I'm a big fan of B5, having caught on only at the end of season three. I faithfully watched all the previous seasons when it was syndicated, concluding that it was one of the most well-thought out story arcs to ever hit television. Even the filler episodes were interesting. The movies, also, were well produced and as entertaining as anything to hit the theaters.Which brings us to 'River of Souls'. Naturally, after seeing everything else, I had high expectations. Martin Sheen appears to be acting in an Ed Wood movie rather than a serious Sci-Fi story. The story itself, might have looked good in outline form, even made it to the story board. However, it suffers obviously when it came time to filling this notion out into a two hour movie. There are no special effects to keep us entertained in the total absence of a compelling story. There are places where they were obviously short of time and just improvised the dialog to fill the story out. Had this made the regular season, it would have rated among the worst of the episodes.

I thought "The River of Souls" was a very good Babylon 5 movie, with some exceptional performances from Martin Sheen, Tracy Scoggins and Ian MacShane. If this were an episode of the series (without the humour) it would probably be one of my favourite stand-alone stories of the series.Personally, I've always preferred Scoggins to Christian, although granted JMS didn't write her as well for much of the series and she did have to endure the Byron/Telepath plot. If you take out the smutty humour about the brothel and the "poorer" actors in those scenes, then this movie is solid stuff. Probably my third favourite of the four movies, but in no means bad at all.

I'm an admitted Babylon 5 fanatic, so I looked forward to seeing this film with some anticipation. And imagine my surprise when Martin Sheen waltzed into the screen! I thought he did a very good job. The film was pretty good - for some reason the films seem weaker than the series, most likely because they don't really fit into the web-like plot structure of the series.

I was very disappointed in this movie. Plotwise it was weak bordering on silly: Souls who can affect reality in the way they do? A mission apparently critical to the Soul Hunters entrusted to one of their younger members? And the whole B-story with the "holobrothel" and the lawsuit against the station was so awful that at one point I blurted out to the television, "Why are you wasting my time with this?"Thematically, "River of Souls" didn't really go into the question of the soul in any more depth than the original episode "Soul Hunter" did. We see that Soul Hunters can make mistakes, but we still don't get a feeling for their culture. (Are there any female Soul Hunters?)The acting was okay, given the material they had to work with, and the special effects - especially the planetscapes in the first act - were very impressive. But overall, I'd say give this one a miss.