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story identification - SciFi movie (or miniseries) of the afterlife



I am trying to find the name of a direct to TV movie, possibly a 2-3 part miniseries which I believe aired on the SciFi channel in the 90s. I don't remember who starred in it, but the movie opened with an astronaut attempting reentry whose shuttle ends up exploding. He awakes in a large bubble of air in a river and after reaching the surface and swimming to shore, meets several other people, from seemingly many different times throughout history (including one alien, who died on Earth).


Over the course of the movie, we learn the world is the afterlife, where everyone goes when they die. The major plot involves launching a steamboat (built by Mark Twain, no less) to travel up a river to the mountains, where the beings responsible for bringing everyone to this world are.


Does anyone know what the title of this movie/miniseries is?



Answer



Sounds very much like the 2003 pilot for a (proposed, but never produced) television series adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer's "Riverworld" concept.


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Here's a link to the Wikipedia page for the 2003 version of Riverworld which aired on the Sci-Fi channel.


And here's a quote from the first paragraph of that article's "Plot" section. You will see that it strongly resembles your description of how the movie began.



In the year 2009, a meteor shower above Earth claims the life of American astronaut Jeff Hale (Brad Johnson). He awakens inside a jade-green bubble beneath the surface of a body of water filled with them. A mysterious cloaked figure pierces his bubble with a staff pressing it against his forehead, forcefully filling his mind with images to come. Dazed and in pain, he soon finds himself crawling nude onto a beach littered with metal canisters containing unisex clothing. Soon dozens of people from different lands and historical eras emerge from the water, also nude, and distribute the canisters. All understand each other's language, except a lone Neanderthal man, who lacks the capacity for speech.




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