Riverworld

This was the most disappointing adaptations of a novel to film/video that I've ever seen. Most of the points that made the novel so interesting were completely changed or glossed over. While the movie was entertaining enough in its own right, it totally missed most of the essential points in Farmer's works. The fact that they tried to condense two novels ("To Your Scattered Bodies Go" & "The Fabulous Riverboat") into a two hour (with commercials!) production made it even worse.

I was looking forward to this one, and was totally disgusted by the results; its like yet another pseudo-scifi "product" extruded from the studios of New Zealand. Except that compared to this thing, Hercules and Xena are highbrow entertainment! Sci-fi for the McDonald's generation. The script includes a jumble of maybe about 15% of the entire original lively and inventive story from the first two books, tosses the other 85%, and replaces it with childish claptrap like evil warlords pursing the virtuous blonde maiden -- and will she escape their clutches??? Yeah, really had me on the edge of my seat. I was expecting the villain to grow a mustache he could twirl, and tie her to some railroad tracks -- spare me! I'd give it a '2' for story, and a '6' for production-values.

Not surprising that Sci-Fi would produce such a horrible tv/F- movie. Whoever greenlights a project over there outta be taken out back and put out of his/her misery. Riverworld is a noble and daring project to undertake, but it ends there as soon as you see the space shuttle hurdling through space in the opening sequence(I can just see the crew shaking and rattling the ersatz-shuttle cockpit in some huge studio, most likely in New Zealand.) These hack producers and writers take such liberties with Philip Jose Farmer's original material, which was brilliant! The first thing to do is get the script right, we will forgive the bad production values, and the bad fight scenes.

There are so many horrible movies out there, why add to the list.

Read the books by Philp Jose Farmer instead!

The movie does a great disservice to Farmer's series of novels.

The book's interesting story line is morphed into a series of martial arts choreographies for TV - typical 21st century emphasis on cartooning over substance. And how did an 18th century female slave from Africa learn Bruce Lee's moves? Forget the screenplay; read the book.

A law was passed in the 1970s that all fantasy novels had to be franchises, with sequels out the wazoo for time and eternity. Philip Jose Farmer opted not to be a criminal and wrote book after book about a strange world, dominated by an endless river along whose banks everyone who had ever lived on earth was reborn. Food and clothing were supplied, and there were alien observers, whose plan was -- well, that's the plot!

Now the Sci-Fi Channel, abetted by Canada and Australia, has filmed the concept, but be warned, it's not really a movie -- it's the pilot for a series! A 21st century US astronaut, Lewis Carroll's Alice, a riverboat man named Sam, a Holocaust survivor, a strange little girl, a Yoruba princess (whose native dances look suspiciously like standard stripjoint choreo but who also does martial arts like Xena), and the evil Nero, among others, are here, struggling for survival, for power, and to launch an oldfashioned Mississippi steamboat. (So where is Richard F Burton?)

Tech credits are fair for the budget. Except for Emily Lloyd, as Alice, the cast is no-name. There's a higher than expected body count among the extras, which will no doubt be toned down considerably to make sure of a TV PG rating when this goes to weekly, and the gaggle of reborns coming out of the surf during the teaser in flesh-colored G-strings and bras, where appropriate, is probably as close to sensuality as this is going to get.

The ending is as wide-open as the defenses at Basra, with the aliens talking enigmatic foreboding stuff that will make more sense later in the series and a climactic revelation that is no surprise at all and just sets up the conflict for subsequent episodes.

This is going to be a lot like "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World," except that it has a river, not a plateau, where the leads can encounter a new civilization every week while tooling along in that steamboat. If you liked the Lost World series, you may find this worth watching. Odds are they'll be using some leftover scripts from it! On the other hand, if you were a fan of the books, I think you'll regard this as basically an unworthy bastardization for popular consumption of a fascinating idea -- even though Farmer did eventually write it into the ground.

On the IMDb scale, 3 out of 10.