Riverworld (2003)

Riverworld (2003)

Directed by: Kari Skogland

Starring: Brad Johnson, Emily Lloyd, Cameron Daddo

This SciFi Channel original movie was very, very obviously intended to be the pilot of a series which never happened. It’s apparently very loosely based on a series of novels by Philip José Farmer, the first one of which won a Hugo award for best novel. The Hugo award, for those of you not aware of the science fiction writing community, is the Academy Award of scifi. Only, you know, it’s based on actual achievements and it still actually means something.

As Riverworld starts, we see strong-jawed and barrel-chested American astronaut Jeff Hale (played by Brad Johnson, but he really should’ve been named Big McLargeHuge or Beef Cheststeak) dying in a space shuttle. Oops, we killed our main character right off the bat. Turns out it’s okay though, since he finds himself in a little ball underwater, then it pops and he swims to the surface, naked and confused. Soon he’s joined by a whole flock of naked, confused people, and he single-handedly organizes them all to open up these canisters he found lying on the beach which have clothes in them. Buff Drinklots is the traditional beefy American guy you find a lot in movies, who always is the good guy and always makes exactly the right moral decision in every situation, commanding loyalty from men and lust from women. Apparently he was not in the original novels. That’s one point for Philip José Farmer.

All these now-not-as-naked but still-quite-confused people gather and settle down a little to find out that they’re all dead and have reverted back to being in their’ 20’s or 30’s. Despite them all coming from different time periods and countries, they can all understand each other. Soon they find a giant pillar with fire coming out the top of it, which fills their clothing canisters with some gloppy food. Finally they come across some other people, who are all decked out as vandals (the medieval tribe, not the punk band) and capture the group of people for use as soldiers or slaves.

Without actually describing every single thing that happens, which is what I seem to be doing, it turns out that this planet is inhabited by people who have died at one point or another, and that the ex-Roman emperor Nero takes over the vandal empire and has to square off against Flank Chestgrease and his group of friends, which include Samuel Clemens and his riverboat that he’s been building. Also, there’s an alien there, since it turns out anyone who dies on Earth can come back to Riverworld, but he’s the only one because he died in the giant asteroid crash that killed all life on the planet in the 22nd century. Since it’s the pilot for a series, it ends with a “our journey is just beginning…” sort of thing, which is fine and all if you’re actually going to make a series, but just obnoxious when it fails.

Overall, I thought it was all right. It was certainly a neat idea, having a planet where anyone who died could come back to life and Mark Twain and his riverboat crew had to figure out why. I’d probably watch the six episodes they’d make of the show, because there’s pretty much no way that it would’ve ever gotten more than that. From what it seems, the movie really butchers the original work and that the only thing they really took was the basic premise. Which is the cool part. Everything else is very SciFi original series stuff, kinda like Farscape with a lower budget and no cool Henson puppets.

I’d probably not recommend this thing, even though I liked it well enough. If anything, I’d recommend the books, which I think I’ll take my own recommendation on and go find them myself. In any case, it’s a hell of a lot better than 90% of all the terrible things the SciFi channel pumps out.