Riverworld (2003)

Phillip Jose Farmer wrote an impressive series of books as part of his Riverworld saga. Sometime in the future, an alien race resurrects everybody who has ever lived on planet Earth and places them on a carefully constructed planet. If you died, you were resurrected somewhere else on the planet. The original novels focused on British adventurer, writer, linguist Richard Burton and Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) and their attempts to explore and understand the strange, new world, but there were plenty of other famous historical figures that contributed to the tales.

The SciFi channel decided they could adapt the story for the small screen. Reworking and condensing a book to fit the running time of a feature movie is a daunting task, but the SciFi channel decided adapting one book was too easy, so they took the plot elements from the first two books and mangled them in to one movie. They also decided that an historical legend like Richard Burton wasn’t good enough for their audience, so they replaced him with a fictitious American astronaut.

The film starts with the resurrection of astronaut Jeff Hale (former Marlboro Man Brad Johnson), who finds himself on the beach with Alice “in Wonderland” Hargreaves (Emily Lloyd) and Emperor Nero (Jonathan Cake). Nero replaces King John who was the villain in the book. The Sci-Fi channel must really not like British characters. There are a series of adventures where the characters are captured and escape and make their way to the village of another group (that includes an alien who died on Earth), led by Sam (Cameron Daddo), who are building a riverboat.

I have no major complaints with the actors (Daddo is his usual one dimensional self, Johnson is as bland as his character, Cake is wonderful), or the effects people for doing what they could with a limited budget, but I have a problem with whoever decided on the plot for movie (which is really the pilot for a cancelled series). Reducing the concepts and imagination of Farmer’s book had to happen for television, but making such a grand idea so mundane did not.