History has been more kind to Waterworld. If you talk to anyone about the movie, they will bring up things around the movie, but never anything about the movie itself; unfortunately for Waterworld, the story around the movie turned into jokes like this, for good reason. But I’m not a Hollywood production reviewer, I’m a movie reviewer, and despite its obvious flaws, Waterworld is a film that is a pretty great summer blockbuster with some cool action sequences, a crazy world, and a movie about something. Somewhere Kevin Costner is putting on a “I told you so” smirk.
Waterworld takes place in the future, where global warming has melted the polar ice caps. The whole planet is flooded, leaving humans to live in little manufactured communities called atolls. At one atoll, the mariner (Costner) brings some rare artifacts to trade, but is interrupted by a group of Smokers, war mongering renegades, led by Deacon (Dennis Hopper). The Smokers are searching for a little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino) and her caretaker Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) because, supposedly, Enola has a map to the last remaining piece of dry land available after the drastic global climate change.
Waterworld is hilariously bipolar in terms of what is good and what is bad. So let’s just get the bad out of the way first. Most of the mistake lie in the script and character development. I do know that Joss Whedon, a famous script doctor, came in to help clean up the story and described his experience as hell on earth, kinda like Waterworld itself. Let’s start with the villain, Dennis Hopper. As much as I like Hopper the actor, as Deacon the actor is playing his Speed character on many, many drugs. Perhaps Costner thought the rest of the script was too dramatic to make the villain more complex, but Deacon feels like he belongs in another movie; Hopper should have dialed it down a bit and he might have been just a man affected by loopiness being on sea so long, instead of a cartoony homicidal maniac. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the movie did not FEEL longer than its 135 min running time. The reason it feels so long is that the character development is basically limited to the mariner and no one else. At the end of the film, everyone else is basically the same character they started as, meaning they’re pretty boring to watch for a movie over 2 hours. That leaves the mariner. I’ve never found Costner to be that compelling of an actor (Harrison Ford is a better everyman), and here I think he’s high on his own stuff. Costner makes the mariner an unrelenting dick for a LONG stretch of this movie. During that stretch, he’s usually so horrible to what are mostly likable people that Waterworld is barely watchable for lengthy segments, making you roll your eyes and wanting to turn off the movie.
However, despite its Titanic like budget issues, Waterworld’s strengths are pretty spectacular. The action set pieces are really fun, maybe a little hokey, but very exciting. Anytime explosions and jet skis and crazy looking sailboats and air balloons get used with frequency during a chase, you know the movie is doing something right for the audience. The actual water based world is quite a marvel of set design and well crafted logic. The atolls are really cleverly constructed to be serviceable and archaic, since the world’s advances are basically wiped out. The script takes clever routes to show things that we take for granted now would be so scarce in an aquatic world. Paper. Dirt. CD Players. None of these things we would blink at today, are so expensive in Waterworld that you can get months worth of rations for something so simple. Hell, the Smokers have so much power because they stumbled upon the last great oil/gas based resource left standing. Finally, and this is probably the movie’s best idea: Waterworld really looks into how humanity has changed because of the drastic environmental shifts. The people left in these atolls think and speak like the scattered communities of millennia past, talking of prophecies and legends and ghosts since information doesn’t transfer anymore. They’re all a little loopy, but that could be due to isolation and incessant quest for survival. The mariner has some secrets that lead to strong questions about human biology in this environment, and to the now legendary underwater kiss, which was pretty cool at the time. Anytime there’s a dumb Hopper monologue or Costner actively abusing helpless people, you get more examples of that kiss or jet skis chasing to get a girl or a gigantic ship engulfed in flames. Fair trade, if you ask me.
Many consider Waterworld to be Kevin Costner’s greatest movie disaster. If you can’t tell by my review, I liken it more to Return of the Jedi like flaws, preparing us for The Postman (The Phantom Menace in this analogy), by far a worse film, with an even funnier Simpsons joke. Waterworld is equally the best and worst of Costner. Why couldn’t Costner be smarter like James Cameron, who convinced the studio to do the exact same thing, but created the highest grossing movie of all time. Maybe Waterworld just needed a Celine Dion song, that would’ve made it more moola.