CaballoVerde Review of Riverworld

Riverworld (2003 TV Movie)

More like Liverworld (but that insults liver...)

[1/10 · 22 March 2005]

This movie sucks all the fun out of what fans of Farmer's series might expect. All is dreadfully serious (Sam Clemens, of all people, is boring...), the absurdity & whimsicality is sadly missing, and (just for instance) the ingenious "grails" have become mundane "canisters" (Does the sci-fi channel think we'll need a dictionary, or are they just afraid we'd be tempted to throw it at them if we had to get it out?) This last aspect is just one facet of a general tendency the picture has to take what it finds in the novels, dumb it all down to the level of a person who cannot read a novel, 7 go on from there. Plus the censors seem to have clipped the joints & dreamgum out of things (I may be wrong about this--there was a small part of this film I missed). Capital B Bleahh.