[COLUMN] The Compelling Hubris of Waterworld | by Darren Mooney

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Waterworld, the infamous Kevin Costner vehicle that has become shorthand for a particular sort of cinematic folly.

Waterworld is an interesting film. Very few big-budget late-summer blockbusters introduce their lead character, played by one of the biggest movie stars in the world, urinating into a cup, feeding that cup into a filter, and then drinking the recycled water – all lovingly captured within a single, lingering take. Waterworld is a bizarre object, casting one of the most handsome actors of the era as an anonymous disgruntled mutant known as the Mariner and distinguished by the gills on his neck.

Despite its lingering reputation, it was not an especially absurd cinematic flop. The movie cost a then-record $175m to make, but it grossed $264m worldwide. It likely made a significant loss, but it’s certainly not an embarrassment on the scale of something like Heaven’s Gate or The Flash. Honestly, Costner’s movie star career would likely have survived Waterworld had he not followed it almost directly with The Postman, which made a mere $20m on an $80m budget.

The film is closely tied to Costner as a movie star. The Mariner is a classic stoic Costner protagonist, a gruff non-nonsense figure whose silent gaze hides a deeper inner life. Waterworld exists at the intersection point between two of Costner’s default modes of operation during the decade, splitting the difference between the silly derring-do adventuring of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the weightier meditations on unformed American identity in Dances With Wolves or The Postman.

More substantially, its themes of environmentalism are close to Costner’s heart. The villains’ base of operations is the rusty hull of the Exxon Valdez, the real-life oil tanker that ran aground off Alaska in March 1989. In the real world, that natural disaster prompted Costner to invest $24m of his own money in technology to clean up oil spills, which he brought to Capitol Hill in June 2010, a month after BP used those devices to clean up their own spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even beyond this, Waterworld has a strange lingering cultural cachet. The tie-in stunt show has become an institution of Universal’s theme parks. There was talk of a streaming show on Peacock that would have been overseen by Dan Trachtenberg, who has done wonders reviving the Predator brand. There were recent efforts to restore an extended cut of the movie – The Ulysses Cut – cobbled together from various international television versions, suggesting the film’s enduring appeal.

In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to reclaim Waterworld, similar to efforts to rehabilitate similar big, bold, beautiful box office disappointments like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer. In 2020, The Guardian described the aquatic epic as “a perfectly watchable sci-fi cult classic.” Last year, SyFy declared that the film “delivers everything one should hope for in a wild, dystopian epic.” Last week, Den of Geek boasted that “there’s more to be proud of in Waterworld than ashamed of.”

Part of this reappraisal is likely down to how novel Waterworld feels in the context of a modern theatrical landscape dominated by franchise instalments largely handled by journeymen directors, saturated with weightless computer-generated imagery, laced with irony and focus-tested to death. Waterworld certainly has flaws, but those flaws are its own. There is no compromise or hesitation in it. It commits unfailingly and unflinchingly to its premise. It’s expensive, but at least it looks expensive.

Waterworld is undoubtedly a folly. Contemporary press set that narrative before the film released, wryly dubbing the movie “Fishtar” or “Kevin’s Gate”, in reference to two earlier era-defining flops. That said, the fact that the press had been gunning for Costner for a couple of years is demonstrated by the fact that “Kevin’s Gate” was a recycled joke, with press having previously employed it in pre-emptive dismissals of Dances with Wolves.

Of course, the production of Waterworld was a fiasco. Although the movie is largely considered a Costner project, he did not technically direct it. Those duties fell to Kevin Reynolds, who had a long relationship with Costner, having directed the star in Fandango and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. However, tensions ran high. Although still credited on the released movie, Reynolds walked off the film when Costner took control of the edit.

“In the future, Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself,” Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly in July 1995. “That way he can always be working with his favorite actor and his favorite director.” It is a delightfully acerbic burn, but the real punchline to this story is that this was not the end of the pair’s creative relationship. Reynolds would go on to direct Costner once more, in the History Channel docuseries Hatfields & McCoys.

Although Waterworld is an interesting object of itself, any discussion about the project should situate it in the larger context of late 1990s Hollywood. This gigantic spectacle did not emerge fully formed from the ether. It reflected a number of larger trends within the industry, emerging at the vanguard of a new era of excess. The 1980s had seen an explosion in blockbuster cinema, with several consecutive years – 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 - reporting the biggest box office ever.

In contrast, the early 1990s found the industry in decline. Box revenue dropped sharply between 1989 and 1990. At the same time, the industry was spending wildly in the hopes of making up for lost ground. Flops like Havana and Days of Thunder did a little to help studios justify tightening the reins on spending, but there was a palpable hunger in Hollywood to push the boat out – to spend more on increasingly lavish films in the hopes of holding the audience’s attention.

This meant more money being allocated to greater spectacle. The 1990s saw a resurgence in natural disaster movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Volcano and Dante’s Peak, with these movies often competing against each other. Films like Jurassic Park and Independence Day pushed the very notion of what was possible on screen. Waterworld arrived smack-bang in the middle of that decade, but it was a harbinger of things to come.

In August 1996, just a little over a year after Waterworld’s release, Walt Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth opined that the upcoming blockbuster season of 1997 had “12 movies with an average negative cost of $100 million aimed at basically the same demographic – young men under 25 – all competing for the same 12 weeks of summer.” Reflecting on that summer, Imagine Entertainment President Michael Rosenberg argued the pile-up of films “cost each other 15% to 20% of their potential gross.”

One of the more interesting expressions of Hollywood decadence is an increased dependence on water. Waterworld was the first of a wave of movies involving lavish water-pieced set pieces, concentrated in 1997. The most obvious example is James Cameron’s Titanic, which would soon surpass Waterworld as the most expensive movie ever made and which was covered with a similarly cynical tone by a press that seemed eager to watch the failure of its “famously bombastic director.”

However, what is really interesting is the extent to which water was shoehorned into movies that didn’t really need it. Jan De Bont set Speed on a bus. However, he decided to set the sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control on a cruise ship, prompting critic Kenneth Turan to argue that the follow-up had “little connection to the earlier hit.” Despite being set in space, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection includes an extended underwater action set-piece involving computer-generated monsters.

There is a lot of this arrogance at play in Waterworld. Screenwriter Peter Rader was commissioned by Roger Corman’s company to essentially rip-off the Mad Max movies. Those films are hard enough to shoot on land, as George Miller will attest, so translating them to the ocean seemed to be asking for trouble. Corman understood that setting such a story at sea would swell the budget, and so shrewdly killed the project as being too expensive; though even Corman under-estimated the size of the task, imagining it would cost $5m.

This emphasis on making movies in and around water is as good a measure of cinematic hubris as anything. It is very difficult to make movies on water; during production of Waterworld, the sets would routinely drift away from locations and out to sea. Filming took longer; support staff like make-up artists were on separate boats, meaning that things like fixing Costner’s hair between takes took forever. It was more expensive; equipment and sets had to be waterproofed.

It was also more dangerous. Kate Winslet almost drowned on the set of Titanic and Sandra Bullock was almost decapitated by a boat rudder making Cruise Control. Waterworld featured more than its fair share of near disaster. Costner was almost killed by a helicopter, and his co-stars, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tina Majorino, almost drowned on the first day of shooting. Norman Howell, Costner’s diving double, suffered a near-fatal embolism.

Still, even recognizing the inherent absurdity of trying to make a movie like Waterworld, there is something quite charming about the fact that it even exists. These days, when studios lose hundreds of millions of dollars on would-be blockbusters, they tend to be bland and generic – they lack any real identity or perspective, they have been focus-grouped and hacked-and-slashed until they are just a shapeless void of forgettable “content.”

There is little interesting in the experience of watching The Flash, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Marvels or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Modern big studio follies tend to be deliberately anonymous, hacked to pieces with a chainsaw and reassembled with crazy glue in the hope that at the very least they won’t actually offend audiences by having anything as particular as a distinct authorial point of view or express ambitions above their station.

Waterworld is not a hidden masterpiece. It’s long, it’s meandering and the Mariner is occasionally deeply unpleasant in a way that makes the movie tough to watch. It takes itself almost painfully serious at times, to the point that it’s hard not to root for the villain played with scenery-chewing relish by Dennis Hopper. However, it’s also a blockbuster where every dollar is visible on screen, where the world feels tactile and tangible in a way that few modern blockbusters do. It is earnest, sincere and driven by big ideas about the direction of the world in which it exists.

If only all studio follies had half as much to recommend them.