I am – Hercules!!
Never mind that SciFi Channel never made a series from its 2003 “Riverworld” pilot; the channel has just ordered a new four-hour miniseries (and “backdoor pilot” for a potential ongoing series) based on the same Philip Jose Farmer series of novels. The books are about the surprising place we all go when we die (hint: not the bellies of worms). The 2003 pilot focused on an astronaut. The 2010 version will center on a photojournalist. According to IMDb, the 2010 version is directed by Stuart Gillard (“Charmed,” “One Tree Hill,” “90210”) from a teleplay by Robert Hewitt Wolfe (“Deep Space Nine,” “Andromeda,” “The Dresden Files”). An untested source writes that Alan “Nightcrawler” Cumming is back in blue makeup for this one:

Hey Hercules, I got a chance to see the new adaptation of Riverworld that SyFy is putting out next month. And man, is it really not worth anyone's time. The basic premise: Everyone who has ever lived and died is reborn on a distant alien world. The planet has a single, planet-spanning river, on the banks of which humanity resurrects. People are reborn with "grail bands", which look like little metal "livestrong" bracelets. These grails allow them to access "grails" which are constantly replenishing machines that provide food and other supplies. Our hero is Matt (Tahmoh Penikett) who is killed in a suicide bombing along with his girlfriend. Matt resurrects without a grail band and with vague visions of blue-faced robed people. He's reunited with other friends killed in the bombing, but not his girlfriend. The villain, Burton (Peter Wingfield) allies with Francisco Pizaro (Bruce Ramsay) who has been on the planet for a while and amassed an army. Pizaro is a bloodthirsty conquerer and quickly enslaves the newly resurrected. Matt manages to escape and finds a riverboat captained by Samuel Clemens, yes, Mark Twain.(Mark Deklin) who is leading an expedition to find the source of the river. Clemens helps resuce Matt's friends, and the first half of the mini-series ends with a battle and an escape with leads to Burton on board the boat and a sort of hostage situation/alliance. The second half of the mini-series follows Matt and his friends as they try to understand the blue figures, who are behind all this and appear to be at war over the nature of humanity. The hinderberg 2.0 shows up. Lots of bad, bad cgi, Alan Cumming, horrible dialogue ("So back in the batcave that was just a limited form of waterboarding?") and the whole thing collapses like dying star. The whole series is a mess. Starting with the casting. Penikett just is not a leading man. He spend the whole movie barking at everyone and chasing after his girlfriend (of 8 weeks as it later turns out) and manages to come off grating rather than sympathetic. Ramsay plays Pizarro as a complete psychotic who burns people at the stake for laughs and seems to lead his men by screaming loudly. Wingfield's Burton has a certain slimy charm, but where he's supposed to come off sinister he mainly comes off campy. He almost needs a mustache to twirl. The premise is so exciting, offering all of human history and a strange alien world, and yet the script does nothing with it. Clemens spends years building a paddle boat all to "find the headwaters" and yet he seems less obsessive and more like a bad dinner theater version of Mark Twain. Another thing, Twain was an avowed Atheist, and yet nary a whisper of this in the story. How would Richard Dawkins feel waking up in Riverworld? Wasted opportunity and instead we get the cartoon Mark Twain sans white hair. The supporting characters are thinly drawn. The female Buddhist monk who is really a kick-ass swordsman, the taxi-driver who has turned soldier. the scheming Italian noblewoman who beds Twain. They barely come alive beyond their initial descriptions. In terms of the bigger story, the aliens purposes are less mysterious than they are aggravating. At one point Matt and the Alan Cumming alien (oh, of course they have no names) are standing on the wing of the Hindenberg 2.0 arguing about the nature of humanity and the rules of Riverworld. Awful CGI in the background can't distract you from how tin-eared the dialogue gets (that "batcave" line is from this scene) leading to Matt simply yelling "Why don't you just push me off?" And that's just it, you kind of want him to die. At least that would be surprising. We've seen Alan Cumming in blue make-up before (hello Nightcrawler) and here he looks less like an X-Man and more like Tobias Funke, Blue Man understudy. The female smurf/alien looks just as ridiculous. Would it have been that hard to look a Farscape, Avatar and even Nightcrawler to get some idea of how to do make-up that doesn't look distractingly bad? The worst part of all this is Jessie herself (Laura Vandervoort) she appears for about 2 minutes in the first half and is then absent for the bulk of the series. When she does come back she's a void. This is the great love that Matt's friends have lived and died for? There's a scene where Matt and Burton (who it's revealed, had been with Jessie as well) are arguing over who was with her longer. Matt's 8 weeks to Burton's 250 days. Jessie just stands there, mute, staring at the floor. Great female character writing. The production values are typical Syfy, meaning low and cheap. The direction is dreadful (at one point during a pitched battle the main characters just seem to be standing in the middle of a sea of carnage having a laugh and a chat) with slow-motion used to cover up messy fight scenes. Even the costumes feel cheap, with Pizarro's men dressed like Ren Faire rejects. After the 2003 mini-series, which for all it's flaws at least seemed to be trying harder, I read the books by Philip Jose Farmer. They're great, psychadelic trips filled with mystery, redemption (Nazi Hermann Goring founds a religion based on second chances) and great characters. Read Farmer's series and don't waste 3 hours drowning in the shallow waters of this mini-series.

Syfy debuts the entire miniseries, which stretches to four hours when one adds commercials, April 18. Follow Herc on Twitter!! Follow Evil Herc on Twitter!!

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