When I say "long-awaited," I mean I got the idea about three-and-a-half weeks ago -- was it only that recently? a lot's happened since then -- when we went to Universal Studios in Los Angeles on January 1st, which was also my younger son's 11 birthday, and saw my beloved Waterworld stunt show, which I have now seen at least four times. I had only seen the movie once, and I decided it was time to rectify that. Maybe, I thought, it's better than I remembered.
I was rewarded pretty quickly on my two "favorite" things about the movie, though one is an actual favorite and one is a moment that makes me laugh.
The actual favorite: the device where the Universal logo of the planet Earth steadily loses all its land masses before the movie proper starts, perfectly preparing us for what we're about to watch. I think that may be the first time I had ever seen a studio tie something about its logo into the themes of the film, and it enthralled me.
As a side note, this is immediately followed by some voiceover setting the stage, the kind of thing that is far more often handled via on-screen text. The voiceover is in the familiar booming voice of Hal Douglas, who did the readings for about 732 trailers back at this time and was one of the most recognizable voices to those of us who watched them. There was a funny disconnect hearing his voice used within an actual movie, and I don't think it works. You just think you're watching a trailer.
The joke favorite thing: the line of dialogue mentioned in the title of this post, which comes during Kevin Costner's first exchange with another character.
(The second meaning of this title? Waterworld itself was not free. I can't believe I had to pay to rent it. I have about five streaming services and I thought it should have been available on at least three of them.)
Costner's "the Mariner" (I was surprised how rarely that name is actually spoken in the film, given its usage in the stunt show) is bartering with another loner like himself, who offers the Mariner something for free to sweeten the deal. "Nothing's free in Waterworld" says the Mariner, and I have to say, the intonation of this line is different than I remembered.
I always thought this was funny because the line should just be "Nothing's free." You don't need to say "in Waterworld." Waterworld is Earth. It would be like saying "Nothing's free on Earth," which no one would ever say.
I understand the point of the line, which is to tell us, the audience, that this specifically -- not life generally -- is a place where there are no free lunches, where every free agent has their own agenda. But to the characters of this world, it's just the only world that exists. They would only call it "Waterworld" if they thought there were some sort of alternative.
Of course, there is an alternative, which is that some number of decades or centuries earlier (more on that in a minute), there were cities and countries and continents that were once above the waves. But the premise is also that no one alive has seen these cities and countries and continents -- except the Mariner, who can use his gills to swim down to them, but he isn't telling anybody about it -- and that the oral storytelling tradition is not sufficiently developed to have passed down any certainty that these things existed. In fact, most people believe dry land is a myth. If dry land is a myth, then certainly it's also a myth that there are any planets in the heavens, that the sun is a star, or that there is anything in the universe other than these people traveling around in steampunk boats and wearing Mad Max's hand-me-downs.
In other words, they have no reason even to believe in the concept of something called land, so to distinguish what they do believe in from it, there is no reason to call it Waterworld.
That's probably just about enough of that discussion.
But if there's no land, one wonders how they continue to get the things they need, that are in many cases used so plentifully that they are almost squandered. For example, there is a careless disregard for the quantity of cigarettes that are smoked, such that the lead Smoker, the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), throws them around to people in the teeming crowds like Donald Trump throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans. Whether they get stomped on by those crowds seems immaterial, so obviously it is easy for them to make new cigarettes any time they want.
But cigarettes rely on tobacco which grows as a plant. We obviously do see things growing here in some limited quantity of dirt, but then it's unclear where that dirt came from if no one has ever seen land and its very existence might only be a rumor. It's tempting to think they just came across a shipping container full of a zillion cigarettes, but then this would suggest that the time of land and regular tobacco plants was as recently as a decade or two earlier, in which case, many people alive would remember that land existed and it wouldn't be an idea involving any uncertainty. This happened more like generations ago. So this group of bestial, id-driven cretins, overseen by Deacon, somehow have the sophisticated means of producing, machine-rolling and then wrapping in paper boxes these perfect packs of cigarettes. Don't forget, they had to get the paper for that somewhere too.
This is to say nothing of all the other things they have, and how they got those things, like a seemingly unlimited supply of bullets.
It is not worth asking these questions about Waterworld. It is only worth asking if you had a good time.
And I did. I definitely liked the movie better than I remembered, and I'll go through some of these points here.
1) Costner's performance as Mariner is really enjoyable. His movements really suggest a person who is more animal instinct than refined human gesture. And he takes quite a long time to become fully sympathetic, though once that transformation occurs he is a pretty standard hero. Before then, he engages in such dubious behavior as suggesting that they throw the young girl Enola (Tina Majorino) over the side of the boat to optimize their supply of drinkable water, and then later actually throwing her overboard, in a fit of combustible annoyance rather than an actual attempt to kill her. I like that the movie gives us more than a superficial idea of his bestial qualities instead of immediately redeeming him as a traditional hero.
2) On the other side, Hopper's villain is not one-dimensional either. A film that cared less about nuance would just make Deacon do terrible things during his every moment on screen, because especially in 1995, we would have wanted our villains to be unproblematically loathsome, to make their eventual demises all the more gratifying. Deacon is an asshole, but you can't say he doesn't have his reasons; in his very first scene, he loses his left eye, an occurrence that the movie makes comedic hay out of the rest of its running time. In fact, the comedy in Hopper's performance is one of its best aspects, as he relates to people as more like a businessman frustrated with what he has to deal with than a cackling epitome of evil. I think of the contrast with his villain in Speed the year before, and though I like that work quite a lot too, I think this performance is less sadistic and more opportunistic. In a way he is also just a version of a guy trying to get by in this world, like the Mariner. (Incidentally, we already know Waterworld received some inspiration from the design of the Mad Max movies, but as I was watching this, I couldn't help but notice that the influence might go both ways. The way Deacon interacts with his subjects is very similar to how Immortan Joe would interact with his own subjects some 20 years later.)
3) Because the Universal Studios stunt show is more my frame of reference for this movie than the movie itself, watching Waterworld had the enjoyable element of feeling like I was watching that stunt show fleshed out to feature length. It was nice to be reminded where some of the design elements and specific stunts got their origins, and in turn made that stuff seem more vigorous and exciting in the movie. Any time a character swung around in a cage or traveled along a zipwire, I remembered the stunt show that has entertained me so much and it reflected well on the movie. These scenes are just plain exciting, and given some similarity in design elements, like big shipboard guns that can be trained on nearby targets, I sometimes felt like I was watching an elongated version of the scene in Return of the Jedi where Jabba the Hutt's floating barge is destroyed.
4) The copy of the film I had looked really good. I'm not much one to determine how one copy potentially differs from another, but I was really noticing how crisp and clean everything looked here.
5) I thought the plot had sufficient momentum for a movie than runs over two hours. Given that there is a general sameness to all the sets, I was surprised at how this thing moved.
6) I was also reminded of an actual favorite film, The Cable Guy, as I was watching. In the climactic scene of that film, Jim Carrey's character, while punching Matthew Broderick's character in a satellite dish full of rainwater, shouts "Dry land is not a myth! I've seen it!" And then paraphrasing his next line: "I don't know what the big deal is! I've seen that movie five times! It rules!" The funny thing is, Chip Douglas (no relation to Hal Douglas) saying he loves Waterworld is supposed to undermine his taste in movies. The Cable Guy came out only a year later, when Waterworld was definitively and seemingly irreversibly in the realm of complete and total flop. But I don't know. Maybe it does sort of rule, in some ways.
I could probably continue with some other observations, but that's enough.
When adding this and Throw Momma From the Train to my list of rewatches on Letterboxd, I noticed the star ratings I'd given the two movies I hadn't seen since the 1990s (or possibly the 1980s for the other one). Obviously I gave those ratings not when I saw the movies but in, I think, 2012, when I filled in all the movies I'd seen on Letterboxd. I gave Throw Momma 3.5 stars and Waterworld 2.5 stars, but I think I would definitely reverse those two now, if not drop Throw Momma even a half-star lower than that. At the very least, my thoughts on that film don't warrant a full post, like I've just given this one.
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