Movie #93- "Waterworld" (1995)

Every decade has its bombs.  Big budget movies that failed to meet audience expectations, then becoming the punch line to jokes for years to follow.  As you can tell by the rating, "Waterworld" has not been the worst movie I've watched this year.  I can think of other big budget disasters that I've hated more ("Battleship", I'm looking at you).  Part of the fun is trying to figure out where "Waterworld" went wrong.
Conceptually, I don't find it as a horrible idea.  A world that is covered with water with the hope and search that dry land exists somewhere.  They've just taken the traditional apocalyptic genre and given it a different setting.  And you have to give that world some colorful characters, in this case marauding pirates traversing this waterscape, a kind of "Mad Max" on the open sea.  So the opportunity did exist to make a better movie.  But somehow, the filmmakers have unleashed two hours of near boredom.
I think my biggest issues is the characters that populate this work.  Unfortunately, they've framed the main character as the surly, unfriendly loner that usually populates these films.  We've seen this kind of loner so many times and there are better examples (like say, "Mad Max").  However, Kevin Costner's Mariner is the guy you wish would collect his supplies, then move on, no questions asked.  I also had problems with the relationship between Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn and the young girl, Enola, he takes as passengers.  He tries too hard to be a bad-ass with flashes of a tender side.  I didn't buy either version.  And while Dennis Hopper adds some color as the villain, his role comes off as cartoonish, especially with the alter to Captain Joe Hazelwood (I guess it's an environmental statement).
Audiences were probably put off by the expensive price tag "Waterworld" rang up (reported $175 million), but it's really not any worse than some of the other over-hyped Hollywood films that have been tossed into the theater pits the last few summers (again, "Battleship").  Now if they had put a baseball in Costner's hand, we might have had something.

Rating: 4/10
Movies I've previously seen: 6
First time viewings: 87