This Riverworld Meanders, But Doesn’t Go Anywhere
Syfy, 9:00PM Sunday
Written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Randall M. Badat, and Hans Beimler; based on the novels by Philip José Farmer
Directed by Stuart Gillard
Starring Tahmoh Penikett, Laura Vandervoort, Mark Deklin, and Peter Wingfield
Movies like Riverworld make me wonder if science fiction can ever survive the transition from page to screen. Certainly space opera in the vein of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica makes the grade, but something like Philip Jose Farmer’s theological/philosophical magnum opus is another thing entirely. How does one convey, through action and dialogue, the highly intellectual themes of theRiverworld series? One can copy the action sequences, certainly, and cast actors to play Samuel Clemens and King John of England. But neither the actions nor the characters are the main point of Riverworld—it is an extended meditation on the soul of humanity, the perfectibility of man, and the values shared between aliens and humans. Pretty heady stuff, enough to fuel at least one master’s thesis I know of. And damned hard to translate to the conventions of television. Science fiction has been called the literature of ideas, and few series illustrate that more than Riverworld.
The books are classics, beloved by generations of fans. What puzzles me is why Syfy chose to change or delete virtually everything that makes the books so popular. Why would a network pay good money for a popular work, and then take out everything that makes them popular? It’s as if a movie producer wanted to take Harry Potter out of the Harry Potter books. Yet here I am, looking at an adaptation of the Riverworld series that has very little of Riverworld in it.
The basic setup starts off the same—everyone on Earth who ever lived is reincarnated in British Columbia, er, a manufactured planet named Riverworld, which contains—you guessed it—a meandering river 20 million miles long. Assorted aliens dressed as monks and looking like refugees from the Blue Man Group pop in and out to deliver cryptic, useless warnings to our hero, Matt (Tahmoh Penikett,Dollhouse). He’s a war reporter/crusader who got blown up by a terrorist bomb just as he was proposing to his girlfriend Jessica (Laura Vandervoort, V).
The next four hours consist of Matt looking for Jessie while orienting himself to this world, fending off the imperial ambitions of Sir Richard Burton (Peter Wingfield, Sanctuary)—the explorer, not the actor—and the conquistador Pizarro (Bruce Ramsay,Supernatural). Among the people he runs into are the terrorist who killed him, and humorist Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens (Mark Deklin, Romantically Challenged). Clemens has built a riverboat and is sailing it upriver to find the source of Riverworld. So far, so good. One of the charms of the books was seeing so many famous people from disparate historical eras all thrown together. I’d love to see Moses meet George Washington, for example. Or the Buddha. It’s a conceit that could easily fuel a short-run summer series likeWarehouse 13, but here it’s thrown away so that Matt can chase his Jessie through thick and thin. Mostly thin.
The first problem with any plotting in this series is that there are no stakes, no consequences, no drama. We quickly discover that anyone who dies is immediately resurrected—which turns this story into nothing more than a video game right away. If the worst that can happen to you is that you get resurrected over and over, there’s not much at stake if you want to go to war or start a rebellion. Life is cheap when it is free and endless. I could not get very much worked up over characters who literally can lose nothing.
So, okay, the instant resurrection and the free grocery machines are all there to take the focus of this story off survival. I get that. But in the books, that means the focus shifts to finding out who the aliens are, why and how they have resurrected everyone on Earth over the age of five, what happened to Earth, and where this will all end. You know, grand questions with big answers. Instead, we get petty squabbles over a riverboat and a man searching for his girlfriend. Which, considering they have what is essentially eternal life, should not be that anxious a search. He has all of eternity to find her.
Syfy, having apparently decided not to explore the philosophical ramifications built into Farmer’s original work, opted instead for a rather dreary muddle of Survivor meets Lost. The scenery, of course, is magnificent, although I am growing weary of the mountains of British Columbia. The costumes look like they were put together by the Society for Creative Anachronism. The actors struggle with poorly written dialogue and pointless action scenes. Alan Cumming (X-Men) is wasted in a role that only requires him to wear almost as much blue makeup as he did as Nightcrawler. Penikett squares his jaw manfully, but cannot make his quest any smarter than the script does. Deklin puts on a fair Missouri accent; his Sam Clemens is one of the most entertaining characters on board. I would have been happy to dispense with Matt altogether, and travel the wide river with the man who wrote Life on the Mississippi. I found it very interesting that the resurrected Southerner, Clemens, had no trouble treating black men as equals on his boat. Clemens, as Twain, wrote one of the earliest time travel books, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; a friend of Nikola Tesla, he had a lifelong interest in science and technology. I’d love to have seen more of his geek side. One of the best parts in the movie was Jeaneane Goossen’s (Aaron Stone) Samurai girl, who forges her own weapons and armor, and takes on a host of Conquistadores. Go, girl!
The Riverworld books and concept have the potential for a solid SF series, at least as intricate and interesting as Battlestar Galactica orBabylon 5. If all we got was a face-off between characters drawn from history every week, it would be worth while. Add in the mystery of the planet itself, survival issues, aliens with their own political agendas—yes, this could be rich and interesting. But Syfy shot itself in the foot from day one by discarding all the really unique aspects of this show, and trying to cram it into the usual TV action-adventure format. Fail.
This was not even Syfy’s first attempt at adapting Riverworld; a 2003 made-for-TV movie intended as a series pilot went nowhere; this movie apparently was also intended as a backdoor pilot. It does not appear to have gelled, even by Syfy standards, and the network burned off both halves of it in one night. The strategy appears to have gained them some viewers, at least on a one-shot basis. The show(s) garnered 2.1 million viewers on Sunday night, making it Syfy’s most watched Sunday show of 2010. But the 2003 version roped in more viewers; I don’t expect this to become a series any time soon. River world still hasn’t found the right adaptation for television; I hope someday someone gets the formula right.
Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Stegall