Video/DVD Review: Waterworld

By Charles Cassady Jr.

From our provider:

Rate This Article

Click Star to Rate...

0 Comments

What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this post-apocalyptic epic postulates a semi-barbarous future where everything is traded and bartered -- including sex. The heroine is glimpsed naked from the rear as she tries to use her body to bribe the hero (he declines the offer), and there's a near-rape of her by another man in a similar "business" arrangement. Frequent violence includes death by machine guns, spears guns, bombs, crashes, knife slashes, drownings, and fireballs. There's a gruesome threat of execution by drowning in some sort of sludge made from human decomposition, and a mutilated main villain demonstrates graphically that he's lost an eye. A little girl is occasionally threatened with danger/death, usually via drowning. Swearing includes one use of the F-word, multiple S-bombs. Much cigarette smoking, and some drinking-carousing happens among the bad guys. The flamboyant lead villain, at one point, is made to look like a Christian evangelical preacher. Some viewers may be grossed out by the introduction of the Kevin Costner character, urinating and then distilling/drinking his own urine.

In the future, the melting polar ice caps flood the whole planet. On this “water world,” semi-savage, seagoing remnants of humanity subsist on atolls, sailboats, and outposts. One of them is a nameless “Mariner” (Kevin Costner), a wanderer who has evolved gills to breathe underwater but who otherwise roams and trades on a cool sailboat. Despite his loner nature, the Mariner ends up protecting a little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino) and her adult guardian Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) from piratical "Smoker" raiders, armed barbarians who pillage and loot while riding Jet-Skis and powerboats.

Like the 1963 Cleopatra, this ecologically-tacking sci-fi flick become a symbol of Tinseltown waste and epic ego, as the original director left the production and the budget ballooned way over estimates. Thanks to all the gossip the film was labeled a bomb by many before it had even opened. In fact, WATERWORLD does offer solid entertainment (and it did find minor box-office success) in the form of fun swashbuckling and cool low-tech nautical gadgets and imaginative production design that is indeed otherworldly. Dennis Hopper does an amusingly comic-scary villain -- even if his bloody eye socket is one of several gross-out moments for kid and adult viewers. Only as it slackens toward the end (and piles on the bad-science snafus) does the movie begin to feel as ponderous and self-absorbed as critics complained. It helps if one hasn't recently seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which was a too-obvious inspiration.