A flop that remains a Universal Studios institution

When Kevin Reynolds' Waterworld tanked at the box office in 1995, and was generally reviled by
critics as well, it seemed that the only future life it would have was as a punchline for cautionary tales about Hollywood excess, and as a miscalculation by Kevin Costner based on the size of his ego and his inflated sense of self regard. 

Instead, a stunt show based on the movie is still going strong at Universal Studios, 30 years after the movie itself was such a disappointment.

Is this in some way the equivalent of a film that finds a cult audience after failing with critics and viewers on its original run?

The answer might seem like an easy "yes" except that it is still not the film version of Waterworld that is beloved, though I think there has been some minor reassessment of its virtues in the intervening three decades. Regardless of what you think about the movie, the brand still has ongoing relevance, as the Universal Studios show is still full for every performance, as we experienced during our own viewing -- about the fourth overall for me -- on New Year's Day, which was also my son's 11th birthday.

I actually thought about writing this post after my third viewing in August of 2019, but travel and a lack of time to blog left that idea on the back burner. I'm enjoying a quiet morning at our Air BnB so I decided to put pen to paper, metaphorically, after my fourth viewing. 

I might have said "fourth (and final?) viewing," because a) it's always possible they could switch this out for a different sort of stunt show, or b) we might not go to Universal Studios again at a time when both of my kids are still definitely kids, which means we might not go at all. The older one is 14, and if our pattern of alternating theme parks holds true, it'll be Disneyland's turn for a visit on our next time through LA. 

However, option A certainly does not seem likely at this stage. For one, the stadium where the Waterworld show occurs is based around water, so if you wanted to re-use the same space, you'd have to find another water-based stunt show that has ties to Universal. Perhaps something like an Avatar show would work, except Avatar is not Universal. 

But then there's also the fact that this show has been surviving for 30 years, as it actually did come out in the same year as the movie. (There was a lot of optimism about that movie that went unrealized.) Not only surviving, but thriving. The same attraction has been opened in three more Universal Studios around the world, those in Japan (2001), Singapore (2010) and Beijing (2021). That means it was most recently greenlit for permanence only four years ago, and don't tell me building that set is cheap, because it ain't. 

And Universal does switch things out. One of my favorite attractions the first time I went, way back in the 1990s, was the Back to the Future ride, which hasn't been around for at least 20 years now. (And I still sort of miss it each time I go.) But there is no similar financial incentive to scuttle Waterworld. 

(Actually my first Universal trip was on a family vacation in 1989, but I honestly don't remember if the Back to the Future ride existed then. I know the Waterworld stunt show did not exist because the movie did not exist.)

I won't go into too much detail about what the show is about, though I could probably synopsize it in one sentence. Basically, there are a bunch of "good" characters (friends of the Mariner, who was played by Costner in the film) who man a floating outpost that they are trying to keep out of the clutches of the man who leads a group of bandits called the Smokers. That's the Deacon, who was played by Dennis Hopper in the movie. There are multiple stunts involving boats, jet skis, waterskiing, flames, explosions, guns, fisticuffs, and even a plane that comes crashing into the arena near the climax, which you see in the poster above and which is still a moment of absolute exhilaration for me, even on my fourth time seeing it. 

Here are a few photos I took to give you an idea of what it looks like:

They're not great -- I took them very arbitrarily, because I've taken similar photos on three previous occasions that I likely have saved somewhere. 

In any case, to return to the main point, I have to think that anyone involved with Waterworld, who might have otherwise seen the movie as a blight on their resume, must reflect at least a little bit fondly on it, considering that the (indirect) fruits of their labors still bring joy to thousands of people every day at four Universal Studios worldwide. It may not have made for a great movie, but it makes for a spectacular stunt show.

And I think this may be a good time for me to reconsider the merits of the actual movie. In a few weeks I will finally be free of watching 2024 films, and I think I'll make Waterworld one of my first viewings undertaken merely for the pleasure of watching the movie, not for ranking it. 

Nabbing novelties left and right

I'm trying to fulfill that perfect happy spot between movies that are on my Letterboxd watchlist but also not equally available to me in the U.S. as they will be when I get back home on Monday the 6th. That initiative led to killing more than half the day on The Brutalist on New Year's Eve, the sort of activity I don't intend to repeat unless the movie is a lot shorter than that one was.  

Streaming presents its own interesting challenges and opportunities in that regard. The TV in our AirBnB has some accounts that are logged in either to the homeowner or a past guest -- which reminds me, I think we left our Netflix logged in at the AirBnB back in Maine -- that might get me access to some things I can't access equally back in Melbourne. 

I say "challenges" in addition to opportunities because there is something weird going on with the remote control for this big TV in the living room. No back buttons on it seem to work, and there are certain apps where the TV allows you to get in to a certain point, but then not to retrace your steps. Turning the TV off and back on again seems to get you to a main menu again, but once you go back into the app, it remembers the place you left off, and the cycle starts all over again.

And so it is that I'm not sure if I actually have access to Marielle Heller's Nightbitch on the Hulu logged into our TV. Within the actual Hulu app, I have progressed to a point where I can't seem to get out of a certain screen of options and the search function isn't accessible. I did search for Nightbitch elsewhere, but I'm not sure it was actually checking Hulu when it did that search so it showed as unavailable. But Nightbitch is available on Hulu, which we don't have in Australia, isn't it? I have a few more days to figure this out.

I eventually abandoned Nightbitch for a different sort of American novelty, which is Max. The Max account was fully logged in and I could go through all the choices. We don't have Max in Australia, as the things that play on Max are on a streamer called Binge, which my wife can get on her laptop but I can't get on our TV. (A boring topic that it is not worth getting into today.)

In a moment of desperation, I almost started watching Joker: Folie a Deux. However, I had resolved not to watch it out of some vague protest of Todd Phillips and his vaguely right-wing rhetoric, and I didn't want desperation alone to cause me to crumble. (Plus the movie is available on the plane if I do get to that point.)

Instead I found something that is not actually accessible to me in any other way, but is on my watchlist: Gary Dauberman's Salem's Lot. As far as I am aware, this is fully a Max exclusive and it may not even be available for rental via iTunes, though I have not checked that. 

For context, Salem's Lot is one of my favorite Stephen King novels. The 1979 movie version of it is terrible, and on IMDB I am noticing there is also a 2004 version that I haven't seen. For being one of my favorites, though, I remember very little of the actual plot, only that I loved King's execution of it and that I cherished the book at the time I read it. Catching it before I finalize my 2024 rankings seemed like the best possible outcome of a night in America with my different viewing options, even though I would have preferred Nightbitch. And it was also not too mentally taxing a way to wind down from a day at Universal Studios for my younger son's 11th birthday. 

I didn't end up loving the movie, though I didn't end up hating it either. I'd heard it was pretty mid, and it was.

Though it's hard to tell if a second novelty played a significant role in my assessment of the movie or not. Allow me to elaborate.

As many TVs are out there in this world, this TV is on the high-def setting that does not make movies look very good. Actually, I should clarify. It makes them look extremely "good" if your idea of "good" is to see lines so crisp and details so defined that it almost creates the impression you are watching something on video, like the high-frame rate of Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies. I've discussed this before so I think you know what I'm talking about even though at this moment I am lacking the technical language to describe it more accurately.

I don't ever like to watch movies on this TV setting and rarely would be in a position to do so because my own TV is set up on cinema mode (or whatever it's called), which makes movies look like they are supposed to look. But given the challenges this remote control was already presenting me, I decided not to try to change the picture mode, in part because I am going to assume the guy who owns this place actually wants it to look like it does. (He's got surf movie posters up around the house and I think he might be involved in movie production in some way, so I am having to assume he made this choice intentionally.)

So I decided a second novelty would be to watch Salem's Lot on this setting that I never use on my own TV, and see if I could quantify any impact it had on my impression of the movie. Which turned out to be a tall task.

People talk about an uncanny valley when they discuss Robert Zemeckis' films -- boy do they talk about that, I really wish they would come up with a new perspective. For me this is more like the uncanny valley, watching these actors in high-def, feeling like the sets and (in this case) the monsters are hyper-real in some way that bothers me, rather than cinematic creations that are of a piece with the rest of the attractive looking environment we get when we watch films in the theater or on the right TV setting. It also gave me the impression they were making a television show, not a movie, but also not a television show from the prestige TV era. In the past I've likened it to something shot for the BBC in the 1980s and I stand by that description.

So that feeling alone takes me out of the idea that I am watching something that I should consider on par with all the other movies I'm watching in a particular year -- a consideration especially at a time of year that I am comparing those movies for the purposes of my list. And it dulls my ability to properly rate all the other elements of a typical movie, like script and performance and special effects. Once I've lost my like with like comparison, I'm lost for sure.

As I was watching Salem's Lot, I found myself wondering how I would fare with a movie I thought I had good reason to like -- Nightbitch, for example. There was never a great likelihood Salem's Lot would contend for even my top 100 of 2024, let alone my top 20. Heller, on the other hand, has already made one movie that landed in my top 20 (Diary of a Teenage Girl was my #19 of 2015) and one other that probably would have contended for the top 20 if I'd seen it in time to rank it (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). 

The question, of course, is whether I want to subject a movie I have a good chance of liking to this setting. What if I would have really liked the movie but watching it this way ruins it?

It remains to be seen whether that question will be answered with Nightbitch. If I do manage to pull it up on this TV, then I can decide whether I want to make my way into the TV settings and find the proper mode on which to view it. 

The last movie of 2024 was the brutalest

No, there's no typing error there, no failure on my part to contradict the autocorrect.

My last viewing of 2024 was indeed The Brutalist, but it was also the brutalest of all my viewings in the calendar year. 

That is not a comment on the film's quality in any way, shape or form. You will have to wait a couple weeks before you find out my thoughts on that.

No, it was merely a comment on its length.

In case you were not aware, The Brutalist is 3 hours and 35 minutes long. I don't know whether that includes the 15-minute intermission or not, and I'll explain in a minute why there was some intermission-related confusion related to the total running time. All I can tell you is that I entered the movie theater at just before 9 a.m. and left just after 1 p.m. That's a long amount of time to be in a single movie.

It was also brutal in terms of the impact I thought it wouldn't have, but totally did have, on the rest of my family. But I probably need to back up a few steps at this point.  

We are in Los Angeles now, and any time we are in Los Angeles late in the year -- which has happened twice previously since we moved away from here in 2013 -- there is the opportunity for me to see something that not only isn't open in Australia, usually not by a long shot, but also isn't open anywhere else in the U.S. Brady Corbet's follow-up to Vox Lux is one such film, probably the best "get" out of the remaining contenders I'd like to see before closing my rankings, but thought I probably couldn't.

Only a few days ago, though, I first visited its IMDB page, where the sticker shock of the 215-minute running time first hit me. I might have actually swooned like a Georgia debutante on a hot summer day. 

So The Brutalist was out as something to watch in LA. Or was it?

I noticed that the AMC in Burbank, which I had never thought of as one of those theaters that shows year-end movies released in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify for the Oscars, had a daily 9 a.m. screening of the movie. If there was any way to see this movie without severely screwing up the trajectory of one whole day in Los Angeles for the rest of my family, one of only five short days we are here, this was it. 

But then my wife and I drank a bit too much on our first night in town during a gathering of a half-dozen close friends, which was an absolute blast, so my plan to do this on the morning of New Year's Eve seemed out the window. Even if I didn't think it would impact her and I didn't think she'd feel offended by the request, I was hesitant to spoil the good vibes of our drunkenness. Then there was the fact that I might feel too wrecked in the morning to make the attempt, even if it was approved.

Then I just decided to sucker up my courage and ask, and it turns out that decision was justified. She agreed immediately, without hesitation or even a small quantity of seeming miffed by the request. Perhaps I'd chosen the perfect moment after all.

I couldn't sleep past 7 a.m. this morning -- it's rare that I do, no matter what the previous night holds -- so I was up in plenty of time and it was all coming to plan. Since we've been very busy most days on our trip and everyone (but crazy old me) needed a bit of a rest today, I knew that no one else in my family would be put out by my not being there, even though I'd have the car in a city that requires them. 

The only small bit of concern was that my closest friend here had messaged me before going to bed, after he himself got home from the bar, about possibly doing lunch today. I told him about the Brutalist viewing but that I would likely be done by about 1, so a late lunch would work. (I tend to unrealistically estimate the endings of things that I think could go longer, when it's other people's time I'm infringing on. I think it makes me feel less guilty, though the opposite reaction would also be valid. I guess I feel like if I'm trying to squeeze in an absurd thing that no one else would try to squeeze in, the least I can do is give off the impression it will inconvenience them less than it actually might.)

So I left a note for my wife (who was still asleep) upon leaving that she should touch base with him and his wife mid-morning, knowing that I might actually be capable of doing that myself if the movie had the intermission I thought it might have. However, I'm also playing this game where I see how much I can do without actually connecting my phone to international roaming, which means I'm trying to hop from one free WiFi to another whenever possible. That factors into this story. So it was better for her to start to arrange things.

Because I was already a little bit concerned about the way my movie would be delaying the "start" to the day, I reacted with special annoyance at the number of trailers before the movie. Although I didn't see any actual ads for other products, which dominate the time before an Australian movie starts, there were at least seven and possibly as many as eight movie trailers. Each one felt like a specific delay of two minutes to my getting done with the movie. 

During the intermission, I did successfully connect to the AMC WiFi -- even though it had asked for my AMC Stubs membership details the first time I tried to connect -- so I got to see the status of their planning. And that started to worry me about how much I'd delay them getting lunch, especially when I've got a 14-year-old who doesn't take well to having his food delayed. And especially when plans were taking shape for them to walk more than a mile to his house because they had no car. 

Then there was the problem with the intermission that I alluded to earlier. 

I used the intermission to go get myself a popcorn and soda mid-movie, since I hadn't gotten one before the movie started. Yes, this viewing was just novelty upon novelty for me. Not only was this almost certainly the earliest ever showtime for me in a movie theater, but it was also the only time I'd gotten snacks mid-movie without missing any of the movie. (And the times I've done that I might be able to count on one finger.) 

I was worried about how quickly the intermission would elapse, though, so I hurried back to my seat in case they restarted the movie early. Only to find the screen completely blank, making me wonder if I were even in the right theater. There had been a picture of Adrien Brody and some of the other cast on the screen before I'd left.

I asked my neighbor why there was nothing on the screen. "Because it's intermission," he replied, his voice dripping with the word "Duh!" 

"Oh yeah I know but I thought ..." There didn't seem any point to finish the thought.

Less than a minute later, as if in response to my question, the slide with Adrien Brody came back up again ... and had a 15-minute clock that started to count down the remainder of the intermission. But was counting it down from the beginning again, as if ten minutes of that intermission had not already elapsed.

I hoped someone might realize this error and fast-forward it, but you can't really do that -- as soon as anyone might have used this countdown to determine how much time they had to run to the bathroom, you are committed to that being an accurate countdown. Better to go too long and make sure nobody misses anything than the alternative.

So in the end we had a 25-minute intermission rather than a 15-minute intermission, further delaying my arrival at the burger place -- and it was now unclear whether I was meeting them there or at my friend's house. Giving them an update on my situation, I told them I would leave as soon as the credits started.

Which I did, and just to make sure I did not lose the connection to the AMC WiFi, I put the phone on Do Not Disturb rather than turning the phone off. So I did ask for clarification on where I should go once I was able to use it again, but got no response before I needed to leave WiFi range. 

Which meant that by the time I had meandered back to their house, taking a less than optimal route to get there, I hadn't seen that they wanted me to meet them at the restaurant.

This officially signaled the end to my "How many days can you go without connecting to the cellular network?" game. They brought me back a burger, at least having had the good sense to go ahead and eat without me. And I got to catch up with their 20-year-old son, who I've known since he was a baby, so the mishap did have some fringe benefits. 

Anyway.

So a bit brutal on the trajectory of the day, but at least my wife and kids were in good spirts and I don't think I've lost any points with them.

Although this time stamp will say January 1st, there are still about eight hours to go in 2024 here on the west coast of the U.S. And though it's conceivable I could watch another movie in that time, I think it's best to use the excuse of having written this post not to do that. Two hundred eighty-seven new-to-me movies in 2024 seems like a good number -- perhaps even too high a number, since I haven't seen this many in a single year since 2016. Definitely no need for a 288th. 

Happy New Year to one and all.