Starring: Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Dennis Hopper   Directed by : Kevin Reynolds

THE STORY:  My wife asked me the other day if I wanted any DVD's while she was out shopping. I was in the mood for a post apocalypse flick. "Get me Waterworld." Said I.

"Waterworld!?" She replied, "I thought that movie sucked!"

And she's never seen it.

Such is the power of word of mouth I guess. Well, I just watched it, and I can tell you my droogies, that Waterworld doesn't suck. Its pretty silly, and its not a great movie...calling it a good movie might be stretching it...but it doesn't suck like say, Mega Force, or Captain America. But weighing in with a budget of about 180 million bucks its a pretty expensive silly movie.

Kevin Costner is the Mariner, a human mutant that has gills behind his ears and webbed feet. He can breathe underwater which comes in handy. Its the future...how far into the future I'm not sure. If an exact date was given I missed it, but the polar icecaps have melted and produced more water than I actually thought was possible. The entire earth has been flooded. People live in floating cities...man made "Atolls". The two most valuable commodities are dirt and drinking water. The people speak of a mythical place called 'dryland' and hope to someday find it so they can stop living in the middle of the freakin' ocean. While bartering for goods on one of the atolls, the Mariner commits a social faux pas and finds himself imprisoned. The people discover his mutation and he's sentenced to death. But as the sentence is being carried out the atoll comes under attack by the "Smokers". Every post apocalypse movie needs bad guys, usually bad guys lead by an 80's punk rocker styled madman named "Humongous" or "Mongo". Since there's no land the Smokers don't ride in on motorcycles and souped up cars, they ride in on Jet skis and armored boats and they're lead by Deacon, played by Dennis Hopper. The smokers want Enola, a little girl who is cared for by Helen (Tripplehorn). Enola has a tattoo on her back that supposedly contains a map to the mythical Dryland, where's there's...uh, dry land. They almost get her, but Helen frees the Mariner during the attack with the promise that he'll take her and Enola with him in his boat and escape. Having little choice the Mariner agrees. Deacon and his bunch now chase the motley crew on the high seas.

You want to know what bugs me about this movie? The fact that it has an outlandish, but interesting premise but it only scratches the surface of some of the implications. If people have to live in floating atolls and dirt is such a hard thing to get, wouldn't they be actively trying to find Dryland? It doesn't seem like Enola's tattoo is a big secret. Helen's friend Gregor has been trying to devise a way to read the tattoo. Is he the only one that knows about it? Of course not....Deacon and his men know about it and they don't live on the atoll! And are there any other atolls? There must be, since everyone in the world can't possibly live on the one we see.

Also, the Mariner is a loner. He doesn't particularly like being around people so when he has Helen and Enola on his boat he's pretty mean to them. He's a perfect anti-hero at first. He even speaks about killing Enola to conserve drinking water and at one point and when another seaman comes across them on the ocean the Mariner offers Helen to him for 30 minutes of sex in barter. (Don't fret ladies...the other guy is a freaky sorta guy so the Mariner kills him before he gets Helen's goodies.) You get the idea that while the Mariner might be the flick's hero, but he's not a nice guy. He looks out for number one. Suits me. Think of Mad Max (who is pretty much the standard of Post apocalyptic heroes) In the Road Warrior, Max didn't want to help the people in the refinery. He did it for personal gain, and his actions in the climactic ending of that movie weren't done because he was being a good guy...they were done because Max didn't have anything left after his car was destroyed and because to some degree he wanted revenge on the Humongous. In Waterworld, however, the Mariner has a complete change of heart because he does in fact care what happens to Helen and Enola. Something you wouldn't think if you saw how he treated them at first. When Enola gets captured by Deacon, the Mariner goes to rescue her. Even though the other survivors from the Atoll don't want to even try. Why is the Mariner doing this? He doesn't have any other reason except that he's the hero. I liked him better when he was being a dick. You'd think that a guy that could breathe underwater would be underwater a lot too. Nope. Yeah, he does go underwater quite a bit, but for some reason the implications of this fantastic ability aren't used to full measure in my opinion. (Those little gills can support him? I don't think so)

Deacon wasn't too interesting as a villain either. The Smokers have a huge ass tanker (The Exxon Valdez...har har...we get it Hollywood. It wasn't as clever as you thought it was) and a [unwrite]load of people living on it. What's their society like? What do they eat? That's a lot of people to feed and that means you have to provide food and water for them. Not in this flick. They're just there to blow up real good when the Mariner gets pissed. Now I didn't expect the movie to go through the motions of showing me all of things I mentioned. Its not like The Road Warrior showed the refinery people growing vegetables to eat or digging wells...but there's a certain level of disbelief that gets exceeded in this movie for me. For instance:

Dennis Hopper is seen smoking a lot. (Smokers...har har...get it....okay, Hollywood enough with the damn messages...smoking is bad. We know that) But where does he get the cigarettes? He damn sure ain't makin' 'em. There's not enough dirt to spare for growing Tobacco. Does Phillip Morris own an atoll out there somewhere?

Where are the smokers getting the gas for their jet skis? (That's a thing that crops up in a lot of post apocalypse flicks. There might not be enough water or food, but the bad guys always have an endless supply of gasoline for their vehicles.

Where the hell are the people getting ammo for all of the guns and weapons? Don't tell me the NRA survived the apocalypse! Seriously....where?

I can't help but wonder about those things...so much that I just typed those conundrums here instead of the "Huh" part of my review. That's how much they bothered me. I wish they hadn't bothered me...heck, I thought for the most part the movie was alright. There's only one thing that happens a lot in Costner's movies...its too damned long. I might have glossed over the questions I had, but there was too much time to think about it. Please, Kevin...try to keep the movie to about 90 or so minutes next time. Or at least throw some more interesting parts or a few more action sequences in the middle.

BEST LINES: "He doesn't have a name so death can't find him, He doesn't have a home or people to care for. He's not afraid of anything, men least of all. He's fast and strong like a big wind. He can hear for a hundred miles and see a hundred miles underwater. He can hide in the shadow of a noon sun. He could be right behind you and you wouldn't know it 'til you're dead."- Enola describes the Mariner to her captors. Boy is she playing this guy up. He didn't seem all that super to me.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?:

1.) One of the last things I need to see as an opening shot is Costner's ass.

2.) When the Smokers first attack they say "I've never seen that before!" when the Mariner uses his Rube Goldberg sail deployment machinery. In a world full of water? Where almost everyone has a damned boat? You'd think someone would have seen something like that before. Its not like he had a warp drive! Just some pulleys and stuff to deploy his sails quickly!

3.) If the Mariner was ready to kill Enola in cold blood then why does he want so badly to save her from the Smokers? You can't have it both ways. He even comes close to raping Helen. She offers herself to him so he won't kill them, and he refuses. (Later he says it because he knew she didn't really want him.)

4.) What the [unwrite] was that monster fish thing that the Mariner caught? That bugged me a lot because it was apparently a big deal for him to risk his life catching it. But they would have starved if he hadn't. But EVERYONE lives at sea so if food is so hard to get how does anyone survive?

5.) How long has the world been flooded? I got the impression that the Mariner's mutation was due to mankind having to live in a Waterworld. But mutations due to environment take what, a few million years? I'm not Charles Darwin, but then this movie ain't the X-men. Speaking of comic book characters I wonder if the character was named the Mariner as a slight nod to the Marvel Comics character the Sub-Mariner? (Imperious Rex!)

NUDITY AND SEX:  Very brief glimpse of Helen nude. Helen does the Mariner but you really don't see it.

HUH?:  Maybe some of you science types can clue me on this...if the world was covered in water wouldn't that kind of [unwrite] up the air? don't we need plants to provide oxygen?

Dennis Hopper is a respectable actor...but he's no Humongous.

If there's such a danger of an explosion on the deck of the Valdez than why do the people there fire flares in celebration? Why even waste the flares in such a stupid and obviously dangerous way? Its not like they can be replaced easily!

How come Enola wasn't killed or injured when she fell from Gregor's flying contraption into the ocean. She was really high up and just because you're landing in water doesn't mean its not going to have an impact.

The bungee jump rescue was kind of cool, but it was a little silly here. Indiana Jones might have pulled it off, but the Mariner? Naaaahhhh.

Dryland is found at the end. One would think that someone somewhere would have located it before now, however. As I said...wouldn't people be actively searching for it?

There's an interesting continuity jump at the end. When the Mariner talks to Enola before he leaves dryland the tide is coming in. You can see the waves run up to her feet as she sits on a log at the shore. But a few seconds later you can see the sand is drying up as if the tide had been out for awhile.

THE FINAL JUDGMENT: Okay, I did kind of chew this movie out, but its not really that bad if you like cheesy movies. And this is an expensive cheesy movie. I enjoyed it despite its goofy bits and weird logic. If you like post apocalypse movies check this one out sometime. Its not a classic...its no Road Warrior....but at least its different.