Lower Decks

With the imminent release (um, finally) of ‘The Road,’ based on the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy book, now’s a great time to revisit post-apocalyptic material. Earlier columns covered my experiences with Stephen King’s ‘The Stand.’ Next month I’ll be covering Oni’s excellent comic ‘Wasteland’ as part of my annual QB50 awards. This week, it’s probably appropriate to talk about a film that many believe is a real turkey – ‘Waterworld.’

Kevin Costner rebounded nicely from being cut out ‘The Big Chill’ to become one of the biggest and most bankable stars of the late 1980s, a status he carried over to the early ’90s. From ‘Bull Durham’ to ‘Field of Dreams’ to ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ (to name a few), he seemed to dominate the movies. He won Oscar glory with ‘Dances With Wolves,’ and seemed to enter a new phase of his career. Then, just as quickly, he seemed to sink into a virtual pariah status, a star no one seemed interested in anymore, even though he could sell everything from political thriller (‘JFK’) to romantic adventure (‘The Bodyguard’). The culprit was the expensive but not actual box office failure ‘Waterworld,’ which painted him in an entirely new light: excessive, indulging hack.

It’s worth noting that no star seems to maintain their charm forever, that at some point they at least become a niche interest, but it’s not often that someone in their prime loses their charm almost entirely. ‘Waterworld’ came at a time that was seeing a transition of the blockbuster. The ’80s had been almost completely dominated by them, but attempts to find the new Indiana Jones, a revival of old heroic archetypes, had already been failing. Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ was widely acclaimed, but was already collapsing on itself by then. Costner’s own ‘Robin Hood’ was a standalone flick. Geena Davis couldn’t make ‘Cutthroat Island’ swim. ‘Independence Day’ was looming, the dawn of the modern blockbuster. And ‘Waterworld’ just couldn’t get any respect. Like I said, it made money, but you wouldn’t know it.

Part of it was that Costner was forced into a spot, one he’d created himself, but perhaps hadn’t quite figured out. He was always best as a loner, but ‘Waterworld’ took that persona to the extreme. He was practically unlikable, almost as much the villain as Dennis Hopper (too over-the-top to take seriously himself, perhaps). He was a mutant before Bryan Singer made mutants cool, an antihero whose origin was never made clear, and stuck on a world environmentalists might have embraced, but released during the years where all the focus was on the budding recycling initiative. Finally, his goals and ultimate destination weren’t exciting enough either, and he fought them all the way. How to understand any of that as entertainment?

Costner would actually try this sort of thing again with an adaptation of David Brin’s ‘The Postman,’ but it was either too soon or too late to salvage his career, or garner much interest. Even ‘Prince of Thieves,’ which had shot like a cannon into the popular consciousness, seemed to have been lost by then. ‘Waterworld’ was one of the first things I realized I didn’t care what people thought about, that my interest couldn’t be shaken no matter how little respect it got, how impossible it was to find anyone else who seemed to have a positive opinion of it. I liked Costner’s Mariner, and I liked how he interacted with his world, which I grew to appreciate more and more. I didn’t care how flimsy the conflict with Hopper proved (increasingly), just the interaction he had with the woman and her little girl who ended up as unwanted stowaways on his boat, one with charms he didn’t care for, the other with a tattoo that was a map everyone wanted to get their hands on, a virtual big giant arrow to land, the one thing everyone had stopped believing in.

I liked the scavenger existence, the dirt Costner got from making trips to the bottom of the sea (pessimism, always a constant in these kinds of stories, meant science was virtually unknown now, and no one was apparently capable of adapting a bit more creatively to the new world) which was like gold, the crazies languishing under the sun, the way it was all like ‘Mad Max’ but that apparently being too hard to voice on the water.

There’s plenty to think about when viewing a movie like ’Waterworld,’ and it doesn’t have to be negative.