not good

The story was based on an all but universally recognized science fiction classic by Arthur C. Clarke. It's reasonable to criticize the show, which in my opinion had it's good and bad points.

And we all have the occasional classic we don't see as deserving of it's general praise. But attacking the basic premise of CE almost comes across like saying Brave New World was stupid.

Im sorry for slaughtering your sacred cow I apologize this program was a masterpiece

what a sad waste this was. In the book, the reason that Karellan looks as he does presents a very fascinating point to contemplate and it was scarcely alluded to in the film and most people did not notice or get it because it was so badly done - poor writing, poor direction, poor acting and poor editing. I don't think the filmmakers understood what that point was. There had been contact in the far far far past and because it was not done well - repeatedly the point is made that Karellan learned his lesson from that failed experience and made a lot of choices this time to avoid failure, humanity retained its innate fear of that appearance and carried it forward. And that that appearance was associated with the idea of the end of humanity; and that is where concepts of devils, hell, etc came from and that people wanted to avoid at all costs. We created the look of devils based on those ancient experiences and that actually, because buried within us was that pre-knowledge, we gave the that specific look to things we feared and named it devils.

And the book explains that the "overlords" had nothing to do with the eventual change in humanity. Mankind was simply following its own nature of evolution and the overlords came to prevent nuclear catastrophe so that humanity could continue its development. Everything that happened was already within humanity's potential. The film makes it seem that the overlords were responsible. They were not.

In the book, the Greggson's children were simply the first to be different, they were NOT the "leaders" in any way, nor did they cause the changes. Nothing in this film showed the wonders of the travels that they children took throughout the universe and how/why they were becoming one with a "higher consciousness" and joining a larger community in the cosmos. Everything was shown in a negative light and that the kids were acting like mean-spirited automatons, which they were not in the book.

The script was so lightweight that it avoided explanations of deeper issues and focused on mundane, trivial, self-centered and short-term matters.