of the Eroica?

Would Mahler's Second Symphony, his Fifth symphony?

Would Picasso have created GUERNICA or Michelangelo have painted the Last Supper in a Utopia?

After Episode 2 -- titled: THE DECEIVERS

And so the alien Overlords turn the world into Utopia. There are still disbelievers and people who don't trust their motives.

Noteworthy: Milo Roddicks opens the story once again but in the present (more or less) and he has become an astrophysicist and this is his last day at work trying to build a rocket to fly to the stars. The Aliens have shut that effort down.

Remember that Milo opened the entire story speaking from a destroyed earth. Milo was the little boy in the wheelchair, shot by a drug dealer and brought back to life, fully healthy and walking.

Rupert Boyce doesn't trust the aliens but he cooperates to spy and learn. He has sent pairs of animals and insects and fish to the Overlords. He asks for a rather strange and alien looking Ouija Board and gets it. He decides to have a party about it for reasons of learning.

Jake and Amy Greggson and their son Tom live in the new Utopia. One night, the alien spacecraft visits and Tom their son, begins having nightmares and fearful dreams. They get an invitation to Africa on the pretense of getting a job and meeting Karellen. They hesitate because Amy is pregnant again.

Peretta is a young lady who hasn't lost faith. She is a therapist who thinks to help Tom but fails. Something is happening to the young, to the children. She tries to gain Ricky Stormgren's trust. More on that later.

In Africa, Amy touches the strange alien ouija board and Karellen communicates with her unborn daughter. The fate of the world is accepted, sealed, and broadcast to the stars in a massive beam of light... Milo sees the alien images being blasted to the heavens and uses it to decipher where the home world of the Overlords is.

This sequence to be seen to be believed. It's stunning and brilliant.

After, Karellen brings a cure to Rocky Stormgren who is dying of something the alien spaceship did to him. At his farm, Ricky's wife confronts Karellen about their childlessness. Karellen is rather paternalistic in his answer. However, before all the fateful words can be said: Peretta confronts the great satanic figure standing before them and the deception is revealed. Peretta shoots Karellen and he dies. To say more is to spoil the climax of the story. The revelations include what is to come and almost why it has to be. There is much sorrow in Karellen and much hope at the same time.

And the episode ends with Baby Jennifer Greggson being born... "and a child shall lead them"

Peretta meeting her fate and it is the same fate as religion,

Plus much foreshadowing of the final episode -- The Children.

I wanted to add that Charles Dance plays an excellent Karellen.

The makeup people wanted to create the archetype demon and his makeup was extensive.

So they make him 8 feet tall by creating his legs from a stunt man on stilts. That's how he walks on cloven hooves and with retrograde ankles and funky knees. Filming requires keeping the camera in the right position and making sure that two men move identically so the CGI people can merge them into one creature.

They tried wings but that required two men per wing and having Charles Dance (who plays some character on Game of Thrones), his stilted stuntman, and four "wing" men all choreograph their movements at the same time, sort of... One try and it didn't work out. SO they had to CGI the wings into the image.

Charles Dance wore cyan colored tights for the blue/green screen effects guys to remove them.

And that is how to create a bipedal alien.

I'm not sure what to say about the final episode.

Mankind evolves and joins the Overmind. The realization that this is happening and then the actual event is shocking and heartbreaking.

There are several heartbreaking moments.

Ricky Stormgren never sees the end.

Milo Roddicks does see the alien's homeworld.

It is important to understand why Karellen and his people are Overlords and not part of the Overmind.

I see many discussions on the internet that haven't quite got a clue about what AC Clarke did in CHILDHOOD'S END.

Karellen is the saddest person in the universe and he is not Satan but he is Lucifer, the brightest angel in the heavens.

In AC Clarke's universe, every race of sentient beings will ultimately evolve into non-corporeal beings of thought. This has already happened and in some cases the result was disastrous. A world and race of beings can self destruct as it attempts the ascension to higher being. However, there were sufficient successes to form the Overmind. Contact with the Overmind at the time a race evolves into non-corporeal beings of thought isn't desirable. I don't know why off-hand. In a general sense it comes down to the question of how can mere mortals see the mind of God but that isn't altogether correct.

However, there is a one race or maybe two who cannot make that final step and evolve into non-corporeal beings of thought. In AC Clarke's universe, this is the race of Karellen and the Overlords. This race pledge to help all the other races of the Universe ascend into what they cannot.

So like all good children leave their parents when they grow up, the children of the human race, leave their parents behind and evolve into the substance of what might be called "god" in the broadest sense of the concept.

This is always painful for parents. When a child is born its parents have extravagant dreams of success for their child. Everything is possible. our newborns will be the next Einsteins, Mozarts, Clarke Gables, Lady Gaga's or U Thant, or Nelson Mandela, or Mother Theresa. Instead, As the child grows, he or she breaks the hearts of its parents by making choices. Most people live mundane lives. As bad as the pains of child rearing are, none of us would give it up.

But the Overlords cannot follow. They watch. They assist. They are faithful agents of the Overmind.

AC Clarke explains that every race of beings knows in the depths of their minds, in the tiny parts of their beings-- that the final step of evolution is into the Overmind. Deep inside we know that when the winged, red-skinned, horned-beasts appear, our lives are at an end in this world. We fear the unknown step and demonize it.

In the movie version, Karellen offers Ricky Stormgren a life with his first love in a fake hotel room. This is Karellen's justification of his own existence. His existence as the one who watches. The one who assists. The one who cannot follow but lives in the shadow of paradise. He is Lucifer, the brightest star of the heavens. A tragic figure. That is the life he offers Ricky Stormgren who in a very human act, returns to his current love to die in her arms.

This is pointed out a second time as Milo Roddicks delivers the last words from the changing earth before it is consumed in the evolution of man... Roddick's asks if "anyone else invented Cookie Dough Ice Cream?" And as a last request, Roddicks asks for something to be left behind. That music you hear is familiar to many -- Ralph Vaughan Williams THE LARK ASCENDING.

Listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b0rN43q6jo

And Karellen agrees. For all who pass this way, something is left of what was...