Unlike the original, "Village of the Damned," this film skips the introductory stuff and begins in medias res, with the kids already six or seven years old, half a dozen of them, spread around the world in different countries. There is no explanation of how they were born except in the claim of an English mother that she'd "never been touched." In principle, that's okay. But in this instance it means there is no dramatic introduction that's the equivalent of those disquieting first scenes in the original, in which Midwitch is shrouded in some kind of invisible cloud that renders people unconscious the moment they enter it.
What I mean is that there isn't a lot of mystery in most of this movie. We see the kids drawn together in London. They hardly speak. Some of them never utter a word. And they hole up with their pretty, blond adult servant in a dilapidated church, resisting all efforts to get them to return to their normal lives.
Why are they there? (Or, let's say, why are they here?) We don't know. They don't know either. They manage to share thoughts with one another without speaking. They put together some solar-powered machine that blows the minds of anyone approaching them with even the slightest of hostile intents. And they don't hesitate to kill people who try to exploit them.
They're both sinister and lethal. And nobody knows their goal. There is a big argument among the military and the scientists about whether they should be destroyed or not, and one of the children is shot dead during a killing spree.
Finally, the community deems them too dangerous to survive and brings to bear enormous ordinance to exterminate them and clobber the deconsecrated church they've barricaded themselves in.
There's a lot of rather obvious Cold War intrigue going on. Every nation wants to take its own superchild and put its brain to use. (For a surreal example of this theme, read John Hersey's novel, "The Child Buyer.") The Cold War material is right up front, but when that dilapidated church first appeared I wondered whether religion were behind the story. It was. The child who was killed is brought back to life. And the children stand hand in hand while they're martyred. I won't get into too detailed an explanation of exactly HOW religion fits in because, mainly, I can't. I didn't understand the thing.
The narrative seemed to be going in a direction similar to that of "The Day the Earth Stood Still." I am sacrificing my life to convince you that you should stop your bickering. And yet, if that is in fact the message, it comes across as if written in proto-Indo-Hittite. What's left at the end resembles the cloud of dust that settles over the now-demolished church.
I'd like to be able to recommend it more highly but it's left me as confused as the screenplay. I think, if I hadn't a clearer idea of what I was aiming for, I'd have left the original alone.
What I mean is that there isn't a lot of mystery in most of this movie. We see the kids drawn together in London. They hardly speak. Some of them never utter a word. And they hole up with their pretty, blond adult servant in a dilapidated church, resisting all efforts to get them to return to their normal lives.
Why are they there? (Or, let's say, why are they here?) We don't know. They don't know either. They manage to share thoughts with one another without speaking. They put together some solar-powered machine that blows the minds of anyone approaching them with even the slightest of hostile intents. And they don't hesitate to kill people who try to exploit them.
They're both sinister and lethal. And nobody knows their goal. There is a big argument among the military and the scientists about whether they should be destroyed or not, and one of the children is shot dead during a killing spree.
Finally, the community deems them too dangerous to survive and brings to bear enormous ordinance to exterminate them and clobber the deconsecrated church they've barricaded themselves in.
There's a lot of rather obvious Cold War intrigue going on. Every nation wants to take its own superchild and put its brain to use. (For a surreal example of this theme, read John Hersey's novel, "The Child Buyer.") The Cold War material is right up front, but when that dilapidated church first appeared I wondered whether religion were behind the story. It was. The child who was killed is brought back to life. And the children stand hand in hand while they're martyred. I won't get into too detailed an explanation of exactly HOW religion fits in because, mainly, I can't. I didn't understand the thing.
The narrative seemed to be going in a direction similar to that of "The Day the Earth Stood Still." I am sacrificing my life to convince you that you should stop your bickering. And yet, if that is in fact the message, it comes across as if written in proto-Indo-Hittite. What's left at the end resembles the cloud of dust that settles over the now-demolished church.
I'd like to be able to recommend it more highly but it's left me as confused as the screenplay. I think, if I hadn't a clearer idea of what I was aiming for, I'd have left the original alone.