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An Early Review Of Syfy’s Second Run At RIVERWORLD!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
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.
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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.
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So I have no doubt this is as bad as some of the monster of the week movies that Syfy pumped out a few years ago. In any case, Mark Twain was not an athiest, he played both sides. I'd call him a "bi-theist" at best. ;)
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Mar 14, 2010 1:55:46 PM CDT
MARK TWAIN KICKS ALIEN BUTT!
by isleptwithkathybatesandallthatigotwasthi
Doesn't he? No? Well, even if he does, i don't actually care about this. I'll read the books thanks.
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make it stop.
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Okay, so we've already got Helo and Gaeta. Can Col. Tigh, Ellen and Chief Tyrol be far behind?
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Where do I sign up? ;)
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Something tells me someone has a theological (or antitheological) axe to grind. Clemens was actually more of a deist, believing in a creator God but denying miracles, revelation, etc. And most of his criticisms of religion didn't see print until after his death. If he didn't publicly rail about God in this life, why would be doing so in the afterlife?
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Seriously- BSG vets have totally stunk the place up over at 24 this year. Abort abort abort.
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I re-read the 5 book series recently
Unfortunately, while I loved this as a teenager and thought that the series was great, it fades upon 2nd reading
Those 5 books really should have been 3 books. The 3/4th books drag and the 5th book was worthless. -
...with a weak ending, but, still, how can this fail? Just make the damn books, already!
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syfy knows a good thing when it sees it.
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Oh, and in the books:
no blue aliens (merely humans from the future, the future in which the books are set no time travel)
everyone gets resurrected at the same time
no metal (mined later but very very rare) just stone and wood
no "normal" clothes just kilts and bras, provided by the grails. Basically you have nothing on resurrection but your grail. The grail provides a few clothes, meals, and toiletries. -
hump established and good stories and inject their putrid dna into them
Producing a rotten, stillborn corpse that stinks the place up
Worse thing is that people that haven't read the novels will think they're as bad as the abominations produced by syfy -
in their effort to have a bad guy with an army... fucking morons.
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...and what a mess (as usual). Why can't Hollywood/TV just adapt classic stories as they were written (for the most part). Why can't they understand that they were popular the way the were. Stop trying to dumb down and modernize because you assume your audience is retarded.
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But I do recall an alien character (described as having what looked like testicles on his forehead) who at one point was explained as being killed upon making contact with humanity, his ship triggering an apocalypse that destroyed mankind... Later he was revealed to be on of the "gods" of Riverworld, whose plan encompassed the resurrection of mankind. Also, if you died on riverworld you were re-resurrected... up to a point where your soul would stop reattaching to your body...
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Take a cue from "Lost" and let a character's story arc include flashbacks to his/her pre-resurrection life. Include the mystery of the alien/apocalypse. Piece it together over a few seasons. Wait for the riverboat until season 2... It could be done decent and make a watchable series.
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I saw the first half of it, it was so bad, I didn't bother with the second half. Worst script and storyline ever. It's nothing like the original movie, which was better than this thing. Leave it to SyFy to keep pumping out crap.
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it's some hilarious cop-drama where he screams at everybody for an hour.
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The reviewer is quite right. Worst thing I've seen lately.
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I made it up to that line.
GOD. AWFUL. BAD. -
It's a pity SyFy spends money on this, but won't finance more Farscape. Frelling dren eating tralks.
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Mar 14, 2010 7:29:13 PM CDT
Every alien world in the universe looks like British Columbia
by tangcameo
It's a fact!
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Mar 14, 2010 7:31:00 PM CDT
RiverWorld can probably be only told as a LONG boring miniseries
by tangcameo
Much like Children Of Dune where only the diehard fans would watch and even they would be checking their watches.
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That shit reads really cinematic. It has insane action (wars between Romans, Nazis and indians, Burton Vs. Cirano, Mark Twain Vs. Eric Bloodaxe) a great mistery, great, long character arcs... You can make it cheap and use the same canadian woods they use in every Stargate episode, since the Riverwolrd is supposed to lack diversity, so yu can spend your money on effects... And we get this? How many crayons the producers have in their noses?
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Working for the Syfy channel must be the greatest job ever. Once you're put in charge of programming you apparently have your job forever? No matter how bad or well you do? Is that right?
Someone tell me I'm not right???? -
or something else even remotely original....?
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jesus what a bunch of maroons.
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Wolfe has a lot of credit with me-- and I've never seen Wingfield do a bad job, so I'm actually almost tempted... but it does sound REALLY awful.
What's with SyFy doing SUCH a bad job with really good properties... EarthSea??? -
Hammer: Ok, so what's this new show we decided to pickup? Is it a new wrestling show? Exec guy: No, we obtained the rights to do a World War Z mini-series Hammer: World War Z? What the hell is that? Exec guys: It's about zombies and a huge war against them. It's basically people giving interviews about stuff that happened to them, so you get little stand alone stories Hammer: Good. Stand alone. Easier to syndicate. Exec: Ok, so about budget... Hammer: How many of the stories could we do in British Columbia? More importantly, how many stories can take place in nondescript warehouses? Exec: Well, there's a few in the woods... Hammer: Ok. For the pilot lets use %90 of the budget to get people hooked. Then for the remaining episodes, all the action will be inside the warehouse and in the woods. Lets also get Michael Shanks...we can keep our budget down if we hire them since he needs money for food. Exec: He's ok on money now...his wife still gets work
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... that Syfy is only the DISTRIBUTOR, and not the producer. You do understand the distinction, right?
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the first mini sucked ass
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then NOT make absolutely sure it doesn't suck?
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"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" is fantastic source material. Great sci-fi setting that could be done well on a very limited budget. All you need is a river boat, a three mile of river to shoot on, and a costume department to equip extras as everything from Aztechs to Nazis. This could be done well on the cheap. The less make-up, the fewer special effects, the BETTER.
Think about Farscape.. I was just re-watching that, and what? 3/4ths of those episodes take place entirely on Moya? Its a whole series is one long succession of "Ship in a bottle" episodes. And its clear they're trying that with the new Stargate series. And there is NOTHING WRONG with that if the series is written well, performed well, and if the set and costume design isn't so bad as to be distracting. I'll hold judgement till I see for myself. -
Before you go calling other people idiots, you might want to at least understand something. The Sci Fi channel is listed as the Producer AND the Distributor, on various sites around the web. Wikipedia and scifiwire.com for starters.
Now, those sites may be wrong, but even if they are, you're the idiot for assuming that talkbackers were speaking from ignorance and not misinformation.
(I distrust anyone who uses the syphilitic term 'syfy' as being either a company shill, or a wanna-be company shill) -
Quoting from Robert Wolfe:
"SCI FI had some very specific ideas. They wanted a viewpoint character that was an American, which isn't in the books. Once you start with these marching orders, you pick and choose the things in the book you love and try to keep as much as you can."
"With Riverworld, they wanted the riverboat to be there right away, and an American viewpoint character who has a very understandable and human quest, which is the search for love. When you come from that point of view, a lot of what's in the book has to fall away, because we're not following Burton. He's a character in the miniseries, but he's not a viewpoint character like he was in the first Riverworld book. Nor are we following Sam Clemens, who is also a character in the miniseries but isn't a point-of-view character like in the second Riverworld book. If you're coming at it from that angle, what was important to preserve was the spirituality, philosophy, this sense of wonder of meeting these historic figures and the humanizing of them so you understand even Sam Clemens has bad days and gets cranky." -
I am not surprised surprised by this review. The Sci-Fi..excuse..I forgot, the network changed to the name to the assinine SyFy..Channel has a reputation for making really suck-ass "Made for SyFy" Movies which horrible stroylines and "special effects", it is also the Network that often times cancels shows that are good or potentially good in favor of shitty shows (Sorry, but anything with the word "Gate" in it automatically qualifies as a crappy show!!)...this is also a network that instead of airing what really IS sci-fi or classic scif-fi shows from the past (I am not talking about "Twilight Zone" I am SO sick of seeing that aired constantly!!)? It airs such things as "Ghost Hunter" and Wrestling on Tuesdays.
With the rare gem or exception of such shows like BSG, Eureka and Caprica and the Dune Mini-series from a few years back? I am not surprised that this "Riverworld" series sucks -
seriously every day Hollywood buys or options scripts, novels, songs comic books and then "tweaks" them to somehow how make them "better" what happened between the time they bought them because they thought they were good and the time the product is finished? hey Hollywood, instead of the endless reboots/remakes how about simply filming the original product that you initially liked...
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Stephen R Donaldson is way too involved with his stuff to let this half assed network handle his work. But a good production of the Gap series or Covenant should be easy today with the FX out there.
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Where's the bloody scotch on this planet?
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The big question is: In this does he fall in love with a person and then struggle with the fact that she isn't real? I mean damn, after BSG and Dollhouse dude is getting the most specific typecasting in TV history...
If this goes to series and he gets his own first-season subplot seperate from the main narrative then something is definitely wrong. Its like his career is regurgitating itself -
The Sci-Fi Channel produced and distributed the 2003 version; they are only DISTRIBUTING the 2010 version... nor does the SciFi Wire story you cite as your "source" say anything to the contrary. You might also try IMDb, a rather more reliable source than *snicker* Wikipedia.
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SyFy is an absolute shit network that shows absolute shit content. It's embarrassing.
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My point stands. Websites (yeah, wikipedia too) may have been incorrect. But you're still a cretin for assuming that talkbackers were speaking from ignorance and not *misinformation*.
And the quotes I gave from Robert Wolfe above? Are pretty fucking clear in showing that Sci-Fi was exercising control from the get-go. -
Mar 15, 2010 10:45:52 AM CDT
Ooooh, can you working "fucking" into your response one more tim
by mockingbird girl
It makes it *so* much more persuasive! :-D
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The source material is pretty damn good.
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...but I am a huge fan of SF, I even teach a college-level course in SF, and I have absolutely NO interest in a visual adaptation of Riverworld. None. Nada. I wouldn't watch it even if it WAS faithful to the source material. Mostly because, after the first novel, it is an endlessly boring delay of solving the central mystery - who created the Riverworld and why. And when the mystery IS solved, it is completely underwhelming. How did anyone think this a good basis for a television series...?
Answer: because no one who makes executive decisions at Syfy has ever read or understood the original material him or herself. That would be my guess. -
If you want to tell a variety of stories in different ways, with a bad-ass iconic SF monster at the heart of it, you could do a lot worse than the SF Canterbury Tales that is Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion.
Plus, you know you want to see the Shrike do some big-screen damage... -
The Covenant series will never see either the big or small screeen. As no distributor is going to release a project whose main character is a rapist, no matter how tastefully done. Sad as these are some of the best fantasy novels of all time.
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I think the story could still work without the rape. He just needs something to be guilty about. They could just have murder someone in a fit of rage.
That said, I agree that they'd never make it. With the ring and the long trek, it's too similar to LoTR. -
I really like this concept, but I didn't read the books after the 2003 movie, because I heard they sucked. So I was hoping that this would be a deeper take on it. V'Shael's Robert Wolfe quote up above is precisely why I watch less and less movies and TV these days. Hollywood execs need to stop messing with the creative talent cause it's clearly not working anymore (if it ever did). Just shut the fuck up and collect your fat paychecks.
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Where they need to produce something in order to keep the rights?
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