Touches You

One of my all time favorites.

I'll tell you why so serious

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I only needed to watch the trailer to know this film is not worth watching. The book is amazing. Read that instead.

The beginning is pretty good as the alien invasion is visually quite impressive. But then the talking begins and goes on and on and on without saying anything. And then it goes on some more.SciFy took a 225 page paperback and blew it up into a three-part, five and a half hour miniseries. Heavy portentous music plays throughout letting us know something BIG is about to happen. But it's not until nearly 4 hours in before anything does.Whether you think the ending is profound or jejune will depend upon your worldview. For me, it just showed the utter emptiness facing mankind without a Creator who loves and sustains them...

The first of 3 discs was spot on--crisp, engaging, well produced and compelling. Truly promising with wonderful special effects. All of a sudden, as if the flush lever were hit, disc 2 swirls into nonsense and turgid drama, descending rapidly through disc 3. The story gets absolutely derailed with Hallmark moments and sappy "love" strewn about like cars from a massive train derailment. The mawkish teacle swirls into strident emotionalism, drawn out sentiment, pointless dialogue, and continuity disasters. Many of the cast are just plain annoying, especially Jennifer's mother, whose tremulous delivery was uncomfortably vulnerable and fragile to me. The series swaggers drunkenly from cloying to banal, from shock to boredom with plenty of nonsense thrown in. (The Devil visually is really amazing, though, despite an emotionally constipated demeanor.)

The production was remarkably true to the book, which like the first-cited reviewer I read almost a half-century ago and dearly love, except in one respect - no doubt with understandable but not forgivable artistic license, the scriptwriter in the final episode removed the dignity and eventual acceptance of the evolutionary process of the 'remaindered' humans and thus allowed the separation scenes to become - doubtless televisually attractive - those of panic and distress, at odds with Clarke's view of humanity as expressed by Karellen - that they were worth the effort. After all, the Overlords had the job of 'midwives to this process, but we ourselves are barren': they had the greatest respect, as did the writer, for their charges, who eventually deserved it.