Riverworld |
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 • USA / Canada • 2010 • 178m •    • Directed by: Stuart Gillard. • Starring: Tahmoh Penikett, Mark Deklin, Peter Wingfield, Jeananne Goossen, Alan Cumming, Laura Vandervoort, Chiara Zanni, Matty Finochio, Romina D'Ugo, Kwesi Ameyaw, Arnold Pinnock, Bruce Ramsay, Meg Roe. • Music by: Jim Guttridge.      Welcome to Riverworld, a place of strange, watery beauty and the current abode of a fascinating cast of the recently (and not-so-recently) dead. It certainly isn't Heaven, but it just might be Hell.
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Review:
The only positive thing I can say about this movie (besides instructing you on what really doesn't work in a film script) is that the DVD cover looks nice. I thought this would be a great fantasy story within an original world... but there was no world building at all. So WHY did they film this thing? There is barely a story. There are a lot of questions with no answers and the few original ideas in it are overthrown by clichés (like samurai lady being killed one second after she says their destinies are intertwined and entertaining him with a touchy speech about life).
So the main character is looking for the girl of his dreams (who he's met only a few months ago but apparently wants to spend his entire afterlife with). Everybody wears wrist bands called 'grail bands' and nobody knows why. The main character and his girl are the chosen ones and have to kill the bad guy and no one knows why ('cause all he needs is a little love reminder in the end to get all cuddly). There's a robot horse and no one knows why. There's airplane food for those with wristbands and no one knows why. Tons of questions don't get answered and the story goes... nowhere. More than half of the characters are a complete waste of screen time. And then there are all those crappy 'funny', spiritual, literary, religious, etc. references. If this story was supposed to be deep and meaningful I really missed it. (Again, I haven't read the book so I'm not judging that story).
Moreover, there was no emotional connection to the characters and no world building which adds up to... "I, as part of the audience, do not care at all what happens to the characters or the world". Maybe I would have preferred it if they had destroyed Riverworld. Looked like a place where I wouldn't want to spend eternity... And that's another thing... You couldn't really die in this world so you really didn't care when someone did die. The scene right after samurai girl's tragic death, she's walking around again (even though it's apparently 8 years later, who cares...).
It really felt like this script was written by a teenager whose closest experience with spirituality was going to a party, getting wasted, getting laid for the first time by a girl he doesn't remember the name of and puking his brains out afterwards. (There are a lot of witty autobiographical references to puking by the way) So my advice? Don't watch this movie, unless you really had fun watching The Room and Happily Never After. I think I might read the book some day, out of curiosity. There's no way it can be worse than this anyway.
Review by eline-hoskens from the Internet Movie Database.
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