What's wrong with Waterworld?

[Vympel]

It's one of the biggest bombs ever, but watching it again over the weekend, I wonder why. It's not great, by any means, but it's still entertaining, the acting's pretty good, the prodcution values are high, and the story's not too bad. Why is it so panned? This is no Postman.

[Gandalf]

I found everyone except for Dennis Hopper to be quite annoying, especially the small girl.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I've always liked Waterworld. Definitely not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of telling its story.

Vympel, have you ever seen the extended cut? It was made for the movie's TV premiere (and got a DVD release last year), and while it doesn't add a tremendous amount of material, it does help flesh out a few things here and there, particularly the ending.

[Vympel]

I've always liked Waterworld. Definitely not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of telling its story.

Vympel, have you ever seen the extended cut? It was made for the movie's TV premiere (and got a DVD release last year), and while it doesn't add a tremendous amount of material, it does help flesh out a few things here and there, particularly the ending.

I read about it on Wikipedia, but haven't seen it - apparently the extended DVD cut was taken from the televised (and watered down - no pun intended!) version that ABC originally aired, so its a bit assy compared to a true restoration. Hopefully they'll bring it out on Blu-Ray.

[Batman]

The whole premise annoyed me. So, where does all that water come from? Also, if all of Earth is flooded except Dryland how come New York is scant hundreds of meters underwater (if that?) Why can the Bad Guys who allegedly are low on fuel nevertheless splurge it on completely pointless RAR we're Bad Guys missions that gain them nothing worthwhile?

[Bounty]

I suppose it's easy to bash Waterworld considering who made it, what it was supposed to be and how much it cost.

At the end of the day it's a pretty entertaining movie, and the production values are staggering, but for me it really suffers from having a half-baked plot. It's a speculative fiction movie built on an outrageous premise, so I expect it to either acknowledge the outrageousness of the premise and run with it, or provide a proper and believable framework for this world to work, but the movie gives you neither. It's dead-serious about jetskis and airplanes in a world that's been submerged long enough for a new culture to arise and gills of all things to evolve. That, for me, makes it hard to stay involved in the movie. If Costner had either thought his premise through and made a consistent this-may-be-the-future vignette or if he'd just gone for an all-out adventure movie I think Waterworld would have been much better received, but as it is it's neither fish nor fowl. You don't get a very though-provoking SF story but you get enough of one to bog down the action and the end result is something that looks amazing but feels very hollow.

I like it. I watch it when it's on and I do like some of the small touches that make the world feel at least a bit plausible, like the marine code or using water chips as currency. But it doesn't really rise above the "oh, nice" factor for me.

[Zac Naloen]

The whole premise annoyed me. So, where does all that water come from? Also, if all of Earth is flooded except Dryland how come New York is scant hundreds of meters underwater (if that?) Why can the Bad Guys who allegedly are low on fuel nevertheless splurge it on completely pointless RAR we're Bad Guys missions that gain them nothing worthwhile?

The presence of dry land always made me think that there are probably pockets of dry land all over the planet but that the human population is so low (in the thousands?) that word of it never really spread and those who did find it guarded the secret jealously from bandits and out laws.


I always liked the film when I was a kid, but I haven't watched it in many years now, does the production hold up even now, maybe it's worth tracking down a dvd for rental...?

[Bounty]

Production holds up thanks to loads of practical effects. It may have cost a bundle but it beats the shit out of anything CGI, especially with 1995 tech.

[Dooey Jo]

I thought Waterworld was pretty cool, but then again I was only about nine or so when I saw it, which means I only remember little bits and pieces, like drinking water made from pee.

It may have cost a bundle but it beats the shit out of anything CGI, especially with 1995 tech.

You mean like Jurassic Park?

[Big Orange]

The main reason Waterworld was a comparative failure, despite being a movie being made on a scale not done since then by Hollywood, was because of its highly egotistical but equally bland leading man, Kevin Costner. Dennis Hopper saved/stole Waterworld in the same way Alan Rickman saved/stole Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I enjoyed the original Stargate movie and Dead Man's Chest more than Waterworld, even though I enjoyed its huge floating sets and action set pieces.

[LaCroix]

As far as I remember Kevin Costner's reputation had a knack back then when the movie came out, and that took it down. I always liked it, but then, I really do like boats and pirates and stuff.

[Broomstick]

It was a "failure" due to the comparison of cost to make to box office income. If the movie had only cost $1,000,000 to make it would have been hailed a success but it cost a hundred times that and didn't turn a quick profit.

It's not a bad movie - but for what it cost it make it had to be a GREAT movie to be called a success.

[PeZook]

The presence of dry land always made me think that there are probably pockets of dry land all over the planet but that the human population is so low (in the thousands?) that word of it never really spread and those who did find it guarded the secret jealously from bandits and out laws.

Dirt is apparently a precious trade resource in the movie. Since it works at all, it means there's a source of it, somewhere. Costner's character can simply dive to get some since he doesn't need advanced gear to do it, but settlements can apparently get dirt to grow food in from other sources.

So yeah, it's likely there's dry land, or places shallow enough to dig for dirt, all over the place. Hell, with the kind of navigational tools shown in the movie (none), there can be large landmasses everywhere, it's just that the local primitives can't find it and reliably guide others to them, because keeping course over long distances is impossible without navigational aids.

[Big Orange]

Although the physical sets were huge and there was a virtual fleet of boats, there was still a fair bit of CGI effects: for example the Smokers' supertanker lair was a set on dry land, Gregor's baloon, harpoon guns, and that unexplained giant, mutant shark with the vertical maw.

And there was some negative publicity surrounding Waterworld when it was released, when there were reports of environmental damage done to the sea by the film crew, and at the 1995 Venice Film Festival Kevin Costner was getting heckled by a satirical comedian acting as a journalist (not Sascha Baron Cohen). I personally say that Waterworld was roughly comparable to PotC: At World's End, only that At World's End had a stronger cast ensemble with Orlando Bland filling a similar niche to Kevin Costner. Both movies are well made but full of too many gaping flaws, padding, and inconsistancies, clearly struggling under their own bloat.

I'd give both movies a score of 5/10 or 6/10, both movies are by no means terrible, but considering the vast amount of resources invested into them that didn't stop them from being disappointing, which was why Waterworld and At World's End were critically panned in spite of being moderately entertaining.

[Starglider]

Dirt is apparently a precious trade resource in the movie. Since it works at all, it means there's a source of it, somewhere. Costner's character can simply dive to get some since he doesn't need advanced gear to do it, but settlements can apparently get dirt to grow food in from other sources.

Or they could just use... a dredge. Tedious without a power assist but completely practical. After all that island must be in water shallow enough to anchor otherwise it would be drifting about randomly.

[PeZook]

Or they could just use... a dredge. Tedious without a power assist but completely practical. After all that island must be in water shallow enough to anchor otherwise it would be drifting about randomly.

If they had a practical dredge, they wouldn't get such a hard-on over Costner's single jar of dirt.

[Mayabird]

For me (and apparently many, many other people), it went kinda like this:

...they wrote the entire movie around that bungee-jumping scene, didn't they? They were snorting coke at a party and someone said, "You know what'd be awesome? A scene where somebody bungee-jumps out of a balloon and plucks somebody else out of the water just in the nick of time! And there should be an explosion too!" And the entire movie was written to make that happen. I want the last two hours of my life back.


Similar thing to The Postman. I watched it and thought, "This is a bad movie, but it's not absolutely terrible. The movie listing gave it zero stars, but it could get one. I've seen one star movies that were worse." And then that very last scene was just so horrible that I said, "YOU LOSE YOUR STAR! AWFUL MOVIE! YOU SUCK FOREVER! BURN AND DIE AND THEN BURN AGAIN JUST TO MAKE SURE!"

[Themightytom]

I thought the Deacon's dialogue was pretty funny, especially in the opening act.

"Maybe he doesn't like Chuck, call him Charles!"

Kevin Costner's fishing strategy seems dicey.

HOW HAVE THEY NOT RUN OUT OF BULLETS???

I didn't know what to do with the revelation at the end that the smokers were living on the Exxon Valdez O.o


I didn't see it on the big screen but I will usually leave it on if I see it on TV, it has pretty good rewatch value.

[Starglider]

If they had a practical dredge, they wouldn't get such a hard-on over Costner's single jar of dirt.

So they're morons, just like the characters in Star Trek, Transformers and pretty much every other script to come out of Hollywood.

[Stark]

I think it just sucked because of herd mentality; it was high-profile and very expensive, so when people started saying OMG SUXX and it didn't perform well, everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. It's a bad movie, but as Vympel says it's not an outrageously or unusually bad movie, and I just think it became a media cliche to bag it out (especially since people were still doing it YEARS later). It's the reverse-Counterstrike effect.

[Junghalli]

If they had a practical dredge, they wouldn't get such a hard-on over Costner's single jar of dirt.

The island might not have a practical dredge but the dirt could have been bought via traders from somebody who did have one. Maybe dirt is that community's big resource so they work very hard to keep the Big Secret of Dredging under wraps, and all the traders know is that they can get it somehow. Or maybe by the time the dirt reaches the island it's just been through so many middlemen traders that every time they ask where it comes from the trader just says "I bought it from some guy". Sort of like how Midaeval Europeans thought all kinds of ridiculous things about where Asian spices came from because they bought them from guys who bought them from other guys who bought them from other guys; there was no direct link to the source.

After all, Waterworld is an ocean the size of the entire Earth. There's plenty of room for long trading networks.

Of course, it does make me wonder what they were paying for the dirt with. Slave labor? Hookers? Some kind of manufactured goods? Food?

[Batman]

If memory serves, water (presumably meaning drinkable sweet water what with there being saltwater aplenty) figured into their economy in no small part.

[Broomstick]

Guys - any dirt dredged from the ocean floor will be contaminated with salt. Very few, if any, edible plants can grow in such soil. Waterworlders really should be surviving on fish, seaweed (some of which actually are pretty tasty) and the occasional slice of longpork.

But clearly, this is not a movie where you should think too hard about such things.

[Big Orange]

If memory serves, water (presumably meaning drinkable sweet water what with there being saltwater aplenty) figured into their economy in no small part.

Kevin Costner had to drink his own processed pee...

...although is urine sterile?

[Broomstick]

Purified pee.

I have the plans for a solar still that would let you refine your own urine to a drinkable state in your own backyard right now. This is not rocket science. Of course, the gizmo in the film worked a hell of a lot faster than a solar still, but who wanted to wait around 4-8 hours for a glass of water?

Urine is nearly sterile when it leaves your body, presuming you don't have a bladder or kidney infection. You can drink it straight without harmful effects (some people even promote this as a healthful practice) although it is recommended that you consume fresh water as well.