Giant Freakin Robot

Syfy is trying their level best to distance themselves from the schlock factory image they’ve had over the past few years. To list all of the ambitious titles they have in the works would take all day, but the network is developing a ton of projects that we’re totally psyched to see, and one of those that we’re most excited about is their adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Casting wise, they have a couple of pieces in place, but they just added a key player as Mike Vogel has been tapped to take the lead role.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the Under the Dome star has been cast to front the six-hour event miniseries based on Clarke’s classic 1953 novel about aliens coming to Earth. He joins Game of Thrones star Charles Dance on the call sheet, as well as Ashley Zuckerman of Manhattan and Osy Ikhile (Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea).

Nearly 50 years after its original theatrical release, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains both one of the best science fiction movies ever made, and one of the best movies ever made, full stop. The epic scope, the sense of wonder, the jaw-dropping visuals, all ensure that the film still holds up perfectly, even all these decades later. While Kubrick was never a sequel kind of guy, Clarke did continue the story in several sequel novels, one of which was adapted into director Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We Makes Contact in 1984. (And my love for that flick is well established given how often I find excuses to reference it.) Now the world of the mysterious labyrinths will be returning to the screen…but this time it will be the TV screen.

In addition to being one of the literary titans of the science fiction genre, Sir Arthur C. Clarke proved an adept hand at predicting the ways technology would evolve in the future, from game-changing communications satellites to visions of space flight that uncannily mirrored the eventual real thing. Of course, this sort of forecast runs the risk of you looking goofy a few decades down the line when we’re not all puttering around the sky in Jetsons vehicles. Or, as Clarke himself more eloquently put it:

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation, because the prophet invariably falls between two schools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that in 20, or at most 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

It’s a good time to be an actor on Game of Thrones, or, as the case often is given the frequency with which HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga kills people off, a former Game of Thrones star. The cast of the sprawling epic is popping up everywhere. Peter Dinklage is in Pixels, Emilia Clarke plays Sarah Connor in Terminator: Genisys, Nathalie Emmanuel just joined The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials, Gwendoline Christie has a significant role in Star Wars: Episode VII, and Sean Bean dies in tons of movies, and the list could go on and on. Another guy who gets a lot of work is Charles Dance, who played Tywin Lanister, and he’s been cast in Syfy’s upcoming adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, something we’re very interested in around these parts.

Envisioned as a six-hour miniseries event, Clarke’s 1953 novel tells the story of a different kind of alien invasion than you’re used to. It’s not a violent incursion, but a race of creatures from space, called Overlords, show up, take charge in an indirect way, and end all war and conflict, creating a global utopia. While that may not sound so bad on the surface, it comes at the cost of individual identity and culture and the very things that make us human, so there’s that.

If science fiction’s most popular writers were still alive today, they’d be pulling in truckloads of money at this point. (Not that some of them weren’t already wealthy, but still.) Syfy is getting into the Arthur C. Clarke business with an official order for the miniseries Childhood’s End, first announced a couple of weeks ago. Is anybody else besides me just waiting for Syfy to announce that of all their recent pickups have been a joke and they’re actually just going to air Scare Tactics and wrestling for 24 hours a day?

Childhood’s End will be presented as a six-part miniseries executive produced by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) and mega-producer Mike De Luca (Dracula Untold). To direct the project, the team nabbed British filmmaker Nick Hurran, arguably most notable around these parts for directing The Day of the Doctor, as well as a few other Doctor Who episodes. He was also recently recognized with an Emmy nomination for his work on Sherlock: The Last Vow. Taking on screenwriting duties is Life on Mars co-creator Matthew Graham.

There are a lot of hurdles out there when it comes to making a video that will stand out among the zillions that are already available across the Internet. You need a great idea. You need to execute it well. And if you can leave the viewer wondering just how the hell you pulled it off, so much the better. The above video, a fan merging of this year’s Europa Report with imagery and footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to create a faux trailer for Arthur C. Clarke’s unfilmed 2061 sequel did precisely that. It left me asking, “Is that really Keir Dullea? How the hell did they get Keir Dullea?”