WATERWORLD (1995) 175 megabucks not that well spent Waterworld has become a sort of nickname for any kind of insanely high-budgeted movie that doesn't have a prayer of making its money back. Whether or not this one finally did is a matter people can't seem to agree on, but the movie itself isn't nearly as bad as such a long-clinging reputation would suggest, though it's still a fair ways from good. Essentially a post-apocalyptic pirate movie, Waterworld stars Kevin Costner (sunburned on half his face) as the Mariner, who lives alone on his boat where he collects little artefacts from the days before the icecaps melted and turned the slopes of Mount Everest into beachfront property. Cool intro with the Universal globe getting bluer and bluer until it's just one big water planet, though since there isn't that much ice in the first place, I will give this movie the scientific benefit of the doubt and say that maybe all that global warming caused the waters to expand. Or something. We know the Mariner is crafty and mechanically inclined (we first see him converting his own urine into water for his lime tree, and his boat is outfitted with a few nifty sailing contraptions), and that he's a very selfish fella. I don't mean that in a bad way - I mean, if you live on a boat and everybody on the other boats are always trying to steal your limes, you'd better be looking out for #1. And like most people in this hundreds-of-years-after-the-fall-of-civilization story, he appears to be accustomed to what must be the most monotonous scenery in the universe. If you thought Winnipeg was boring, try living on a planet-wide ocean for a while. The Mariner finds his way to an Atoll, a seemingly haphazardly-assembled floating fortress that serves as a hub of commerce. I guess the people who work in the Atoll live there, but I'm not sure. Folks in the Atoll have this big yellow slime pit where things and people are "recycled", recycled into what, I don't know. If you were designing an Atoll, would you put your yellow recycling slime pit right in the middle of the public square? I don't know about you, but I'd probably puke if I caught a whiff of it. In the Atoll he meets a pretty shopkeep (Jeanne Tripplehorn), her young ward (Tina Majorino), and a feisty old geezer relative (who "accidentally" flies away in a balloon at the first sign of trouble). The girl has a tattoo on her back that some say is a map to dry land. And chances are she's been there before, because she draws things like horses. That, and she CAN'T SWIM. The Mariner is not interested in this, but he bungles into getting sentenced to death (by recycling!) and agrees to take the two away with him in exchange for busting him out when the Smokers attack, trying to get the girl. The Smokers are named either because they have cigarettes (one of the more perishable items to have somehow survived the last few hundred years), or because the ancient, poorly-maintained jetskis they drive all belch black smoke. Their attacks look like some Mad Max version of a theme park jetski exhibition, where waterskiiers and jetskiiers soar on ramps over walls, splash down, then whip out guns and shoot everybody. Mariner gets away with the girls, much to the ire of the Smokers' leader, played by Dennis Hopper. This is probably Hopper's best schlock villain - he's crazy (as always), but in more of an inward-directed way than we usually see these psycho villains. For example, he's commandeered the Exxon Valdez and thinks of Joseph Hazelwood as a sort of patron saint. And it's pretty much what you'd expect from there. There's a sea monster for about half a second, a few more extremely unlikely-looking action scenes, and a number of laughs from Hopper. Not unexpectedly, little thought seems to have been put into the question of what life would be like if everybody had to live on boats. I don't think this movie has much of a handle on the hero. We know he's selfish, and we know why, and we know just how much (in one scene, he threatens and moves to kill the kid). But his heart of ice melts awfully suddenly...one moment he's trying to sell the woman into sexual slavery, the next, he's romancing her, so much as a man with gills can romance a woman with lungs, rebuffing her advances with "Because you didn't really want me, not really.", which REALLY gets her hot. Oh yeah, he has gills. (I remember the advance rumors about this movie, hearing that Costner would be playing a half-man half-fish law enforcement officer of the future) Costner is a dependable actor when not too much is asked of him - I don't think I've seen a truly bad Costner performance, but I think playing a man with gills might be out of his league. The action scenes are elaborate and obviously expensive but they seem kind of lightweight, with Costner swinging around on ropes (four or five times), basically like a pirate movie without swordplay. The routine, cheesy adventure-movie score by James Newton Howard keeps intruding into them anyway. The plot's got all sorts of little problems, like how does that (closed, no hot air) balloon stay afloat? How long did submarines stay in commission after even Denver sunk beneath the waves? Where did the sea monster come from - is a few hundred years enough for something that big to evolve? There's a longer version of this movie out there that was shown on TV a few years ago. I don't know what was added, and I'm afraid to ask. I do know that in this version, the editing can be a little haphazard, like in one scene where, with Mariner's ship quite nearby and still presumably in plain view, Hopper orders his goons to catch the ship ("I hate sails!"), but in the next scene, Mariner's taking Tripplehorn on an underwater tour, leaving the kid unattended upstairs. The Atoll set sunk, Costner did reshoots after director Kevin Reynolds left...everything that could've gone wrong in the making of this movie did, which is why it cost as much as several space shuttle launches. But the result isn't half bad...wait, let me clarify. The result is approximately half bad. BACK TO THE W's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE