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Let's be honest: this 1995 epic isn't nearly as bad as its negative publicity led us to expect. At the time it was the most expensive Hollywood production in history (it had a
Titanic-sized $200 million budget), and the film arrived in theaters with so much controversy and negative gossip that it was an easy target for ridicule. The movie itself, a flawed but enjoyable post-apocalypse thriller, deserves better.
Waterworld stars Kevin Costner as the Mariner, a lone maverick with gills and webbed feet who navigates the endless seas of Earth after the complete melting of the polar ice caps. The Mariner has been caged like a criminal when he's freed by Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and enlisted to help her and a young girl (Tina Majorino) escape from the Smokers, a group of renegade terrorists led by Dennis Hopper in yet another memorably villainous role. It is too bad the predictable script isn't more intelligent, but as a companion piece to
The Road Warrior, this seafaring stunt-fest is adequately impressive.
--Jeff Shannon
Kevin Costner plays the Mariner-part man, part fish, and the unofficial Prince of Mutants-in a post-apocalyptic action picture of the "Mad Max" type. Lurking beneath its conventional adventure-movie surface is a bizarre environmental parable, in which Costner's rugged, ecologically correct loner battles a scurvy bunch of pirates called Smokers, who smoke cigarettes, drink Jack Daniel's, and burn fossil fuels. None of the filmmakers appear to have realized that spending a fortune to make a picture that condemns excessive consumption and preaches the wise use of resources might seem a bit disingenuous. What's really propelling the movie is the vanity of its star (who is also one of the producers); at the end, Costner gives himself the most florid and protracted action-hero apotheosis since the conclusion of "Shane." With Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino, and Dennis Hopper. Directed by Kevin Reynolds, from a screenplay credited to Peter Rader and David Twohy. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker