Waterworld

As an 11 year old kid living in a third world country one does not see a lot of movies, especially if you come from a conservative culture. When I was able to finally collect some change from my pocket money to buy a film DVD, I went ahead and bought the most tantalizing DVD cover and interesting plot summary I could find in the form of Waterworld.

Well the question is was it worth the hassle? The answer to that question would be a resounding no. I am a huge fan of Sci-fi, neo noirs and dystopian future movies. I love when movies build their own worlds, where as a kid my imagination could find accommodation in the said movie world. Which was exactly the reasoning behind me acquiring Waterworld but to my dismay it was a mess of a movie with lacklustre an unlikable characters, convoluted plot, I don’t even know what to say about the editing as i saw both the theatrical and the ulysses cut of the movie, and let me tell you that was 5 hours of my life wasted for nothing excluded the 2 times i saw it as a kid.

I did see the both cut of the films recently to understand where my love for the movie mad max comes from and voila I have struck gold. Cause What waterworld feels like is a Mad Max knock off but with a stupidly high budget and people who did not know what they were doing. Now give that money to Goerge Miller and you will be presented with Mad Max Fury Road, easily the best action movie since the start of the 2000's.

So, Waterworld is about the mariner played by oscar winning actor Kevin Costner who is a hybrid of fish and human, he has gills and his feet are weird. Now I thought Guilermo del toro’s The shape of water seemed familiar I mean imagine the fish guy from the shape of water and the mariner from Waterworld side by side, yeah they look the same. Anyways, I am going of topic, Waterworld is about the mariner who is able breath under water because of his mutation in a world which has gone under water because of global warming. He finds and sells dirt to a market where they find out that he is a mutant and they try to kill him because you know, racism and stuff. He escapes with the help of two lovely people. One of them being a small girl named Elona, my first thought about the name this time around was Where is Sherlock and is this a cinematic universe and if not do i want it to be one? Elona is played by Tina Majorino, who went on to play roles in the movie Napoleon Dynamite and the show veronica Mars. The truth is she was so annoying in this movie that it destroyed her career even as a child. The other person is Helen played by Jeanne Tripplehorn who also starred alongside Micheal Doughlas in the 1992 erotic thriller classic Basic Instinct. My god she has bad luck with men on the big screen, I mean she offers herself to the mariner and gets almost raped in Waterworld. I don’t think I need to to talk about what happens to her in Basic Instinct. Together the three of them set of on a journey to find dryland. Enola has a map on her back which has the co-ordinates of dry land but since the world has turned upside down the only person who can read the map can not figure it out because he has not taken it in to account. Then there is Deacon played by Dennis Hoffman, who was just plain bad as the main villain of the movie. I still think Enola was a better villain of the movie than Deacon. I really hated that kid. After several events they get separated and Enola is taken by Deacon. The Mariner goes to the ship of the Deacon and destroys it all by himself because apparently he is Captain Aquaman, which I was not been made aware of. At the end they do find land, but the mariner has to depart because he does not feel at ease on land. And that is the end of the movie. The ulysses cut has a few extra dialogues and the fact that the dry land they find actually is the top of mount everest.

So, Waterworld has a thin vale of racial awareness only when they have to a quippy one liner like different ways to call Kevin Costner a freak, even if they wanted to say something about the act of racism and it being an issue in 1997, ( which I am pretty sure was not the case) It is weak to say the least. There is no overarching theme, and if there was one it flew over my little noggin. Overall it is just a poorly edited mess of a film which would have been better of being a 80’s action movie with a run-time of 80–90 minutes at best. I would rate Waterworld a three out of ten at best and would put it in the plase avoid category of films.