Waterworld (1995) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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It’s time for an aquatic adventure with Kevin Costner, Prince of Seas.

Waterworld is an epic science-fiction film that unfortunately doesn’t quite connect with its audience. For all of its production value and star power, it feels like a fantastical adaptation of other post-apocalyptic stories.

First Impressions

The trailer for this film, apparently narrated by James Earl Jones, is about a world, made of water. It stars Kevin Costner as a man that exists on a future Earth that is now entirely covered with water. Other than a number of action moments, and people swimming in the water, not much is evident about the film. Is it really just The Road Warrior but on the ocean? Let’s see if readers of Sci-Fi Saturdays can fathom what this film is all about!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Centuries from now, the polar ice caps have melted flooding the world. The remnants of humanity live on boats and in floating atolls. One such person is the Mariner (Kevin Costner) who sails the seas in his trimaran. He enters one such atoll to do some trading with a container of dirt, which is extremely valuable. The Mariner overhears Nord (Gerard Murphy) speaking about a myth of a young girl with a tattoo on her back that indicates the way to Dryland. Enter Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her young ward Enola (Tina Majorino), who happens to have a tattoo on her back. The Elders of the Atoll ask the Mariner to provide “his seed” to help them continue, but he says “no.”

They discover that the Mariner is a mutant, with webbed feet and gills behind his ears and sentence him to death. He is to be lowered into a pit of mud and other things, to be reclaimed and recycled for the good of the people. As his cage is being lowered into the muck a group of pirates on jet skis and power boats, called Smokers, attack. They decimate a lot of the atoll, as Nord attempts to capture Enola. Helen frees The Mariner from his cage as long as he promises to take her and Enola with him. As he makes his way to his craft he manages to save the local “sheriff” (R.D. Call; called Enforcer in the credits) and his child. The Mariner sails his trimaran out the gates and manages to fight off several Smokers, and uses a harpoon cable to turn a gunboat towards their leader, The Deacon (Dennis Hopper). The Deacon’s boat explodes, seriously wounding the man and costing him his left eye.

Another elderly man from the atoll, named Gregor (Michael Jeter), escapes in a homemade balloon. Out in open water, The Mariner regrets bringing the women along. Enola annoys him and neither can pull their own weight. He threatens to kill Enola, but Helen offers herself to him, but he rejects her advances, to her relief. Back at the Smokers base of operations, a giant tanker ship (revealed subtly later to be the Exxon Valdez), Deacon gets a fake eye (which he forego’s for a patch) as he schemes ways to track The Mariner and the girl with the map. The Mariner’s boat is damaged when a Smoker pilot (Jack Black) finds them and Helen accidentally shoots his plane with a harpoon attached to the trimaran. Between that incident, and young Enola drawing all over the boat with crayons, The Mariner is eager to rid himself of them.

However, Helen is demanding that The Mariner take them to Dryland, which he has said he has seen. Over the days on the boat, they are able to tolerate each other. The Mariner saves Helen from a particularly surly drifter (Kim Coates) who barters for 30 minutes with the woman. He even teaches Enola how to swim. They approach a local barter outpost in need of resin to make repairs, but it is a trap set by The Deacon, and The Mariner barely manages to escape with his damaged ship. He chastises Helen for her belief in Dryland, saying she’s “a fool to believe in something” she’s never seen. He places her inside a homemade diving bell and they journey under the ocean to the ruins of a 20th Century city, presumably Denver or something else in the Rockies. They arrive back on the surface to discover Enola has been abducted by Smokers, and his boat is destroyed. He breathes for Helen underwater while they hide from the Deacon and his crew, who only leave with the girl.

Luckily, the smoke from the wreck attracts Gregor, who rescues them in his balloon. He has joined other survivors from the atoll, including the Enforcer, and they agree to help rescue Enola. On board the ‘Deez, as The Deacon refers to it, his men attempt to understand the tattoo on her back. She becomes feisty and tells them the Legend of the mariner, who will no doubt rescue her and kill all of them. The Deacon is eager to find Dryland for the hundreds of people on his vessel to pillage and use. The Mariner is able to track the Smokers down, and sneaks aboard the ship. He threatens to drop a flare into the oil reserves if Enola isn’t handed over. The Deacon thinks he’s bluffing, but The Mariner makes good on his threat and the ship goes up in flames.

The Deacon attempts to fly away with Enola but The Mariner brings the plane down and rescues the girl, leaving the Smokers to die in the fiery wreck. As he flies away on the balloon, Enola falls into the water and is about to be reclaimed by The Deacon–who has managed to escape serious injury. The Mariner bungee jumps from the balloon and saves the girl moments before The Deacon and two other Smokers collide their jet skis in a giant fireball. Gregor has deciphered the code on Enola’s tattoo and sets course for Drylan, a verdant, tropical paradise. Enola, Helen, Gregor and the Enforcer choose to stay, but The Mariner still feels he doesn’t belong and builds a new craft. He says his goodbyes and even though he has come to connect with other people, he sets sail back into the oceans of Waterworld.

“He doesn’t have a name, so death can’t find him…He can hide in the shadow of the noon sun. He can be right behind you and you won’t even know it till you’re dead.” – Enola, regarding the Mariner

History in the Making

Waterworld marks a turning point for sci-fi movies in a number of ways. At its release in 1995 it was the most expensive film to make, at approximately $235 dollars. It would hold this record until the release of the decidedly non-sci-fi film Titanic in 1997. And while it did turn a very small profit, the film is seen as a disappointment both financially and critically. It is lumped in with some of the larger vanity projects that bombed in the previous decades including Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Ishtar (1987). This narrative also is seen as breaking the streak of both successful and popular films for actor Kevin Costner.

Costner, who came to prominence in the mid-80s, quickly became an admired star with a successful string of films. Beginning with The Untouchables in 1987 and continuing to the end of the decade with Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner would become a major Hollywood player in the 90s. There he starred, produced, and directed Dances with Wolves, brought his vision of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Bodyguard to the screen, and had prominent roles in both JFK and Wyatt Earp. And then Waterworld: the albatross that stalled his career and reportedly ended his friendship with director Kevin Reynolds (who directed him in both Fandango and Prince of Thieves).

Genre-fication

Waterworld has its roots in some of the classic stories of Jules Verne and HG Wells as a group of explorers sail the oceans in search of a lost world, in this case the mythical Dryland. It is a mix of themes from Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of The Earth showcasing the epicness of the pilgrimage, but rather than be set in the 1800s, it takes place hundreds of years from now,  in a post-apocalyptic world flooded by global warming. It also, more evidently, is a riff on the popular Mad Max films, specifically Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior), about a loner in a post-apocalyptic world. Max, however, lives in a desert world devoid of water. The Mariner is surrounded by it. Aside from the setting, the similarities are quite striking.

Both films feature a loner character that doesn’t talk much, riding around on their customized vehicle in the apocalyptic landscape. The myths of the fabled Dryland, are similar to the search for “Tomorrow-morrow Land” by the children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, while the Smokers on their motorized conveyances are akin to the bikers led by Lord Humungus and Wez. Enola is a stand-in for the Feral Kid (or any number of children from Thunderdome), Gregor in his flying machine equates to the Gyro Captain, and the Atoll has its similarities to Bartertown. Unlike Max, The Mariner doesn’t get the same treatment in terms of a backstory. While he comes to appreciate the company of his companions and know them, the opposite is not true.

The tone of the film also seems at odds with itself at times. Sequences with The Mariner are mostly firm and serious. He is out for his survival and he doesn’t take much lip from anyone, even children. He wants to be left alone to do his thing, and yet he has been placed onto a path where he must now learn to interact with others, specifically women. On the flip side, the scenes with the Smokers and The Deacon are almost farcical. Dennis Hopper plays his pirate captain character with a wide range, making jokes, and being that vile type of villain that will smile as he kills you. An even more extreme version of the Marek character in No Escape. The Smokers seem to exist only as a parody of the worst parts of late-20th Century society. Instead of working together with “society” they are out for themselves; having all the vices of smoking, drinking, and raucous behavior. They also have powered machines, somehow running on some stores of gasoline (or “go-juice” as they call it). These elements make Waterworld seem almost satirical, but not in an extreme way as Demolition Man did.

Societal Commentary

These differences between the two “tribes” of people, The Mariner and those he encounters, and The Deacon and his Smokers are the crux of the film. Satirical or not, the characters are meant as parallels for elements in modern society. While not quite “environmentalists,” the characters at the Atoll have limited resources that they share amongst themselves, bartering with various drifters that come by. They reclaim the waste from their own bodies (as does The Mariner) into drinkable “hydro” as well as recycle their dead into a sludge-like compost suitable for growing a few plants. On the other extreme, the Smokers drive their noisy machines that pollute the atmosphere, smoke, drink, litter, and basically choose to take what they want. The filmmakers even placed this tribe aboard The ‘Deez, a wholly unsubtle nod that the boat is the ill fated Exxon Valdez, captained by Joseph Hazelwood (to whose picture The Deacon speaks to at one point, calling him “Joe”). This may be lost on modern audiences, but the boat was involved in a massive oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989. It was the second worst spill in US waters after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, and fresh on audiences minds in 1995.

For those that don’t pick up the pro-environmental message from the characters, they are likely to see the even bigger sign the filmmakers created. The entire premise of the film hinges on the flooding of the Earth. In a clever bit of synergy, the opening imagery of the Universal Studios logo (a spinning globe) remains on-screen as the camera zooms in on the polar ice caps as they begin to melt. The sea level rises covering all the visible land masses on the animated globe, before drifting through the clouds and starting the film on the open ocean. The message being that if people continue their current behavior of polluting the planet with greenhouse gasses, that the temperature of Earth will continue to rise leading to global catastrophe where future generations of humans would need to brush up on their nautical skills.

The Science in The Fiction

While the premise for Waterworld’s creation makes for an intriguing film, it would never actually happen. While there is concern that global climate change is melting deep pack ice, the amount of water produced from a total meltdown would never be anywhere enough to cover over the 15-20,000 feet necessary to cover the mountains in the United States. At best, scientists believe that only a few hundred feet of coastline would be covered, leaving much “Dryland,” even though the ecosystem, and many major cities, would be devastated. Depending on how far into the future this is (the novelization states it’s around the year 2500), it’s surprising that The Deacon and his men still have oil left, and have the ability to process it into fuel. Without any ground to drill for more oil (assuming that there was any to drill for), the ‘Deez still has apparently quite a bit left in it. The need for these characters to still have gas is obviously a conceit for the plot of the film, but it seems a little impossible.

The film opens with The Mariner urinating into an open cup, and reclaiming the water from his waste. While this may seem gross, it is a viable source for clean water, certainly easier than desalinating ocean water. In a world where the planet was entirely covered with water, this would be one of the only ways to get fresh water. Alternately the survivors might be able to recapture rain water, but nothing about rain or storms is ever seen or mentioned. Viable soil is also an issue in the post-deluge world, hence why the Mariner’s cup of soil is so valuable. He actually is one of the few characters that would be able to get more soil, by being able to swim to the “ocean floor” and reclaim as much as he needed.

Finally, there’s the Mariner’s mutation. He has developed webbed feet and gills, and is the only character presented that has such a change. While there is certainly a chance for spontaneous mutations in organisms, nothing like this would be possible. Besides the exterior characteristics, changes within his physiology would also need to be altered allowing him to breathe both in air and water. Given a long enough timeline, it is possible that he comes from an evolved strain of humans, but the film doesn’t talk about any of that. Wouldn’t that have been some more intriguing backstory to give the character?

The Final Frontier

For many of its storytelling failings, Waterworld does several things well. Primarily it tells an entire story entirely on the open water. The production had several hardships in filming practically on water that would not exist if they had filmed on a soundstage. But the reality that the actors are actually on the ocean makes for a film that has a verisimilitude that can’t be captured otherwise. It also has some impressive aquatic stunts with planes, boats, jet skis and the trimaran. It’s no wonder that a tie-in for the film was a stunt show created for three of Universal Studios’ theme parks.

The film also had tie-in merchandise, including a novelization by Max Allan Collins, a comic series from Acclaim Comics that focuses on The Mariner’s backstory, and a series of Kenner toys including action figures and a trimaran playset. Waterworld is often thought of in negative terms today. It does have some merits that make it worthwhile, but it also served as a warning to studios that they would need to be more judicious about greenlighting epic sci-fi  films with “guaranteed” stars.

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