Where The Road Warrior had Max rediscover his humanity by bonding with the Feral Kid, Waterworld has the Mariner rediscover his humanity by forming a fractious ”family” with a wild child named Enola (Tina Majorino), who has a map leading to dry land tattooed on her back, and the kid’s beautiful guardian (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Where The Road Warrior featured a roving band of punk-pirate motorbikers led by a facially mangled psycho known as the Humungus, Waterworld features a roving band of punk-pirate water bikers led by a facially mangled psycho known as the Deacon (played by Dennis Hopper). Looking for a place to barter the soil he gathers from the ocean floor, he stops at a giant floating ”atoll,” whose bedraggled residents have built a scrap-heap city from the detritus of civilization.
In its story and characters, its ”visionary” junk-collage aesthetic, this lavishly detailed, rather ponderous popcorn movie is such a brazen knockoff of 1981’s The Road Warrior that it’s as if George Miller’s future-shock demolition classic had been remade inside the world’s biggest bathtub.Ĭostner’s Mariner is, of course, a gloss on Mel Gibson’s Max, the hard-shelled nihilist loner whose empathy has been burnt away by the day-to-day hell of survival. What Waterworld isn’t, by any stretch, is a triumph of originality. The very thing that made it such a high-profile production nightmare - the challenge of staging an entire movie on the ocean surface - pays off in the film’s visually enveloping, woozily off-kilter atmosphere, which effectively creates the sensation that water is the closest thing there is to solid ground.
Directed by Kevin Reynolds, who collaborated with Costner on several earlier projects (notably Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), the film may have taken 166 days to shoot and come in at a preposterous cost of nearly $200 million, but it’s no Heaven’s Gate. Waterworld is nothing if not a triumph of large-scale action-adventure logistics.