Bad Films I love, Part One: Waterworld (1995)

It was the spring of 1995, I was in sixth form studying for a BTEC National in Business and Finance, a qualification I would later realize was pretty pointless. I didn't mind though it afforded me two more years of messing around before I had to enter the great wide open. The weather was good, we had a conservative government, the British music industry was going through a renaissance with the Blur and Oasis rivalry just kicking off,I was just about able to get into pubs and discovered karaoke, life was good. Back then I didn't really read much in the way of film magazines, I had yet to discover Empire and really only picked up Cinescape or Starburst on trips to Forbidden Planet in London one every couple of months. Despite this I was aware that there was a film in production called Waterworld and that it starred Kevin Costner who since The Bodyguard had made three movies that hadn't done particularly well, A Perfect World, Wyatt Earp and The War. The reason I was aware of Waterworld was the fact that it had gone hugely over budget and was seen to be in trouble. Eager Critics had labeled the film 'Fishtar' or 'Kevins Gate' after notorious flops Ishtar and Heavens Gate. There were all sorts of stories emerging from the set in Hawaii. The atoll set had sunk twice meaning it had to be rebuilt, Costner's child co-star had been stung by jellyfish waiting for him to get in the water to film a scene and Costner's marriage had collapsed when he begun an affair with someone he met in Hawaii. The budget had ballooned to $175 million and was growing all the time. At the time this was the most expensive movie ever made and people were worried as the star was clearly not shining as brightly as he used to be and to make matters worse he was losing his hair and gaining girth around his mid-section. Pre-Buffy Joss Whedon was flown to the set to perform some re-writes of the script and described the experience as 'seven weeks of hell'.

On an ill advised Friday evening trip to the old flea pit in Harrow in May of 95 we chose to watch the wretched Jean Claude Van Damme starring Street Fighter movie. The movie sucked big time, its possibly one of the worst films I have ever paid to see (My friend who I went with still maintains its one of his favorite films) but before the movie was a trailer for Waterworld and you know what it rocked! It had Max Max style but completely set on the water, it had HUGE action scenes and seemed to be epic in scope and ambition featuring a shot of Costner's Mariner character standing astride a mast whilst beyond the sun set on this ocean based world. Far from being an out and out disaster of Last Action Hero/Hudson Hawk proportions it looked like a completely new cinema experience, something we hadn't seen before. If you remember the 90's then you will remember that most of the blockbusters released in the summer months were either superhero films before they started to get them right or Die Hard-on-a-whatever-was-going action movies. I was intrigued, and hopeful of the fact that Waterworld may show me something different.

Summer 95 crept up on me as we had great weather pretty much from March onwards that year. The big films consisted of Judge Dredd (rubbish) Batman Forever (enjoyable) Bad Boys (flashy but empty) and Congo (boring until the evil apes turn up twenty minutes from the end). By the end of July we still had Die Hard with a vengeance, Crimson Tide, Under Siege 2 and Apollo 13 to look forward to so all was not lost. At the end of July 95 I spent a week in a Haven holiday camp in Weymouth, this was before they would become a refuge for chav thugs and their armies of feral children and there was pretty much nothing to do except swim. I swam so much I started to think I was part fish and then it hit me, Waterworld came out in two weeks on August 11th.

Having pretty much nothing to do and no job between end of July and September I would go to every film on opening day which was always a Friday at this point. I went with one of my closest pals who had to be at work at Pizza Hut by six so we went to a 2pm showing at the Odeon in Uxbridge, possibly the classiest two screen cinema for miles which wasn't saying much.

The film started with the Universal logo of planet earth spinning and was supposed to fade away but it didn't, instead it zoomed in on the earth and the land slowly faded away as a voice over told us that the polar ice caps had melted and the survivors had adapted to a new world. From here we descended through the clouds and on to the waterlogged planet where we met Kevin Costner's mariner character drinking his own pee. I was transfixed.

I can't quite put my finger on what made Waterworld my favorite movie of 1995, its certainly not that original, its basically Mad Max 2 on the water. The action was incredible, huge explosions aboard an oil tanker, knife fights, sea monsters and a bungee jump. Dennis Hopper was great as the villain, a weird chain smoking cross between a preacher and cult leader with great lines like "Don't just stand there, Kill something!". Truly I felt that all the money spent was worth the effort. Between the action the scenes of floating around on the water on the Mariners boat had a hypnotic calm that I couldn't get enough of.Kevin Costner also played the main character as one mean bastard, you were never sure if he was going to get pissed off and kill the kid and sail away, he was a part fish anti-hero. I went back and saw it twice more that summer.

Now Waterworld is a BAD film and It comes down to one reason;Logic. Think about it, if there are no trees as there is no dry land, how is everyone still breathing? The smokers are the villains of the piece (the beginning of PC gone mad in Hollywood) but where are they getting the paper for their cigarettes? Don't even get me started on the search for dry land, ok go on then; The flooding of the planet supposedly happened over thousands of years (which also is the reason for the Mariner being part fish, an evolutionary leap) so theoretically there probably would be no-one of a memory of what dry land was like, so why is everyone so desperate to find it? Its things like this that don't make a whole lot of sense and keep it from being a classic sci-fi movie.

When I returned to school in September most people had also seen Waterworld and enjoyed it. It was not the box office disaster predicted either taking in 255 million worldwide, not a huge profit but a profit nonetheless. Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds finally fell out over the editing of the film, the directors cut with an extra 40 minutes of footage has been shown on the sci-fi channel and the additional material does fill in some of the gaps in logic, however for my money the theatrical cut is better as the longer version is bloated and tedious and far less fun. Fun is why I can watch Waterworld again and again. In an age where all blockbusters are loaded with CGI cartoon like creatures its refreshing to see something that relies on old fashioned stunt work to present us with a world not seen before.It represents the way blockbusters were made in days gone by. If it was made today it would be done for about 50 million on green screen stages, but where is the fun in that?

ALTERNATIVE FILMS: The Mad Max Trilogy, Doomsday, Fist of the North Star, The Perfect Storm.