All Spoilers Movie Review: Waterworld

Hey Fama-llama-rama-ding-dong!

It's the end of September and my university classes are taking a lot of time. Not to mention getting back into the swing of not being a useless lump in the corner chugging iced coffees. 

Ahh, the good life. 

Not to mention that by the time I actually post this it will be October which meanssssssssssssssssssssssss...

Halloween movies! Since I don’t really differentiate between seasons with the movies I watch, it will pretty much just be those nostalgic ones that are iconic for Halloween. 

I know you know what I’m saying…

I wasn't intending this blog to slowly descend into the snarky silliness that is the movie review a la Rune, but here we are. I discovered I love doing this and I want to have more fun exploring this area of writing as much as I can!

Right-o my folk, let's get down to the nitty gritty of today's post. Because yeah, you read that title right. I'm diving head-first into the moistest flick of 1995, Waterworld. Starring Kevin Costner as The Mariner, Helen Tripplehorn as Helen, Tina Majorino as Enola, and Dennis Hopper as The Deacon. 

Let’s do this shit!

The ice caps have all melted and because of that land just mysteriously doesn't exist anymore, but it's cool because literally no one is here to explain that factoid to us, and even if the polar ice caps melted, we would still have some land. But that is neither here nor there, because as we learned from The Core, science is whatever we need it to be to explain plot... 

Or not explain it in Waterworld's case. 

This movie opens up with Kevin Costner pissing into a plastic container. 

Gruss.

But it’s cool, because he isn’t about to Bear Grylls it straight and warm. Nah, he has a goofy machine that makes it into drinkable water. Neat. He however hasn’t figured out that he can distill salt water, which is the least of my beef with this movie. 

Then we have him dropping some little pellet things into a bowl and he yeets himself into the water. No explanation for this, and as we will learn, explaining things isn’t the Mariner’s deal. 

Note: This movie refers to Kevin Costner’s character as “The Mariner” so I will be using “Mariner” as his name for this review.

While he is down there, for what seems like too long, his boat has a visitor and someone steals his lime tree. 

Nevermind that there is literally nothing around so he probably would have seen this dude coming two weeks ago, but what do I know?

Suddenly a balloon that looks like a nutsack comes to the surface, followed by Mariner, who returns to the ship with the beginner loot of any RPG fishing minigame: a pair of nasty-ass boots. He puts them on and then immediately takes them off when he sees the other guy, unaware that this other sailor stole his lime tree. He is sus of the dude, but not sus enough to actually look around all 18 feet of his ship and notice the one other living thing there is gone. 

Then he realizes that he’s been duped when lime-stealer shows him his limes. 

Smooth.

But Mariner’s sails are down, which means that he will be super far behind when he catches up with the thief. Before he can try, though, Mariner notices some dudes on water motorcycles coming at him Mad Max style. 

I appreciate their dedication to looking filthy when they are literally surrounded by water.

Mariner swings very dramatically all of three feet to get a better look, because that helps I guess, and realizes he has to get his floating ball sack of loot from the water before the dirty guys reach it and gank him. 

He gets them sails up and manages to snatch the loot, but the dirty boys are hot on his trail. 

Meanwhile, Lime Thief doesn’t notice that Mariner is catching up to him because he is too busy stuffing his face with limes, skin, pith and all. 

Do you, my moist friend. 

The thief sees Mariner catching up to him in a big way and starts to panic. 

He totally is.

But the Mariner isn't after the limes now, he’s out for revenge. Fully running over the thief’s boat, taking the sail off and leaving him stranded on the open ocean. The dirty boys get the thief, showing that even in a lawless world of water, crime doesn’t pay. 

Next we see Mariner pulling up to the Atoll, a floating city with serious Fallout vibes, and they don’t want to let him in. That is, until he shows them a treasure so breathtaking, so miraculous, so PRICELESS that they can’t even handle it… Wait, does he have a jar of dirt?

HE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

And just like any suburban dad who hears about a pile of free dirt, they let him in and start relentlessly asking him where he got it, wanting to touch it, eat it, whatever dads do with dirt.

Note to my Father: What is your reaction to finding a pile of free dirt? Is it the same as that time there was a nice boulder in the creek by your house and you spent a lot of personal time trying to think of a way to smuggle it out of the creek and into your backyard so you could have a giant rock to add to your rock collection? I 100% get my goblin energy from you. It was a nice rock though…

Dirt is apparently something super rare and special even though everyone is covered in it.

It’s ok, Jack, your jar of dirt is special, too.

He sails through the atoll and sees them roll a dead lady into a pile of sludge that is probably peeps and poops, but I will call it “Free Soup”… for reasons. 

Mariner bribes some kids to watch his ship with some mirrors while he sells his dirt and they’re pretty jazzed, because in a world where mirrors are rare they’re just dying to develop body issues. Then he goes off to sell the dirt for water, struggling to walk on a flat surface. Cute. 

Note: If it seems like I’m glossing over the beginning here, it’s because I am. This movie is over two hours long and this is just the beginning. 

Mariner stops in at a bar/shop and sees that there is nothing to buy. He drinks some water from a woman named Helen and also buys her shelves and a tomato plant. Meanwhile in the background some creep is staring at a little girl with a tattoo on her back, understanding from a man who is a “hydro addict” I mean, aren’t we all? That this is the kid he is looking for. Helen, realizing that the kid’s whole back is exposed ushers her back inside where people can’t see her. If it is so important to keep hidden, why not give her a shirt that will hide it?????

It is a cute top, tho…

As Mariner is trying to leave the Atoll, he is stopped by a council of elders who show him what appears to be very much a teenage girl around the age of 15 and ask, quite reasonably, for him to impregnate her to expand their gene pool. Mariner turns the offer down, and since he is a 30-something year old man who doesn’t want to have sex with an actual child, they immediately think something is wrong with him. Gruss.

The leaders have him searched, finding gills and webbed feet. Turns out Mariner is a man fish, which you would think would be a highly desirable trait in a world that is literally all water, but nah, they arrest him, throw him in a cage, and put him to death. Apparently they don’t want to X-Men up their gene pool with some useful Old Gregg genetics. 

To be fair, I don’t think Baileys is a thing on this moist planet.

Cut to Helen and some old man trying to understand the tattoo on the little girl’s back. Turns out her name is Enola, ‘Alone’ backwards, get it??? and the tattoo is some big mystery, even though it really looks like a blurry blob surrounded by characters in another language. They decide to ask the Mariner in his cage to see if he understands it. 

I wonder how many 80s and 90s kids got this tattoo, and if they’re doing ok.

The old guy, who’s name is Old Gregor Not Old Gregg, goes to ask the Mariner about the tattoo, however the conversation doesn’t go the way he plans, because apparently being thrown into a cage for being a man-fish put him in a salty-ass mood. Mariner tells Gregor that he will help him decipher the tattoo if the old man can help him bust out. Old Gregor ends up needing to leave before he can help, as guards notice him by the cage and chase him off. 

In the morning the council declares that Mariner will be lowered into the Free Soup to be ‘recycled,’ which is great and all but also sad because it only took a severe case of global warming to get people to recycle. They start lowering him down but then suddenly stop because, LE GASP, dirty people are waiting outside.

The king of the dirty people is smoking, and shocker, they’re called “Smokers” 

Note: Not The Smoggies, much to my chagrin. 

I guess the Smokers are just dirty pirates… or normal pirates. Except they have guns, cigarettes and gasoline for some reason, even though no one has figured out how to desalinate sea water. 

The the Smokers decide to rikkity-wreck the floating garbage city with a rail gun that they just happen to 1. Own and B. have bullets for. 

HOW??? HOW ARE YOU GETTING THESE BULLETS THAT WOULD OBVIOUSLY BE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN AND WHY DO YOUR WET GUNS ALL WORK?

I’m ok. I’m fine. It’s FINE.

In a scene that takes ENTIRELY too long, the Smokers attack the Atoll and everything is on fire. Mariner’s cage falls into the Free Soup, meanwhile Helen and Old Gregor are trying to figure out how to free him. Blah Blah, they do and Mariner books it to his boat. Gregor is going to escape with Enola and Helen but accidentally looses his DaVinci flying balloon without them, so they try to escape with the Mariner. Long story long, they do. The Deacon’s boat gets blown up by an idiot with a railgun, big badda boom, Deacon loses an eye. Helen, Enola and Mariner escape. 

That was just the beginning of the movie… wheeze. Why is this movie so long?

After their escape, Helen is trying to talk to Mariner and he’s being an anti-social butthead. She manages to grab a handful of hairy man-fish tiddy, and we have the first of many moments where Helen appears to find Mariner attractive even though she shouldn’t. He wants to dump the kid overboard because she’s not very useful and takes up resources and Helen has to argue  why murdering a child is bad. 

Meanwhile Enola is off doing that thing where movies try to make a kid seem innocent by sitting there humming a song, but really it’s super creepy. And you know it’s a cheesy way to say this kid knows things even if she doesn’t realize she does. Where did that song come from? Also she is always drawing things like trees, horses, mountains… How would she know what those look like? It’s easy to see how this movie will be largely centered around Enola and her tattoo. 

Helen tries to proposition Mariner by offering him sex and he shoots her down AFTER she gets naked for him. Rude. Instead he drops the sail on her and she gets buried in it. Rude. Then next thing we know, he is climbing the mast to avoid his feelings and the sail is back up, because that’s how boats work, right?

I don’t know how boats work. 

We cut back to Deacon who is being fitted for a prosthetic eye, which I think looks AMAZING but clearly everyone else disagrees. 

I would have painted an anime eye on his face.

He ends up going with the good ol’ fashioned eye patch, because pirate. Then he goes to check on this guy who lives inside of their barge who is just chillin’ on crude oil. I will call him Bottles for very obvious reasons…

Bottles is only seen twice, but I had to mention him because look at those glasses. That’s all. He just serves to show us that they have oil, but not to explain how it is found, refined, and used. Just that they have it. 

Meanwhile, Mariner gets even MORE crusty when he finds out that Enola found his crayons in and has been drawing her horses and trees all over his boat, but he doesn’t care about how she knows about these weird things… nah, he’s just mad because she touched his crayons and Mariner doesn’t like to share.. He takes it away and she calls him out for being a jerk and thinking he’s a tough guy. 

The spray tans in this movie are out of control.

Mariner sees the error of his ways and decides to be a better person, to let the kid draw on his boat while they all navigate the ocean together like one big, happy, fam-

Oh wait, no. He throws Enola overboard because he’s sick of her being a child. Helen dives in to save her because, in a world full of water Enola never learned to swim… Mariner turns his ship around and gets them out. 

Aww, look Fam, character growth. Wait, nevermind.

A plane shows up and because Enola is a child and has never seen one before, waves. Mariner, in all his growth, straight up smacks Enola upside the head. 

Tell me, Mariner; does it count as growth if you attempt to drown a child, save the child, then assault the child?

I’m not even going to touch on where-the-fuck and how-the-fuck the Smokers have a plane. I am incensed. 

The plane starts shooting at the boat. While Mariner runs below deck to get something to stop the plane, Enola starts drawing again, like ya do, and Helen decides to use a harpoon to shoot the plane down. A harpoon with a very obvious rope attached to it, because it is a fucking HARPOON. So now the plane is attached to the ship via a rope and is wrapping up the main sail and the mast, fucking everything up. 

Mariner climbs the sail, blah blah the plan gets detached, blah blah and Mariner goes about showing Helen and Enola how to fix the boat-

No wait, he forces Helen down and cuts off all her hair, and then does the same to Enola. Presumably to make rope, but he doesn’t say or even ask. 

Good thing he also had the time to give Enola that blow-out.

They’re hungry and instead of letting them make a fishing rod, or diving under the water to get them all food, Mariner instead chooses to do nothing. Just in time for this guy named Drifter to show up. Now, Drifter be a creep, and it’s likely he has been drinking a lil too much salt water, however Mariner decides that this is the guy to try and get food and supplies from and lets him aboard. 

Drifter has paper, which is really rare, even though the Smokers have cigarettes wrapped in paper and also somehow tobacco to make the cigarettes with… don’t think too hard about it, we do not get answers…

Ugh, Fam, I hate this part so much.

Point is Drifter is nasty and so is Mariner. Mariner trades the paper and some supplies for Helen. Yes. For. Helen. Because as a woman she is literally only good to be used as currency or a mule to do sex work for him. He lets drifter take her below decks, despite clearly not being ok with it. Fuck you, Mariner.

But then Mariner has second thoughts. Is it because he realizes that he forced Helen into non-consensual sex work for his benefit? I doubt it. Mariner has a theme of not being able to share in this movie, so it’s more like he sees Helen as his property, and like the Crayons from before, doesn’t want someone touching his things.

Whatever the reason, he goes below deck and stops Drifter, but NOT before he manhandles and tries to force himself on Helen. The two fight and he kills Drifter. 

“Hey Rune!” I hear you say, “now they have a body that they can use to fish, right?”

To which I say: “You are intelligent, that is an excellent idea… buuuuuuuut-”

Nope, Mariner just rolls the body overboard then uses HIMSELF as bait to bring a giant monster fish to the surface and kill it for food. You could have just used the dead guy and not risked getting yourself killed and leaving Helen and Enola stranded…

Feesh.

Anyway, they have food now and Enola draws a picture of the three of them on some of the paper, Mariner doesn’t throw her overboard OR rip up the paper. Growth. How wholesome. 

Barf. 

Next thing Helen knows, she wakes up and finds Mariner teaching Enola how to swim, and Helen has that cringe moment of catching feelings for the garbage man-fish as he swims with the child he tried to kill in slow motion. 

Helen. Babe. You’re better than this. Don’t listen to the whimsical, enchanting music.

They stumble across another ship and it’s full of weird waving people who are clearly dead and strung up like puppets. In another scene that takes entirely too long: They sense an obvious trap, so Mariner uses some underwater telescope he has to see that they have jet ski pirates below the water waiting for them. He turns the ship and hauls ass out of there using a kite and the totally believable power of friendship and physics to lift half the boat out of the water so it misses their traps. 

Yep, totally believable that the weight of 2.5 people combined could lift the other side of the trimaran ship.

For reference, the trimaran is 60 feet long with an 85 foot high boom mast. Now I don’t know how much Mariner’s scrap metal vessel weighed, but I found this trimaran boat that is a fraction of the size at 18 feet long with a boom of 11 feet with a displacement of between 9,000 and 14,000 kgs, or 19,841.6lbs-30,864.717lbs. Now, I’m no gynecologist, but it seems a little unlikely to me that they could lift the hull on the opposite side from the water doing this…

I don’t know how physics work.

Mariner has been shot, but it’s ok because he shakes Helen around a bit to make himself feel better. Fuck you, fish man. Then decides to tell Helen and Enola that “dry land doesn’t exist” and he knows this for a fact because he has sailed farther than anyone else. 

Small pee-pee energy.

To prove his point, he sticks Helen in a diving bell and drags her to the bottom of the ocean where she isn’t crushed by the sheer pressure, and shows her what remains of the world that was. 

Where do these road flares keep coming from?

They explore down there, and he grabs a handful of dirt and shows her how land does exist but it’s all the way at the bottom of the water. She gets the point I guess, and after who knows how long, they return to the surface and neither of them gets the bends. 

Oh, and this whole time they have left Enola entirely unattended on the boat, floating in the middle of the ocean, fully aware that Smokers are after her. 

Genius.

When they surface, Deacon is right on top of their boat and Enola is hiding. But when he threatens to shoot Helen, of course Enola comes out and they take her. The boat gets torched, forcing Helen and Mariner to dive under the water where he breathes for both of them in a way that is anything but sexy. 

But this clearly works on Helen, because when they surface to the ruined boat they get it on. Not like they have anything important to focus on…

Mariner goes below deck, which is now flooded, and pulls out some papers he has. One of which is a copy of National Geographic and… you know what, that checks out. Because if anything is going to survive the end of life as we know it, it will be that one 20 year old copy of National Geographic that was in your dentist’s office and never got thrown out.

Suddenly, Old Gregor shows up on his flying machine, and again I ask… Y’all didn’t see him coming from ten miles away?! 

Or perhaps a more important question: Gregor, could you see the fish man flopping around on your buddy Helen while you slowly drifted up to them?

I’m never sleeping again.

Gregor brings them to a small group of people, who I think are survivors of the Atoll, to be honest I kinda spaced out here because this movie is too long. Mariner leaves Helen there and goes to rescue Enola, because he just somehow knows where the Smoker’s ship is. 

Mariner climbs a rusty metal wall and doesn’t get tetanus, while Deacon is doing his best to be Captain Hook and give a speech to his literal unwashed masses and then tosses down cans of “Smeat” for his homies… because they could do the product placement for that bottle of Jack Daniels he’s waving around in this scene and not Spam. 

But seriously, where are these cigarettes coming from?

Now this is another part of the movie that takes ENTIRELY too long, so I’m going to just get through it because this movie is a slog. 

Enola is inside and is talking about Mariner like he’s a hero who didn’t attempt to drown her, cut off her hair, and slap her. Get better idols. The barge says “No smoking” which is funny because they’re SMOKERS, get it?! And Mariner infiltrates the barge that resembles Swiss cheese more than a ship and would be sunk by one decent storm. 

Mariner has a stand down with Deacon and threatens to drop a road flare into the crude oil, Deacon calls his bluff and Mariner drops the flare, resulting in the one scene from this movie that actually made me laugh: Bottles sees the flare fall into the crude oil and before it blows up and kills him he says “Oh, thank God!” 

RIP you two-scene legend.

Shit’s on fire and so is science. 

Deacon tries to escape with Enola in the plane they just randomly have. Mariner manages to crash the plane and now the barge that should have sunk a hundred years ago is sinking. 

Mariner, Enola, Helen and Old Gregor are floating away on the blimp and none has a single care in the world despite just narrowly avoiding disaster. You can tell because they let Enola sit on the edge of the basket like there isn’t a chance she could fall out of it. 

And look, she do. 

Right before three jet ski pirates are able to snatch her out of the water, Mariner uses a normal rope and bungee jumps off the blimp, grabbing her out of the water, and bouncing back up, without ripping his legs off, and the three jet skis explode before they crash into each other don’t ask me how I noticed this.  

But look at that, they figured the map out just as the baddies were defeated and head straight for dry land. 

Suddenly a bird shows up, and since people in this movie don’t know that birds aren’t real, they look around and spot the land, which looks suspiciously like Isla Nublar from Jurassic Park. The first house they walk into on the dry land is filled with doodles of her tattoo and a couple of skeletons, whom everyone assumes to be Enola’s parents. Enola walks past all that, though, going up to a music box which plays the song she has been creepy-kid humming the entire movie, and Enola knows that she is home.

Home with the dead bodies of the people who tattooed a child with a map to Dryland. We don’t get any answers to why they did this, or how old she was when she got that sick ink, if she remembered anything concrete about living on Dryland, or if it was all fragments of memories. Nothing. 

Thankfully, Mariner doesn’t want to stay on Dryland. First of all he’s getting land sickness. Second of all, the land with all its birds and shit is too loud for him, unlike the ocean which is silent... But whatever, he’s a garbage man who is offering to throw himself away, so we’re going to let him. Luckily there is also just a boat there. Just sitting there on the beach despite however many hurricanes, storms, winds, whatever. Nah, it’s there and it’s totally fine, and it also looks almost identical to his old one. Neat.

Sorry I tried to kill you, and slapped you, and cut your hair off, kid, let’s be friends.

Enola gives him the music box before he leaves and they have a moment that I don’t even remember. The gist of it is there might be other people and other fish-men like him out there that he can find. Whatever, he leaves and the movie is so close to being over I could shit. Then Helen and Mariner have a moment and she kisses him. Barf. 

The last shot we get is of Helen and Enola watching him sail off to I don’t care where and FINALLY, this movie is over. 

WHEEZE.

Fam, we did it! We got through it. 

So, what did I think?

This movie was… a lot. 

There was a lot of story to tell in a small amount of time. I know I keep griping about how long the movie is, but it wasn’t long enough for the story they were trying to tell. Now, I’m open to looking at this, and any film, with the luxury of hindsight AND the knowledge of what could be done today, and I will say this: Waterworld isn’t a bad movie. There is a lot of potential here that wasn’t, or couldn’t be acted upon almost 30 years ago that would be amazing now. 

Let me elaborate. 

Waterworld was ambitious. Chances were taken that didn’t pay off, advice wasn’t taken when it should have been. Delays happened. Disagreements between Costner and director Kevin Reynolds. A lot of what could have gone wrong, did. 

It’s easy for me to read through the trivia on IMDB and point out that choosing to film on open water instead of on a flooded sound stage was a poor choice. However, I also want to be real about that. Any attempts at green screening back in 1995 would have looked about as realistic as the scene where Mariner brings Helen to the sunken city below the water… S’not great. It looks… not real. Sure it was good enough for the time but it does not hold up today. Imagine a whole movie like that. It would have been unwatchable. So choosing to film on the actual ocean eliminated that. We got real water, real wind, and real sky. However the ocean is a tempestuous mistress who likes to wreck your shit, which happened a lot during production. 

I can see what they wanted to achieve. 

In the today-times, a project as ambitious as Waterworld would have been several movies. Or better yet, if it had Netflix or Prime money behind it, then a big budget show would be legit. If it was in an episodic format more time and attention could be focused on specific story elements and character development plots. For example: that the Smokers found a way to refine crude oil and that is how they have jet skis and planes, or that Dryland at the end is actually the top portion of Mount Everest. Those sorts of details are amazing and really start to bring things into focus, but were cut due to time constraints.  

Kevin Costner and Kevin Reynolds… call me if you do this. 

However, despite all that and how much flack this movie gets it was not a commercial failure. Was it a massive success? Not what anyone would have wanted, but with an estimated budget of $175,000,000 dollars, it made an overall gross of $264,218,220 according to the film’s IMDB page. It didn’t lose money. It also, unfortunately, did not do as well as anyone hoped it would.

Is this movie a masterpiece? Nope. But it also isn’t a disaster. Ultimately, I think the reason why this film gets such a bad wrap is because it is a truly wild, and imaginative story that didn’t translate from idea, to script, to screen as well as it could have. So for anyone looking for a movie to rag on, this is a pretty easy target.  

So, overall, what’s my rating?

Story gets 7.5/10 : the story wasn’t bad, the execution and format is where things struggled. If put into an episodic format like a big budget streaming show less would have had to be cut out, and the viewer would have a more seamless story to follow. 

Characters get 5/10 : For the same reason the story suffered, there just wasn’t enough time to explore the characters, Enola’s background, Deacon’s motivations, and the relationship between Helen and Mariner. The characters felt flat and left a lot to be desired. More time put towards fleshing out these characters would have likely changed the illusion that Mariner is a jerk who likes to throw children overboard and smack women about. 

Costumes get 9/10: The costumes were interesting! The small details, like how everything was recycled, and the stitching-how it showed that each garment was designed to fit several sizes via lacing, that is a great and subtle touch. Mariner’s shell earring which he clearly plucked off the bottom of the ocean was another detail I adored. It set him apart but wasn’t flashy. 

Overall, I give Waterworld 7 immortal, waterlogged National Geographic magazines out of 10.

Fam! We did it! We got through Waterworld. 

There is a 100000000% chance I wouldn’t survive in this movie. I’m a strong swimmer, but all those cloudless days and sun on the open ocean would have burnt me to a crisp in under a day. 

The Blogstagram is growing! We have 26 followers now which is AMAZING! A huge thank you to everyone who has followed the Blogstagram and supported this precious little dumpster fire I have claimed. 

Any movie recommendations? Please let me know in the comments below or on Instagram! When I tell you that I do a happy dance every time I get a comment or like, I mean it with all sincerity. It is truly humbling to know that people take the time out of their day to read my words. 

As always, don’t lick payphones. 

-R