I just finished watching the “4 hour” Riverworld movie on SyFy.  I was not that impressed.  As a fan of the Riverworld books, and knowing that SyFy can put together a good movie or mini-series when they want to (Tin Man, Battlestar Galactica), I was hopefully that this time SyFy would get it right.  My optimism was further encouraged by some good looking trailers for the show.  My optimism was misplaced.

I understand that any television or movie adaptation must change some things from the book.  To me a faithful interpretation is one that keeps the main characters and themes of the book in place.  Neither was done with any integrity here.  The books revolve around a cast of characters that alternately act as the main character in any given book or section of a book.  However, the overarching protagonist for the novels is Sir Richard Burton.  In the novels Burton leads a complex existence.  He is not an easy man to like but we like him all the same.  It becomes easy to overlook his shortcomings when his strengths are so many.  The author, Phillip Jose Farmer, created a believable character in his version of Burton.

Farmer had an ingenious science fiction concept when he reincarnated all of humanity, everyone that had ever lived, along the shores of a giant, planet-sized river.  But the real plot, and underlying theme of the book is so much more interesting.  Riverworld is a story about redemption and control, about religion and science, and about love and loyalty.

In the SyFy Riverworld, Burton is a 2-dimensional villain, wasting the talents of Peter Wingfield in the role.  A new protagonist is invented, with a new cadre of travel companions.  The new characters are likable, if not a little flat.  We don’t see any real character growth over “4 hours” of television (I keep putting the running time in quotations because SyFy inserted a lot of commercials.  I would suspect the running time with normal commercial usage would have been closer to 3 hours).

In the SyFy Riverworld, the plot of the books is twisted into a silly civil war between the aliens controlling the Riverworld.  So many interesting things could have been done with the real conflict from the books, but instead SyFy turns to a vanilla conflict.  They do try to take a stab at something more interesting than a black and white, good versus evil plot, but they never quite get there.

Once I realized that SyFy was once again trashing the characters and underlying plot of a great science fiction story, I decided to try to give the show a chance on its own merits.  Even pretending that I had not read the books didn’t make the movie better.  Plot holes were not adequately explained.  The motivations of characters seemed too generic.   Decent performances were turned in by many of the actors, but they had very poor material to work with.  And the entire time the film suffers from what must have been a very low budget for extras.  For a river that is supposed to hold billions of people, we see very few individuals outside the small cast of 10 or 15 people.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie.  Go get the books and read them.  They really are fantastic.