What's wrong with Waterworld?

[Batman]

I so didn't need to know that.

[neoolong]

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

It seems like the atolls (at least the one that we see) trade in chits which can be used to buy goods and presumably services. The dirt that the Mariner brought was converted at the value given to pure hydro (water). Probably the chits are only good at that particular atoll based on what is traded and what's needed by the atoll.

Wouldn't any system that converts pee also be useable for seawater? If it could, that's pretty much a perfect solution to the need for fresh water.

[Junghalli]

Guys - any dirt dredged from the ocean floor will be contaminated with salt. Very few, if any, edible plants can grow in such soil.

Were they actually using it to grow stuff? It's been forever since I watched the movie but I sort of had the impression it was valuable for the same reason gold is valuable: mostly just because it was super-rare. Scraps of paper were supposed to be valuable too, presumably for the same reason.

I remember they had some kind of plant that they were growing in a pot. Could have been growing in "night soil" though, rather than the stuff they use for trading.

Edit: also I imagine Waterworld's ocean might be considerably less salty than ours, because it has no continents to replenish the ocean with dissolved minerals. I have no idea whether this would make any real difference though.

[Aaron]

I got the impression they where using the stuff in the "recycling" pond to grow food, or at least as fertilizer.

[Broomstick]

Wouldn't any system that converts pee also be useable for seawater? If it could, that's pretty much a perfect solution to the need for fresh water.

Yeah, if you could manage to process enough volume.

[CaiusWickersham]

Another piece of Fridge Logic for this film -- since the earth's surface is now 5 miles below sea level, how could a city be sitting submerged underwater like it were Rapture? Those buildings should have been nothing but powdered rust, pulverized concrete & glass.

[Knife]

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.

One of the primary purposes of the urinary tract is to eliminate excess water. Your body needs X amount of water, drink more than that and you pee it out. Less, and you retain water. Obviously it is done via electrolytes (salt). That said, with the elimination of other things, urea, BUN and other toxins, drinking pee is usually considered bad. Bad in the sort of way that survival manuals pretty much say don't do it (military manuals). Then again, if you really did need it, you'd have to destill the toxins out. Boiling pee and collecting the vapor to condense back into water would work, but the hand crank gizmo on Water World was not that.

OT;

I rather like the film, own it even. I thought the plot was ok and well executed. I rather liked the little girl's acting and character and loved the pseudo-mom Tripplethorn portrayed. It did have a problem with what a world like that would be like in the long term versus short term but I liked the backyard junkyard-esque gizmo's on the boat.

[Broomstick]

One of the primary purposes of the urinary tract is to eliminate excess water. Your body needs X amount of water, drink more than that and you pee it out. Less, and you retain water. Obviously it is done via electrolytes (salt). That said, with the elimination of other things, urea, BUN and other toxins, drinking pee is usually considered bad. Bad in the sort of way that survival manuals pretty much say don't do it (military manuals). Then again, if you really did need it, you'd have to destill the toxins out. Boiling pee and collecting the vapor to condense back into water would work, but the hand crank gizmo on Water World was not that.

Drinking ordinary piss isn't likely to hurt you as, prior to dehydration, it's pretty dilute - the problem is that there will never be enough to prevent long term dehydration. That way survival manuals say don't do it - you need more water than your bladder will ever provide (you lose water by sweating, breathing, etc. so output via the bladder will always be less than necessary input). In survival situations you need to find water as drinking your own piss is a stop gap at best, and in situations where the water need is that dire the urine becomes ever more concentrated and less healthy/useful.

[Adrian Laguna]

I loved Waterworld, it's one of those movies were every thing's stupid but I'm having far too much fun to care. The whole thing's hilarious. The smokers, the junkyard tech, the sullen but badass main character, the little girl, the crazy old man, the eccentric main bad guy, what's not to love?

[Batman]

Kevin Costner? The fact that the plot makes no sense? The fact that the BACKGROUND for the plot makes no sense?
Of course two of those require you to go and ANALYIZE the movie which is something best not done with ANYTHING that comes out of film studios the world over. As was mentioned before, what gets Waterworld mocked this much is that it took a preposterous amount of money to deliver an at best average movie.

[Aaron]

I loved Waterworld, it's one of those movies were every thing's stupid but I'm having far too much fun to care. The whole thing's hilarious. The smokers, the junkyard tech, the sullen but badass main character, the little girl, the crazy old man, the eccentric main bad guy, what's not to love?

That's what I enjoy as well. Sometimes I want to turn my brain off and watch a retarded cheesy adventure. Is it stupid *shrug*, yeah but I don't much care.

As for it being a flop, it still made around 89 million after it recovered it's budget. Mind you it likely would have been more profitable if the set hadn't sunk and the head stunt guy hadn't run out of gas while commuting from the island to the set via ski-doo and such.

[xammer99]

While it is a bad movie, I enjoyed it because the ginormous set that got wrecked by a storm drove up world wide alumnimum prices and helped create jobs in my neck of the woods thanks to increased production at ALCOA.

[Adrian Laguna]

Kevin Costner?

What's wrong with Kevin Costner? I thought his character was pretty cool.

[PeZook]

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.

Huh...yeah, the guys at the Atoll went all apeshit about Costner's dirt, which he just dug out from the seafloor. I suppose to movie makers just didn't think this through

[Junghalli]

Huh...yeah, the guys at the Atoll went all apeshit about Costner's dirt, which he just dug out from the seafloor. I suppose to movie makers just didn't think this through

Like I said, I got the impression that it was considered valuable for the same reason gold is considered valuable; basically just because it was really rare. They had the same deal going with paper; remember that guy who wanted to purchase the female lead's "services" for some old scraps of newspaper? I doubt those scraps were actually particularly useful for anything, they were just valuable because they were rare and had cultural value.

[Big Orange]

Kevin Costner?

What's wrong with Kevin Costner? I thought his character was pretty cool.

The character is interesting, but Kevin Costner was uncharistmatic, wooden, and mostly dull; the real show in town was Dennis Hopper. Kev seems to be a charmless sleazebag, but it sort of worked with his nautical drifter character.

And it was insinuated that Kev got the dirt from the seabed, when he take a trip down to a sunken North American city, with the love interest in tow in a transparent diving bell (he scoops up the soil in front of her). Although the excitable merchant spurting white wee-wee over the jar of dirt said it was "pure", so the origin of the jar of dirt was never made clear, so another sign of how poorly thought through this movie is.

And where the hell did that giant mutant shark come from? And where did the Smokers get their vast stockpile of booze and fags from?

[Batman]

And where the hell did that giant mutant shark come from?

You mean unlike the mutant HUMAN who is the core character of the movie?

[Big Orange]

And where the hell did that giant mutant shark come from?

You mean unlike the mutant HUMAN who is the core character of the movie?

But the giant brown shark with the weird vertical shaped jaw seemed very random and rendered in bad, dated CGI, so it sticks in the mind.

[aerius]

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.

Since I'm old enough to remember the media crap leading up to its release, I can confirm this and then some. For months before the movie came out, every newspaper & TV entertainment section was talking all kinds of shit about the massive cost overruns and gossiping about rumours on how the actors & producers were completely disfunctional and at each other's throats. Then they were going "there is no way in hell a $250 million movie can be good!", and this went on for months. Then when movie came out all the critics and media sources went "how the fuck is this worth $250 million? This is shit!", and they kept saying that for the entire theatre run. We were literally brainwashed into thinking that the movie sucked.

[LaCroix]

Yes, that's what I meant, the press practically skinned Kostner alive for the budget, for environmental damages, and stuff. Since it already 'flopped' in the staes, everyone jumped that bandwagon.

We thought that Kostner would never ever be seen on screen again.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I never had a problem with Waterworld. It was a competently done post-apocalypse movie, thinking to hard about the apocalypse in question is kind of missing the point. Though it is clear, at least it was to me, that they valued dirt cause it was rare as all fuck, as Junghalli said. They didn't grow dick with it, I'm pretty sure they didn't even know how since they seem to just recycle everything including people. From what I can tell, that gunk they dunk dead people into is some kind of hydroponics deal, using the bodies as a kind of fertilizer. Plus these people don't seem like they understand how it, or anything, works...they're literally in the stone age, that's why the Smokers have such an advantage. The Smokers have guns, everyone else seemed to marvel at the concept of a pointy stick.

Frankly, I think one reason everyone hates it is because they were told to; as the success of stuff like Zero Punctuation shows, a lot of people can hate X movie or Y game because critics say so. Over the years the idea becomes a meme, a concept independent of the actual film itself, which may or may not even be "bad" by your personal opinion. It's just "common knowledge" that it's bad, so it must be bad. If it weren't bad all those people wouldn't have said it was bad. It eventually becomes irrelevent if it's bad or good, everyone just accepts it's "supposed" to be bad and you're "supposed" to not like it because critics all agree you should hate it so there. Kind of like what happened to the Daily Show but in reverse.

[Bounty]

The Smokers have guns, everyone else seemed to marvel at the concept of a pointy stick.

Not that the smokers understand their technology either. They're just lucky they have a supply of magic-oil and magic-engines that run forever. Costner's diving bell and catamaran - both new builds using limited resources - are a lot more impressive technologically than some mouthbreather who is lucky enough to own a leftover jetski that automagically doesn't rust too much.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Of course, none of them understand what the "ancients" left behind really. But the Smokers' clearly have an advantage in many ways, like for example a plane with a machine gun. Really, if they had more fuel they'd probably run the place.

Though, the way it was worded, I always got the impression there was more than one bunch of Smokers and they all just acted as seperate tribes. The Mariner came from someone beyond the local "region" of the atol and the Smokers, at least if I understood the dialogue, so the fact he knew what and who they were implies he probably encountered some other Smoker clan...also it would make sense, as there would prolly be other supertankers left standing after the "Great Flood" besides the Deez.

There was also the mention of "slavers" and people who live on those lighthouse things (Portugreeks they were called, IIRC) so yeah probably more than one bunch of survivors about. Indeed, it's likely "slavers" are just another kind of Smoker clan with a more logical economic system than:

1--Dig stuff up from the ocean floor
2--Smoke
3--????
4--PROFIT!

[18-Till-I-Die]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention.

I read somewhere that, according to the writers, the Smokers know that Dryland exists not as a legend but a fact because they drege stuff up from the ocean floor. They know the world used to be land, not water, everyone else thinks otherwise. That's why they want the girl, they know the reality of the situation: we're down to the wire on resources as a species and somewhere they can grow food is out there, so they have to find it ASAP.

[Junghalli]

When I was watching the movie I remember it gave me a really confused impression of what time period it was supposed to be taking place. The Smokers gave me the impression the apocalypse couldn't have happened too long ago, since they still had all that operating machinery and fuel, and they apparently still hadn't run down their stock of cigarettes even. And you had that bit with the Smoker leader looking at a picture of some guy with a recognizable landmark behind him and saying he'd let him down or something, implying that he knew the guy (I kind of got the impression watching it that the guy was supposed to be his father or something), which would mean the flooding couldn't have happened more than decades ago. But then they've apparently had time for the existence of dry land to fade into being a legend.