Review of Waterworld (1995) by Tara S — 04 Oct 2010

With an estimated budget of approximately 175 million dollars, Waterworld is one of the most expensive movies of all time, and, for my money, one of the worst. The film itself tries to be too smart, too cute and offers little substanc, which results in an awful film that is only benefited from some exciting action sequences.

At some unspecified point in our future, the Earth?s polar ice caps melt causing the world to flood and creating one big ocean. Kevin Costner?s character, known as ?the mariner? is a mutant, mer-man that is seemingly the next step in the human evolution process. He travels around on his large boat looking for outposts in the ocean where he can trade some of his items for food or water or whatever else that mer-man needs. He comes to an outpost where its inhabitants realize he is a mer-man and lock him up because of it. Soon a group of raiders, known as ?smokers? come by the establishment looking for a small girl who has a tattoo on her back that is a map of how to get to Dryland. The small girl avoids capture by setting free Mr. mer-man and together they, and another woman, set off on the open ocean looking to find Dryland. After this the leader of the ?smokers,? Dennis Hopper, races off to catch the girl and try to get to Dryland himself.

So essentially your coupling together 145 minutes of sailing and swimming with three or four battle scenes and that?s your movie.

To me the concept of this movie is very cool, its what drew me to seeing this film despite all the negative things I had heard about it. However, that being said, this film delivered on none of that promise- actually it tried to keep things realistic with people coveting paper and dirt while they seemed to build everything out of random junk floating around, and in that respect it succeeded. No, what im saying is different. This was a colossal blockbuster of a movie, a dramatic movie, and they spend all of 0 minutes giving us any character back story or helping us understand why it is that any of the people do what they do. I think the biggest problem with this movie is its scope- its too big for its own good and it cant honestly expect to tell a story this large in a compelling way in 145 minutes. It seems like it would serve better as a book where the characters could roam free and there is more time for everyone.

The worst parts of this movie deal with the main protagonist and antagonist- Mer-man Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper playing ?the Deacon.? Kevin Costner was all kinds of bad sporting webbed feet, and hands while also rocking gills. He doesn?t really talk much, thank goodness, but when he does he talks like his mother was a Bostonian and his father was from Texas. It must be some mer-man talk because everyone else in the film speaks perfect English. As bad as Kevin Costner is, Dennis Hopper is worse. His character tries so hard to be the comic relief while also being the bad-assed leader of a bunch of renegades, something that you cant have both ways. He is missing one of his eyes after he got in a fight with mer-man before the movie, which is apparently his driving force, but we aren?t really told much about it unfortunately.

This is an empty shell of a movie, seemingly remnant of the epics of the 1960?s (I saw a lot of The Planet of the Apes in this). It starts off mildly interesting but trails off soon after. It feels like a movie written by a little kid, everything is justified with a ?because I said so,? and it makes for one painful watch.