A melodramatic struggle

FILM: Childhood’s End (TV miniseries)CAST: Mike Vogel, Charles Dance, Osy Ikhile, Daisy Betts, DIRECTION: Nick HurranArthur C Clarke’s 1953 novel of transcendent evolution, Childhood’s End, leaps to life in Syfy’s television adaptation.Adapted by Matthew Graham, who created the great fantasy procedural Life on Mars, Childhood’s End, which is four hours long, begins with the arrival of an extraterrestrial force. Stationed unseen in big ships above the world’s big cities, it promises to take the world from war to peace, to end inequality and injustice and to do something about the weather everyone else just talks about. Whether we like it or not. You know the drill.On the page, Clarke’s tale does not exactly scream, “Adapt me!” It’s short on dimensional characters and dramatic action; indeed, it’s in large part a story of things happening slowly over a long time. (And as an antique work of speculative fiction, it’s inescapably quaint in parts.) Stanley Kubrick wanted to film it — in the end, he and Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, which repurposes some of the novel’s themes — and its air of detachment does suit his cool, intellectual style. But it’s not the stuff of which television miniseries are made.The film follows the shape of the novel, while altering the particulars to create a through line and make the show more overtly emotive than the book. New business is created; characters are transformed, as when the novel’s ambassador to the aliens, UN secretary general Rikki Stormgren, is made over into the series’ Ricky Stormgren (Mike Vogel), American farmer, chosen for his peerless people skills. There is no sense to it — he’s not all that charismatic — but it satisfies our liking for an average Joe at the centre of things.As in the original, there’s discussion of what happens to creative striving when people become the pet hamsters of a far superior intelligence. But where the novel has a quasi-mystical bent, looking toward something beyond our dramatic constructions of good and bad, happy and sad, the miniseries leans toward a more conventional, muscular, melodramatic struggle to preserve the human status quo, for better or worse.At times the production can seem under-budgeted, the direction overwrought. Here and there, the dialogue sounds as if it had been written by an alien who picked up English from broadcasts of B-pictures. (“This is not about us; this is about the whole damn world.” “You’re my whole damn world.” Or: “I don’t know about you, Paul, but these guys don’t give the warm fuzzies.”) As the series’ resident alien, Charles Dance — both as a disembodied and later an elaborately embodied, commanding voice — gets the best of this business. -Los Angeles Times/TNSHarrowing mother-son tragedy By Michael PhillipsFILM: RoomCAST: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Sean Bridgers, Wendy CrewsonDIRECTION: Lenny AbrahamsonMuch of the effectiveness of Room — and it’s very effective — depends on not knowing every narrative turnabout in advance. The premise is simple and brutally confining. A young woman known only as “Ma”, played by an unerringly true Brie Larson, lives with her five-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay, astonishingly just as good as Larson). She is a valiant and rigorous mother: playful, inventive, a believer in routines, good oral hygiene and a limited amount of TV-watching time.Ordinary people living ordinary lives, from the sound of it. Yet theirs are being lived inside a 10-by-10-foot garden shed, equipped with a tub, a sink, a skylight, a bed, a closet and a toaster oven. “Ma”, we learn early on in Room, was abducted as a high schooler by a man known only as Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). Raped systematically over several years, the prisoner gave birth to a boy who does not know the identity of his father.For a time, we watch in a state of dread and wonder. Jack’s notions of reality and fantasy are entirely his own. The universe, as far as he knows, belongs only to the place he calls Room. At the start of director Lenny Abrahamson’s film, based on the 2010 Emma Donoghue novel, the boy bids hello to the objects of his life (“Good morning, clock”). The film is divided into halves. Once Ma fashions an escape plan for Jack, we’re hit, abruptly, with life outside Room, which is hugely disorienting for both mother and son.Joan Allen is superb as Ma’s mother, whose mind is a tangle of guilt, gratitude, anger and longing for peace for her daughter and grandson. William H Macy, as the Larson character’s father, offers a portrait in inchoate grief; Tom McCamus is drolly understated as Ma’s empathetic father figure, her mother’s new man.The second half is no less intriguing than the first, though certain elements of both script and direction are worth debating. Some are small details, but important ones. Why, for example, did director Abrahamson stage the crucial sequence with Jack in the back of a pickup truck so clumsily, risking logic and credibility?The larger issue, I think, is one of finding a tone for Room that is honest and love-filled yet not sappy. If Abrahamson’s film had another 10 minutes to it, those 10 minutes would’ve fruitfully been used to finesse Ma’s hitting bottom in the later scenes, before she and Jack come back up again. As is, the recovery feels too easy, too upbeat, for what Donoghue’s characters have endured.Donoghue took inspiration from a particularly grim news story, that of the infamous Josef Fritzl case of abduction, enslavement and worse in modern-day Austria. Room goes its own way, in a state of poetic realism that can break your heart. Certainly Larson and Tremblay do so, and (thank God) without treating their scenes as opportunities for emotional ravagement. The parent/child relationship at the movie’s core is endlessly fascinating. And in the key scene between Larson and Allen, when the shock gives way to old recriminations, the movie reminds us that stories such as these can never end in the middle. -Chicago Tribune/TNSCyberstalking horrorFILM: RatterCAST: Ashley Benson, Karl Glusman, Matt McGorry, Michael William Freeman, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Kaili VernoffDIRECTION: Branden KramerIn this cyberstalking horror, Emma (Ashley Benson) is looking forward to starting grad school in Manhattan, but her joy over relocating to the big city is soon chilled by the realisation that a nameless hacker has taken over every digital device in her possession and is spying on her every move.What makes Ratter fascinating is how its story is told. Because the stalker has access to an entire network of devices, the viewers are privy to some interesting angles that lead the eyes and setup unique vantage points into Emma’s life. It’s this technique that changes Ratter from a found footage film into a more conventionally shot one as the stalker acts as a pseudo cinematographer, always looking for the best angle instead of being locked into one or two rotating cameras. Though it doesn’t always work. There are some odd viewpoints where no cameras should be that leaves one a bit bewildered but overall it works more than it distracts.As the narrative progresses both the tone and the visuals get darker.Ashley Benson is convincing as Emma. – RNDVDs courtesy:  Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha