Waterworld

It is rather surprising given the success of George Miller’s Mad Max films that Waterworld was a box office failure since when it comes to big budget dystopian action films it is certainly on a par with them and in terms of explosions and spectacular stunts even goes beyond them. Costing $175 million to make, the film returned roughly half its budget and won a reputation as one of Hollywood’s costliest miscalculations.

It would be nice to say that the film is better than you might think but it’s not, unless you’re a fan of the “big, dumb fun” school of action movies. Set in a future in which the polar ice caps have melted and the human race has been reduced to a floating world of pariahs fighting over bags of soil, Kevin Costner plays Mariner, a Mad Max type maverick (he’s also got webbed feet and proto-gills although don’t ask me how) who cruises the seas trading dirt (literally). He calls in at a large floating trading post which happens to be attacked by pirates led by Deacon (Dennis Hopper) who is looking for a young girl who has a map tattooed on her back (don’t ask me why) that shows the way to the mythical Dryland). Mariner saves the girl (Tina Majorino) and her foster mother (Jeanne Tripplehorn) pursued by the pirates.

That’s the storyline and it is no more than a vehicle for the spectacular stunts, all of which, like the Mad Max movies were done in real time. Whilst these are state-of-the-art, in terms of characterisation, one cannot but help think of the old time adventure romances for which Errol Flynn became best known, although Costner’s  thinning hair weakens the analogy somewhat. Jeanne Tripplehorn as the romantic interest is a bland presence who is too often framed in soft focus with full make-up when she’s supposed have been days or weeks at sea. Majorino (who would go on to play Deb in Napoleon Dynamite) is OK-ish but Hopper is simply embarrassing in yet another incarnation of his familiar other-the-top psychopath persona.

The film’s ending which calls on more whimsically fantastic elements as it vaunts Mariner to heroic status is frankly ludicrous, shifting tone too markedly and sacrificing whatever credibility the film had established as a grim-humoured action film.  That said, there’s plenty of well-staged crowd-pleasing spectacle here and since when has the absence of intellectual sustenance been a problem for Hollywood? Such is the mystery of film-making.

 

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