It’s SyFy back when it was SciFi, which is after it was The Science Fiction Channel! This is an adaption of a book series, and it caught my attention because it was amazon at one point, but then was removed, and now it’s on IMDB-TV, which is a ad supported streaming service owned by Amazon. Note this is different from Amazon prime and having Prime gives you absolutely no benefits with IMDB-TV, you’ll have to sit through two minute ads every 15 minutes, just like all the other unwashed masses. What kills me about this is that the movie was made for TV and has obvious ad spots but IMDB TV isn’t using them, so they’ll jump to commercial in the middle of a scene, jump back to the movie, then a minute later the movie drifts to black in an obvious moment for ads, but no ads are shown there.
This is a rough adaptation, with made for TV special effects, a made for TV budget and a made for TV cast. The main character (Brad Johnson) gives me strong Bruce Campbell vibes, with a dash of Eddie McClintock vibes, but with an extra dash of hopefulness and goodness in his heart. The story follows his awakening in ‘Riverworld’ which seems to be an alien generated afterlife with people from every time period of humanity’s history being lumped in together, just to see what will happen. For the most part it works, but it does seem to be a “man out of time” story that was super popular in science fiction at one time, and authors still try to get back to those good ol’ days of Yankees time traveling, or civil war soldiers going to Mars. I should say that this was apparently supposed to be a series, but they only filmed this one pilot episode, then released it as a stand alone movie when the decision was made to not pick it up as a full season, and the ending makes it clear this was just the start of the story.
Now I need to find the 4 hour movie they did just six years later.
Strictly speaking, Hale isn’t “reincarnated”, he’s “resurrected”. Reincarnation is when you die and return to a new life in a different body (different than your original one), maybe even as a different species. Resurrection is when you return to essentially the same body as the one you inhabited when you died. You may not be the same age and the cells in the body certainly will be different, but it’s still the same you. With reincarnation, you could come back as a nine-banded armadillo and end up as a speed bump on a Texas highway (aaaaand you’re off to reincarnation again!)
Man. Riverworld.
Way back in 2004 my wife and I rented this from our local Blockbuster. Then a few years later saw it in our Blockbuster mail order service. Two hours in we realized we already saw it. That’s when I downloaded the list of movies in my Blockbuster mail order queue and started keeping a list of every movie we’ve ever watched. Then, when Blockbuster mail shut down and we moved to Redbox mail order, I just loaded all the remaining movies into Redbox, and to this day we’re still using that list. Marking off what we’ve watched, what we have on usb to watch when we want to, adding new things we want to see, and keeping a list of what’s coming and when (so I know when to look for them so I can download them).
This was also the last time we saw Kevin Smith, who, at 38, died too young (an accident).