The film is the story of a terribly uninteresting man (played by Tahmoh Penikett) and eternal love, maybe. You might recognize him – he played Karl ‘Helo’ Agathon on Battlestar Galactica. Penikett was actually (in my opinion) that show’s only resolutely ‘good’ character. Originally written as a sort of redshirt character for the miniseries, he was brought back full time because fans liked him so much. Unfortunately, Peniket’s post-BSG career has not been so ‘stellar.’ He shares Channing Tatum’s misfortune (as observed by Roger Ebert). Their names are much more interesting than they are ever allowed to be. Penikett’s misfortune is that Hollywood, ever the fickle mistress, only has room for one weird named movie star.
Riverworld begins when Penikett’s character decides to propose to his girlfriend while they are on a cruise. Before he can pop the question, however, everyone at the party is killed by a suicide bomber. After a CGI vision of bodies in spheres waking up underwater, Penikett’s character (I think his name is Matt) surfaces on the shores of a body of water that looks suspiciously like a lake. We are emphatically told that it is a river. He meets passengers from the cruise, who are overjoyed to be alive and evidently translated from old age into an ideal physical state.
The film’s most interesting ideas emerge here – a vision of scores of people emerging from this lake in prime physical condition. Lost lovers embrace each other – Penikett briefly encounters the young woman who’s bomb murdered him. He attempts to speak to her but she flees. These ideas are the film’s greatest selling point for me, they speak to my own hopes for life after this one where misdeeds and improprieties are accounted for and we receive joyful reunion with those people who’ve proceeded us in death. Farmer’s ideas about how this might take place are thoughtful and interesting. In this afterlife the living are given ‘grailbands’ – bracelets that can be inserted into pillars located all over that provide food and drink several times a day. Penikett decides that he cannot rest until he has found his erstwhile fiancee.
This is the story’s essential conflict and its weakest part. I don’t understand why Penikett is so attached to this woman. The filmmakers never give us any context for their relationship. They never reveal anything essential about her – she’s a figment for most of the film. When we finally meet her again we discover that, having emerged from the river years before Penikett, she hooked up with the film’s villain. I won’t begrudge her that – the villain is actually essentially only villainous because he takes Penikett’s girlfriend. The film’s secondary conflict, a fight between factions of blue skinned aliens who understand the workings of the said Riverworld, is never adequately explained. Because every other conflict is framed by this one the film is hollow at its core. I like love stories. My two favorite films are both love stories – but they are woven through with reasons for their characters to love each other. This film provides us with no compelling reasons for Penikett to love his girlfriend, other than they love each other and we discover that is not really true.
There are reasons to watch Riverworld. Shortly after his reemergence from the river, Penikett encounters Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro is building an empire using slave labor. Penikett allies himself with a Japanese warrior woman (who is also searching for her lost love and inexplicably played by a white woman), Samuel Clemens, and Ludwig Durr. The film makes its greatest conceptual reach by including these ostensibly real people in its narrative. Mark Deklin plays Clemens. He doesn’t actually play Samuel Clemens; instead he plays a kind of memetic representation of what we all imagine when we think of the author. He is necessarily embodying a stereotype – Colonel Sander’s suit, cigar-chomping, and riverboat in all – and it is marvelously entertaining because he is clearly the only person in the production who is allowed to have any fun.
Penikett’s other allies aren’t offered much by the script. They come and go with very little accompanying context, which can be very amusing in the case of Penikett’s videographer friend, who is reintroduced only to be dropped off the edge of a cliff with no ceremony. In a world where resurrection is guaranteed, death serves little purpose in Riverworld’s narrative function.
In the end, I’m alright with unresolved plot points with non-linear arcs. I think they can be incredibly interesting. They make me, as a participant, work that much harder to follow along. If an artist is going to tell me that they purposefully designed a narrative this way, they need to give me better characters or better story. Either one could have saved this film; but it lacked both. I own Riverworld on DVD. I’ll watch it again soon. I admire its reach but deplore its lack of depth. This film offered me a lot to get excited about, but ultimately let me down. Big ideas are important – but they are sheep and sheep are stupid. They need a shepherd.
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