Waterworld (1995)

It’s not hard to see how Reynold’s massively budgeted Mad Max on water lost so much money. All that exists in the high concept world of H2O looks like it was found at the local junkyard then left outside to weather the elements for about 10 years. It’s unfortunate, too, because there is an interesting concept behind the displacement of man from his home on land and a return to a state of pure survival.

The $175 million dollar budget, $22 of was Costner’s personal investment, while not obviously mismanaged, was certainly thrown around a bit with the hoards of costumes, needless explosions, and extravagant set pieces. The world that gets built, one void of solid earth, is an unnatural and lawless state of fear and represents an accumulation of all the junk we’ve spent years creating. Now, all the leftover refuse is what keeps the race alive and fighting. The atoll set, a quarter mile in circumference, is literally a giant floating piece of trash, overpopulated with savage descendents of ourselves.

The laws of the land, er water, have changed too. Every scrap of one’s belongings can be bartered for, be it food, water, junk, or the body. The population is also split up into Smokers, Drifters, Atollers, etc, and war between the factions is imminent. It is in this arena that the absurdity of the film steps out into the light and makes the film quite laughable. Admittedly, there are some instances of clever and creative actions. As a whole, the plot-less and crazy sequences only point to the fact that the script went through 36 drafts with contributions from 6 writers. The story, and its point, becomes muddled by bad dialogue and real sense of relation to any character.

And while the story is somewhat telling of human nature, that even when the few remaining humans would need to band together to save their race they choose to fight among themselves, the point is lost. The survivors, in finding the lush and green dryland, have only done so by killing thousands of renegade humans. I guess survival of the fittest is the most apt description; he with gills and webbed toes is king in a world of water. The story could be looked at as a giant experiment, the writers having dropped a bunch of humans in a giant aquarium. Unfortunately, rather than scientists observing their adaptations, they are 12 year old propagating the inhabitants to fight one another.

I feel like Waterworld is a case where someone tried too hard to make something that should have been really cool and in the light of immediate failures just kept going. The fact that failure after failure occurred did not dissuade them. After enough money was already invested all they could do was keep going. Apparently, director Kevin Reynolds left and Costner took control for the last two weeks of filming. Not even Dennis Hopper, usually strange enough to fit into any role, can manage to make is pirate overlord worth paying attention too. I’d like to think that someone would make a legitimate and worthy remake, but who am I kidding?