The Riverworld cycle of science fiction novels by Hugo Award-winning author Philip José Farmer has long captivated readers with its audacious premise—the post-mortem resurrection of every human who ever lived along the banks of a seemingly endless river on an alien world. This concept, rich with philosophical potential and boundless narrative possibilities, has not only amassed a devoted following but has persistently tantalised those imagining its translation to the screen. Prior to 2010, there had been but a single, faltering attempt: the 2003 Sci-Fi Channel television film, directed by Kari Skogland, which served as a pilot for a series that never materialised. That production, as noted in contemporary critiques, was a profound disappointment, reducing Farmer’s intellectually curious saga to a generic telefantasy adventure. Seven years later, the same channel embarked on another, more ambitious adaptation: a two-part miniseries directed by Stewart Gillard. On paper, the expanded format promised a more faithful and nuanced exploration of Farmer’s creation. In practice, the 2010 Riverworld stands as a stark testament to how greater length, without concomitant vision, budget, or respect for the source material, can result in an adaptation even more frustrating and ultimately more forgettable than its predecessor.
The miniseries transplants the narrative to a contemporary setting, opening in Kuala Lumpur where photojournalist Matt Ellman (Tahmoh Penikett) is about to propose to his girlfriend, Jessie Machalan (Laura Vandervoort). Their moment is obliterated by a female suicide bomber, killing them both. Ellman awakens, disoriented, in the titular river, and upon reaching shore discovers he is not alone. He encounters others who died in the blast, including an elderly woman now mysteriously rejuvenated. This initial mystery effectively establishes the core conceit: all here are dead, resurrected by inscrutable beings known as the Caretakers, provided with basic sustenance via “grails,” and left to forge a new society. Ellman soon learns that this fresh start has merely replicated old tyrannies. The strong prey upon the weak, epitomised by the infamous Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (Bruce Ramsay), who has established a brutal empire. Aiding him is the English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (Peter Wingfield), a figure whose presence will incense any reader of the novels, where Burton is the charismatic, complex protagonist. Here, he is reinvented as a scheming villain in league with a sinister, renegade Caretaker (Alan Cumming). Escaping Pizarro’s clutches, Ellman embarks on a quest to find Jessie, aided by the legendary Japanese female samurai Tomoe Gozen (Jeananne Goossen) and Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain (Mark Deklin), who has constructed a riverboat to explore this strange world.
The most immediate advantage the 2010 version holds over the 2003 film is its miniseries format. With roughly twice the runtime, the script by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Randall M. Badat does manage to incorporate more elements from Farmer’s literary universe. Most notably, it introduces the concept of repeated resurrections—characters who die on Riverworld can be “recycled” back to life—a fundamental mechanic of the novels that adds a layer of existential stakes absent from the earlier adaptation. This suggests an intention to engage more deeply with the source material’s mechanics. Yet, this solitary fidelity only serves to highlight the myriad other ways in which the production fails, and often more catastrophically than the 2003 effort.
The most palpable deficiency is the glaring lack of budget. Where Skogland’s film was shot amidst the striking, unfamiliar landscapes of New Zealand, Gillard’s miniseries is confined to the well-trodden, temperate forests of British Columbia—a location so ubiquitously used for North American television science fiction and fantasy that it instantly shatters any illusion of an alien, awe-inspiring world. The setting feels generic and earthbound, lacking the visual grandeur the premise demands. The marginally improved CGI, which allows for the inclusion of a zeppelin alongside Twain’s riverboat, is a paltry compensation. It cannot mask the overall cheapness of the production design, from the unconvincing armour of Pizarro’s conquistadors to the underwhelming realisation of the climactic Dark Towers.
This budgetary constraint is exacerbated by Stuart Gillard’s pedestrian direction. Where a skilled director might use clever cinematography and editing to disguise financial limitations, Gillard’s handling of action, particularly the battle sequences, only accentuates their scale-less, televisual cheapness. The performances he elicits are similarly lacking. Bruce Ramsay’s Pizarro is a one-note, snarling antagonist, devoid of the chilling, cultured menace that Jonathan Cake brought to Nero in the 2003 version. Far more egregious, however, is the character assassination of Sir Richard Francis Burton. Peter Wingfield plays him as a standard-issue, duplicitous schemer, a decision that fundamentally misunderstands and disrespects Farmer’s work. In the novels, Burton’s brilliant, irascible, and deeply human nature is the engine of the story; his reduction to a secondary villain is an unforgivable betrayal of the source material that alienates its core audience. Tahmoh Penikett strives for gravitas as Ellman but is shackled to an uninspired, everyman protagonist whose journey feels generic. Laura Vandervoort is regrettably sidelined, her role as Jessie amounting to little more than a damsel-in-distress plot device and eye candy, a wasted opportunity for meaningful characterisation.
Gillard’s narrative choices further undermine the miniseries. Lengthy, repetitive flashbacks to Ellman’s past as a war correspondent in Chechnya feel like tedious filler, inserted to pad the runtime rather than to illuminate character or theme. They disrupt the pacing and contribute to a sense of narrative lethargy. Even more curiously regressive is Gillard’s approach to a foundational element of the premise: the nudity of the resurrected. The 2003 film, for all its faults, had the courage to depict the raw, unsettling vulnerability of hundreds of people awakening naked on the riverbank, a powerful visual metaphor for rebirth and existential nakedness. The 2010 version, in a display of inexplicable prudishness, has characters appear already clothed. This sanitisation strips the scenario of its visceral, disquieting impact, making the resurrection feel safe, sterile, and unimaginative. The irony is acute: Gillard began his directorial career with the 1982 film Paradise, a romantic period adventure whose marketing heavily featured the nudity of its young leads. Here, whether due to network pressure or personal choice, he lacks the will or skill that Kari Skogland demonstrated in navigating such content for television, resulting in a tamer, less daring production.
The miniseries lumbers towards a climax at the mysterious Dark Towers, culminating in a spectacular, apocalyptic showdown that the protagonists conveniently survive via yet another resurrection. This provides a neat cliffhanger, clearly designed to tee up potential sequels or an ongoing series. However, by this point, any narrative momentum or viewer investment has long since dissipated. The Sci-Fi Channel, and the audience, had lost interest. The failure feels particularly pronounced when viewed in the broader television landscape. By 2010, series like Lost had conclusively demonstrated how a mysterious, character-driven saga with a sprawling ensemble and deep mythological underpinnings could captivate a global audience. Lost proved that a premise akin to Farmer’s—people stranded in a strange world confronting mysteries of existence—could be executed with ingenuity, originality, and emotional resonance. The 2010 Riverworld, in contrast, feels like a relic, a clumsily executed adventure story that misunderstands its own source material and fails to learn from either the mistakes of its 2003 predecessor or the successes of its contemporaries.
The 2010 Riverworld miniseries is a profoundly disappointing endeavour. It squanders the expanded canvas of its format, offering only superficial gestures towards the novels’ complexity while succumbing to crippling budgetary constraints, uninspired direction, and a deeply misguided approach to character and tone. It is less an adaptation of Philip José Farmer’s visionary work and more a bland, televisual fantasy that uses the Riverworld name as a shallow backdrop. Its failure is twofold: it neither satisfies fans of the books nor succeeds as compelling standalone television. This second attempt at resurrecting Riverworld for the screen only succeeded in proving that some literary worlds, no matter how fascinating, remain stubbornly beyond the reach of inadequate interpretation.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
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