Sometimes,
mainstream film critics focus too much on the inside-baseball aspects of
filmmaking for my taste.
I
suppose that everyone enjoys behind-the-scenes stories of disagreements between
lead actors and directors, and tales of woe concerning films that run massively
and catastrophically over-budget.
It’s
impossible to take your eyes off a train wreck, in other words.
And
yet the problem with this focus on inside-baseball emerges when the same
critics draw an explicit connection between behind-the-scenes strife and the
artistic merits of a finished work-of-art.
In other words, some reviewers utilize the inside-baseball knowledge to
fit into a specific, pre-drawn narrative.
Using
the former factors (behind-the-scenes strife), to judge the latter (artistic merit),
is problematic, I submit, because the relationship clearly isn’t one-to-one. A difficult shoot doesn’t necessarily result
in a bad film. Going over budget doesn’t
necessarily mean artistic disaster, either.
And the opposite is also true: a smooth shoot doesn’t indicate that a
film is going to turn out terrific.
Certainly,
this unfortunate critical paradigm was exposed with both King Kong (1976) and John
Carter (2012), both of which were received harshly by the critical
community largely on the basis of behind-the-scenes, inside-baseball factors
rather than a judicious consideration of artistic factors.
This
fallacy is also true of Waterworld (1995), a film that, upon
release, was clearly marked in the press as a troubled production, and
furthermore, the most expensive film of all-time.
Yet
seventeen years later, I don’t know that our knowledge of those facts is
vital to a fair assessment of the film’s particular strengths and weaknesses.
Eschewing
the inside-baseball stats and figures, Waterworld plays as a straight-up
and not un-enjoyable transplant of The Road Warrior (1982) aesthetic,
only in a world destroyed by global warming rather than by nuclear war.
Kevin
Costner’s gilled, mutant Mariner, in other words, is a wet Mad Max who, like
his predecessor, is something of a variation on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No
Name, a classic movie character featured in A Fistful of Dollars
(1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(1966).
In
short, this archetype involves a “stranger” who rides into town and becomes
involved in a conflict not his own, and who, largely, is rather stoic, allowing actions speak louder
than words. Similarly, Waterworld’s
Mariner is frequently tagged as a silent brooder, and by film’s end has even
become equated with “Death” Himself for his accomplished – if taciturn -- application of lethal
force.
From this... |
To this... |
To this. |
Beyond the obvious inspiration the film draws from the Mad Max mythos, Waterworld succeeds mostly because of the “reality” of the world it assiduously constructs. The film is one of the last sci-fi epics to emerge from the pre-digital age of Hollywood blockbusters and, accordingly -- and for all its apparent flaws -- boasts this heightened sense of texture or verisimilitude.
Everything
(or most everything…) our eyes witness had to be arduously constructed and set
afloat, and that herculean effort pays off in a visual and imaginative
sense. You can practically smell the salt water and the burning fuel…
In
terms of negatives, Waterworld takes an unnecessary dive into sentimentalism, a
wrong turn that The Road Warrior never falls prey to, though Beyond
Thunderdome certainly did.
The
film’s final act also consists of one generic action movie trope after the
other, from the hero’s ability to outpace blossoming fireballs, to last minute,
physically impossible rescues. These almost
cartoon-like moments tend to mark Waterworld as a product of
eager-to-please Hollywood, and make it rather decidedly unlike its spare,
gritty, Australian source of inspiration.
Still,
some of the overt sentimentalism and action clichés in Waterworld might be
overlooked because of the film’s absolutely original setting, and the skill
with which that setting is presented.
The film’s lead characters -- when
not grinding the gears of expected generic conventions -- are interesting
enough to spend two hours with, certainly.
In keeping with the tradition of the post-apocalyptic genre, Waterworld also makes an earnest statement about man’s self-destructive nature.
“Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!”
In a world of the future -- a world of ubiquitous oceans --
the silent, rugged Mariner (Costner) seeks to re-supply at a nearby atoll. Unfortunately, he is arrested by the local
Elders as a “muto” (or mutant) because he has webbed feet and gills behind his
ears.
The Mariner’s arrest comes at a bad time, because the leader
of the eco-unfriendly Smokers, The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) is planning to launch
an attack there and grab young Enola (Tina Majorino), a girl with an
indecipherable map to the mythical “Dry Land” tattooed on her back.
Enola and her stepmother, Helen (Jean Tripplehorn) free the
Mariner from captivity in exchange for passage out of the atoll on his boat. They barely escape with their lives, and the
Deacon commits to pursuing them.
On the high seas, the Mariner and his “guests” have
difficulty getting along at first, but soon he becomes fond of the women, and
they of him. One day, the Mariner takes
Helen to the bottom of the sea and shows him man’s drowned cities there. That lost world is the only (formerly) “dry land”
he knows of, he insists.
When the Deacon captures Enola, it’s up to the Mariner to
rescue her, and more than that, to lead other rag-tag survivors to “Dry Land.” Enola’s map, properly understood, holds the
key to man’s future…
“He doesn't have a name so Death can't find him!”
That may not be the best word, but it gets the job done in a
pinch. I could also describe this
ingredient as “texture” or “atmosphere,” perhaps, but physicality better gets at the film’s rugged and powerful sense of
setting, of place. I love the
Rube-Goldberg-style devices, the trinkets from the “old world” re-purposed for Waterworld’s
tech, and the sheer mechanical nature of the world. It’s a place of whirring hydraulics, tugging pulleys,
fold-out sails, and endless, ubiquitous sea.
As a whole, I find it all rather compelling and even believable.
As I noted above, most of this setting, at least in terms of
the human dwellings and conveyances, had to be constructed and then set
afloat. I like the tactility and
verisimilitude of this world, and realize that if the film were made today, it
would be a different beast all-together, one “rendered” with digital landscapes
and CGI.
In other words, it would likely
seem a whole lot less real. But some of the little, almost throwaway touches in the film are really quite spectacular, and contribute to the idea that "Waterworld" is a real place, and one boasting a deep and long history.
A world that you can touch. |
A world that had to be built. |
A world that works. |
And a world that speaks of another time. |
In terms of its narrative, it’s plain that Waterworld owes a great
deal to The Road Warrior, and indeed, the entire Mad Max cycle. The Mariner, like Max, is a man who lives
outside of human society and who boasts some disdain for it.
Both characters live as scavengers and traders, contacting
civilization only to re-supply. Both the
Mariner and Max form meaningful relationships or friendships with children
(Enola, and the Feral Kid, respectively), and both eventually come around to
the idea of “helping” an endangered civilization find a new home (either Dry
Land, or the gasoline truck’s promised land destination in The Road Warrior).
Finally, both sagas end with that new home established, but
the warrior himself returning to the “wasteland” arena to continue his lonely
travels. Mad Max and the Mariner are
violent men with a code of ethics, and so they both realize it is better for
them to remain “outcasts” in the wild rather than to seek domesticated lives
inside a new culture. In Beyond Thunderdome, the new
city-dwellers light candles for the wanderers who haven’t come home; in Waterworld,
Enola and Helen watch as the Mariner returns to the sea, the realm that
nurtured him.
In both The Road Warrior and Waterworld,
a central scenario depicted is the “siege” of a pre-existing civilization. Outsiders on a variety of crafts try to “break
in” and pillage either Oil City or the Atoll.
The beleaguered city, naturally, fights back, but the walls are breached
by attacking vehicles, either flying motorcycles or launched jet skis. Both cities eventually fall, leading to a
dedicated trek to new home.
These factors -- the
siege and the trek – make the films origin stories of a mythic type. As Aeneas had to flee fallen Troy to found
Rome, so do Max and the Mariner lead homeless survivors to greener pastures…literally
in the case of Waterworld.
In one moment in Waterworld, we even get a deliberate
mirror image composition of a famous frame from The Road Warrior. There, in the first harrowing action scene, we saw the savage Wez perched on his motorcycle,
another goon seated behind him on the bike, looking at his prey. We see very much the same framing in view
here (also in the first action scene), except, of course, on a water craft instead of a motorcycle.
Despite the obvious aping of the Mad Max universe, Waterworld’s
unique, water-bound setting gives it a lot of “juice,” at least visually
speaking. The images are so lush and
convincing you can make yourself forget, essentially, that the movie is a
pastiche.
A city shall fall. |
And so will this one. |
And a child shall lead the people to a better future. |
And so will this one. |
The bad guys watch. |
And so do these bad guys. |
As we have come to expect from post-apocalyptic films, there
is an environmental message in Waterworld that suggests man’s
self-destructive nature. The “Ancients”
caused rapid global warming, and now, similarly, the Smokers are running
through the last of their oil, trying to sustain an unsustainable
lifestyle.
Their need to live that life-style of relative leisure (replete with
cigarettes, electricity,and even cars…) dooms the Smokers to a life of war and
conflict, stealing what they need from other nation-states/atolls at the barrel
of a gun. The fact that the Smokers
inhabit the Exxon Valdez, a poster-child
for environmental irresponsibility, pretty much says it all. And this too is America's fate, if we don't tap alternative energy sources. We'll have to fight resource wars to maintain our culture's high standard of living.
Even the film’s villain plays into this leitmotif. At one point, the Deacon attempts to flick a
lit cigarette into an open oil tank, an act which could have instantaneous, catastrophic
results were he successful. The message
is clearly that he is self-destructive, but there’s more. By wantonly, thoughtlessly using up the Earth’s
resources, we’re essentially lighting a spark that could destroy everything we
hold dear too.
“We outgrew it,”
one Smoker says of the Exxon-Valdez, and indeed that’s precisely fear of many
environmentalists. What happens when we outgrow the planet’s capacity to sustain us?
This environment message is leavened some by the film’s many action
sequences, which grow progressively less satisfying and less convincing as the
film continues. The opening battles on
the sea and at the atoll are genuinely awe inspiring, and feature death-defying
stunts. By the end of the film, however,
rear-projection and cartoony explosions dominate the proceedings and some
element of reality is sacrificed.
So much of the popular press still terms Waterworld a bomb (though
it eventually made back its budget and more), but this is hardly a terrible
science fiction film. Waterworld may not be a truly great
science fiction film, but nor is it the epitome of Hollywood disaster, as many
still make it out to be.
Waterworld’s biggest problem, I submit, is that the film’s first half
elaborately sets up a world and characters of tremendous interest, and then the
last half spends all its time blowing things up, and resolving all the
conflicts with fireballs and explosions.
In other words, it’s lot like many other examples of mainstream 1990s
filmmaking. And yet, the film doesn't open that way at all. In fact, Waterworld's opening is a kind of brilliant "screw-you" to conventional standards and decorum. How many Hollywood blockbusters can you name that open with a shot of an established star, like Costner, pissing into a cup, refining his urine, and then drinking it?
And in terms of last shots, Waterworld finishes strong. The
Mariner heads off to the next horizon and the next mystery. Perhaps it’s the mystery of his very
creation, or the mystery of the end of the world. It’s kind of a shame we never got to see that
second adventure.
After all, Mad Max and The Man with No Man each got three
attempts to get the equation right…
John great review of Waterworld. The analysis comparing it to the Mad Max films is spot on. There should have sequels. I think if the budget had been scaled down like the early Mad Max films or Star Trek II:Wrath Of Khan was after TMP that would have solved the problem. Costner's Waterworld and Smith's AfterEarth might have both suffered the same built in fate
ReplyDeleteof negative reviews.
SGB
One of the plot points I never could explain from Waterworld is the history of the 'Ancients' and global warming and rising sea levels. While this is said to happen 'rapidly,' surely it would have taken at least a year, or decade, though more likely a century. So during this time of obviously rising sea levels, the human population would slowly be moving higher and higher. Even as groups became isolated in North America, Europe, Australia, etc, there must have been millions or billions of people around Everest in Asia that would have slowly been moving up those mountains and that peak to survive. So in the end, when they hit the top of this mountain as fabled 'Dry Land' location, it would have been teaming with people, or at least the remains of people and buildings. But it was simply lush and green and empty. How could this be?
ReplyDeleteMichael S, excellent point. Maybe it was not global warming, but instead a massive asteroid impact or a nuclear war that melted the polar cap.
DeleteSGB
Good open-minded review, as always.
ReplyDeleteJust one thing I found odd. I seem to remember that this film lost a lot of money. I checked; Waterworld made $264,218,220 in its worldwide theatrical run. Less than 50% of that is "Net". The flick cost $175 million to make (if that figure can be trusted; studios love to inflate the true, or "negative", cost). The 'returned' part of the box office would have been something like 100-120 million.
Unless Waterworld did very well on home-video, then it did in fact lose money. Maybe a lot of money.
None of this changes whether or not a movie is any good, of course. Unfortunately, because film is a business, art doesn't always make it out alive... or stay above water.