Let’s go back once again thirty years to the mid nineties—back when, if you can even believe it, it wasn’t actually standard for Hollywood to sink octodecilions of dollars into productions and then be surprised when their returns, amazingly, weren’t all that great. Even when adjusted for inflation, the budget of today’s subject seems almost restrained—and the reputation it gained for being a giant bomb (not an entirely accurate one at that) feels almost quaint. Still, beyond all the jokes about money being tossed into the sea, how does the once infamous Waterworld actually hold up?
The setup isn’t too complicated—in the future, the icecaps have melted or something, and thus nearly every square inch of continent is underwater. This is beyond even the worst case scenarios for such an event, so we can only presume that all that extra water came from the money-lusting drool of blinkered producers convinced that our star Kevin Costner would enshrine this as the movie event of forever.
Still, early on, we get introduced to both the highlights and lowpoints of the movie—first up, there is actually a decent sense of aesthetic and mise-en-scene here, all things considered. We’re before the age of all-encompassing CGI, so what we have are actual physical sets built on water, all dressed up with rust and the water-logged remains of a modern age. There’s actual thought put into how things might work here—makeshift gardens where everything is recycled for precious fertilizer, and so on (the infamous...filtration scene early on notwithstanding). Inspired by Mad Max as the film obviously is, there is something going on here that makes you wonder how far it could’ve gone with more vision—going all ‘oceanpunk’ as they’d say now.
And then we get to the lowpoint, Kevin Costner himself. The dude’s fine in a supporting role I suppose, but here he just seems vaguely bored most of the time, seemingly staring just off-camera at the juicy steak sandwich an intern made for him, providing the sole acting motivation for the whole movie. His character of a mysterious Mariner is your standard sullen post-apocalyptic protagonist, and at one hilarious point we even need one of our co-leads Tina Majorina to shill for him. There’s also Jeanne Tripplehorn as our leading lady, but the chemistry with her and Costner is about the same as the reaction you get when you pour a cup of water into a cup of juiceless juice.
So what else is there? Well at least we have Dennis Hopper as our bad guy, leading an army of raiders aboard the Exxon Valdez (because we still need to reminded this was made in the nineties), and he’s employing all the subtle nuances that Hopper always put into his antagonist performances, like…absolutely none, but at least he’s somewhat entertaining, and gets what handful of memorable dialogue there is!
Which about sums up Waterworld—it’s a mixed bag, with its moments of actually impressive sets and practical model work, one or two passable action scenes, a boring lead, and everyone else just trying the best with what they have. It’s certainly not awful, but it’s nothing to really rush out and make sure you watch either. The main legacy of the film was an interactive experience at Universal theme parks where guests would get splashed by a crashing seaplane (I’m not sure if it’s still going on, but now people would complain it’d be frying the smartphones they’d inevitably be watching it through!).
So yeah. At the very least, however, I can write the film off as harmless but at least making an attempt. There were other more successful but perhaps…less agreeable films the same year I’m soon to get to..
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