Until someone (like the guy behind "Firefly" and "Serenity") decides to do a big-budget, theatrical version of "Riverworld," you will do better to stick with the books.įirst of all, this review doesn't really have any "spoilers" - I could not possibly spoil this film for anyone worse than the makers already have. This is only slightly better than that, and that's not saying much. Think of the recent SyFy Channel adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars," and how awful that was for want of a decent script and budget.
It would also require a decent budget, which this TV effort lacks. If only someone had the cojones to faithfully adapt the stories, that would make a heckuva movie. But again, this is not truly Farmer's Riverworld. It loosely follows Farmer's plot, more so than the 2003 TV movie, and the acting is better. This new version of the saga appears to be a pilot for a TV series, and was shot in Canada with a no-name cast. Knowledge of this allows certain drastic actions to be taken, but I will say no more. An interesting twist: when someone dies on Riverworld, they are resurrected along a different stretch of the river. As the years go by, we follow the adventures of dozens of these folks, both famous and not so famous, as they strive to make sense of their new home. Clearly, someone or something is controlling all of this, but Farmer takes his time in revealing the ultimate puppet master and the purpose f the experiment.
Basically, everyone who has ever lived and died on Earth wakes up on the banks of an endless river on an alien planet. Farmer's "Riverworld" stories, which eventually were edited and collected in several books, are some of the most fascinating sci-fi ever written. It just doesn't follow the stories all that well, and that's a shame. This followup to 2003's atrocious adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer's classic "Riverworld" stories isn't all that much of an improvement.
well, in this case, perhaps the SyFy Channel should have just given up.
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