William Bibbiani Reviews Riverworld!
Innocents Abroad II: Riverworld
With ‘Lost’ finally out of the way and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ an increasingly distant memory, networks are understandably scrambling to snatch up the hardcore geek demographic that those series left behind. It’s a pretty noble endeavor, if you think about it. There’s an air of desperation among geeks as this new television season approaches. ‘Supernatural’ and ‘Caprica’ have their fans, but there’s nothing even remotely recent to rally behind as the bold new face of science fiction on TV. Last April the Sci Fi Channel (still refusing to call it ‘SyFy,’ thank you very much) aired the miniseries Riverworld, based on the novels by Philip Jose Farmer. Riverworld is out on DVD today, and if you’re looking for the bold new face of science fiction TV… you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Riverworld stars Tahmoh Penikett of ‘Battlestar’ and ‘Dollhouse’ fame as Matt Ellman, a photojournalist who becomes the victim of a suicide bombing, along with his fiancé Jesse (‘Smallville’s’ Laura Vandervoort). He wakes up not in the rubble or the safety of a hospital bed, but in the middle of an enormous and peaceful river in the woods. It turns out that he’s been resurrected on Riverworld, a planet a hundred times the size of Earth, to which everyone apparently goes after they die. On Riverworld you’re eternally young, get one free meal a day from little glowing Epcot Centers located sporadically along the landscape, and get to cavort with such historical celebrities as 19th century British explorer American Sir Richard Burton (Peter Wingfield), 12th century female samurai Tomoe Gozen (Jeananne Goossen) and famed American writer Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain (Mark Deklin).
“So you’re saying we have to get on a boat… to get on a boat? Boy, this Riverworld place is sure full of crazy mysteries…”
Sounds nice, right? Well, it turns out that there are two problems with Riverworld. Since everyone on Earth is resurrected there, there are a lot of complete assholes roaming around the countryside, pillaging and so forth. Before long, Tahmoh and company are kidnapped by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (Bruce Ramsay), who forces them to do… something, I think. It never really pans out. Tahmoh also learns that the blue aliens who run Riverworld are at odds over whether or not to scrap this whole project. These ‘Caretakers,’ mostly played by Thea Gill and ‘The Tin Man’s’ Alan Cumming, have vowed not to interfere with the events on Riverworld, but they also break that rule left and right by selecting various champions to either protect or destroy the planet. (Champions are easily identified because they don’t have metal wrist bands like everyone else, but the only thing the wrist bands are good for is free food, so it really sucks to be them.)
There are lots of distractingly overt similarities to our dearly departed ‘Lost’ in Riverworld, a miniseries clearly designed to play as a backdoor pilot for future adventures, cliffhanger and all. The characters ‘survive’ great catastrophes only to wash up on the shore somewhere mysterious and band together as a ragtag group of survivors betwixt their various flashbacks. There are mysterious devices scattered throughout the terrain and everyone is being manipulated by two godlike beings who use the protagonists to settle their own petty rivalries. Sure, the original Riverworld novel was published over thirty years before ‘Lost’ – which for all I know may have gotten some of its ideas from Philip Jose Farmer’s books – but the miniseries chose to emphasize these similarities to the point where Riverworld loses almost anything special it had to offer audiences. The result is a miniseries that’s so familiar that audiences will most likely find it contemptible.
Oh, and when they’re resurrected they wake up in glowing pools of amniotic fluid, just like in ‘Battlestar Galactica.’
But it’s not all bad. Many of the performances are perfectly fine and there is a lot of promise in the prospect of historical fan fiction team-ups. It’s just a shame that no one was able to capitalize on that promise in the three hours they had available in this miniseries. Mark Deklin cuts a fine figure as a young Mark Twain, but the script fails him as one of the finest wits in American history is reduced to boastful pronouncements and occasionally spouting words like ‘mendicant’ in a poor effort to remind audiences of why he was so awesome in the first place. Film fans like myself will be disappointed as they discover that Peter Wingfield was not playing famed actor Richard Burton but rather the interesting but relatively obscure British explorer by the same name.
The film does make up for these deficiencies a bit by playing around with the resurrection concept: Since Riverworld is where you go when you die, dying on Riverworld just warps you somewhere else on the planet, leading some characters to take the ‘Suicide Express’ when they’re in a tight spot. It’s a neat idea, but one that creates serious problems as the story progresses. Every single character in Riverworld is essentially immortal, so the stakes never seem too high until the very end of the miniseries, when Riverwold itself is in jeopardy. Before that people are blowing each other away left and right and threatening our heroes with physical violence, as if that mattered anymore. One would think in a place like Riverworld that the villains would instead stick to non-lethal methods like torture to perform their nefarious deeds, since the threat of pain is infinitely scarier to our heroes now than actually dying. But the film chugs along like every other, trying to make us care about characters as their lives are threatened instead of getting creative and actually engaging us in some way.
“We’ll have to kill them all!”
“But they’re all immortal! We’re all immortal! Everyone here is immortal!“
“Then we’ll have to temporarily inconvenience them all!”
Riverworld has interesting qualities that science fiction fans may find pleasing on a lazy Saturday afternoon, but there’s nothing that makes the miniseries seem significant enough to warrant further attention. Even the DVD implies that it’s best not dwell on Riverworld, since the only special features that could mustered for this three-hour epic based on a beloved series of books was a trailer and a 3-minute time lapsed video of Alan Cumming getting into make-up. My Geekscape Three-Word Review (a little too late, of course) is: “Competent but disappointing.”
