"Waterworld"
Latest Reflections from the Guild
It's been a while since I've seen this movie so I won't take a stab at a plot summary until I can rent the tape and watch it again.
However, I do remember a few nits from this movie! I remember my wife's disbelief at the end of the movie when the bad guy crashes the plane on the tanker and he is killed (or knocked unconscious) but the little girl riding in the passenger seat is just fine!
And a friend of mine saw the movie in an initial screening and asked the $64,000 question: Where did they get the cows? (Since many in the movie wear leather.)
Reflections from the Guild
[Note from Phil: I have not verified these but they sounded good to me!]
Murray J.D. Leeder: "If the world really is flooded, how come the oceans are so clean?"
"Why doesn't the Mariner or the Deacon either consider copying down the tattoo?"
"How hard would it really be to find dry land? Just go to where Mt. Everest (or McKinley, or whatever) used to be. Surely sextants still work!"
"Speaking of, why don't we see any sextants?"
"Why is it that the bad guys smoke? Who is it out there growing tabacco?"
"The filmmakers certainly took some liberties with the meaning of the word: 'Atoll'." (Note from Phil: Having not seen the movie in some time, I'm not exactly sure what Murray means but I am sure it's a good point. Wink, wink.)
"After the girl is kidnapped and the ship is sinking, what do the Mariner and the Jeanne Tripplehorn character do? Well, let's not be too specific now... but shouldn't they have other things on their mind?"
"Just how does the Mariner navigate? He doesn't use a sextant, he doesn't seem to use the stars, and there are certainly no landmarks to follow!"
"Matthew Chiappardi of Hamilton, NJ: "Any nit we can come up for this film can be explained away by saying...this was BAD, BAD movie. If I had to choose a list of really poor movies from 1994, this would be on it...but seriously, there was about 75 minutes of footage that actually didn't make the final cut...75!, now I'm not talking about alternate takes, or close ups, I mean 75 minutes of completely new scripted footage that ended up on the cutting room floor. So many of whatever we can come up with (which is probably a lot- I saw this film three times) might have been explained away in the missing footage. Who knows how this movie would have turned out if they included the rest of it."
"BTW, as for why they didn't just go to Mount Everest...we have no time frame for when this movie takes place. It may be centuries or even millenia after the great disaster, do folks might have forgotten about things like Mt. Everest."
Dave Craig from Waterloo, Ontario: "I think the great moment in the film occurs right at the beginning, when The Universal Logo shows the polar ice caps melting and and flooding the earth. It was a unique and interesting idea. Anyway, onto the nits!"
"First, the polar ice caps surely didn't melt overnight. Scientists should have realized something was wrong when shorelines started to dissappear? And even if they did, the best thing they could do was build a bunch of small atolls? It just seems like they could have stopped the melting, and only lost some small islands and shorelines. (Note from Phil: Perhaps, but knowing humans, I'd guess that they waited to do something about it until it was too late!)
"Second, Where did these giant sea monsters come from? it's not really clear when the movie takes place, but could some fish have evolved into that thing?"
Joseph Pintar: "I want to add a nit to your Waterworld collection. Is it really believable that the girl can't swim? The polar ice caps have been gone for some time now and I think that swimming is as much a priority as walking. It is a necessity to learn to swim at an early age. Given that the girl is about 7 or 8, I think it strains credibility." (Note from Phil: Maybe they were worried the tattoo would wash off?!?)
Sal Grandon of Edmonton, Alberta: "It's been a long time since I saw the movie so I only remember a couple of nits:"
"At the beginning of the movie we see Kevin Costner’s character run his own urine through a distiller to produce clean water. If this mechanism can purify urine, why doesn't he just run sea water through it? It certainly seems to be a more abundant water supply."
"In another scene when he and the female must stay underwater for a long time he offers to 'do the breathing for both of them.' Man, this guy has some set of gill/lungs! He appears to extract dissolved oxygen from the seawater, converts it into gaseous oxygen in his lungs and then breathes it into her lungs. Impressive!"
Shon Lo of Cambridge MA: "From a biological standpoint, Waterworld is definitely the 'ok, I'll suspend my disbelief, but oh please!' type of movie. First of all, it's inconsistent: somehow huge, mutated (presumably) carnivorous aquatic animals have populated the oceans. However, the evolutionary process is so much slower for humans (not to mention horses) that the only adaptations are teeny-tiny little gills and some toe webbing. The gills themselves would never work, since they are not only small, but stuck behind the Mariner's ears, where the amount of oxygenated water flowing over them would probably be miniscule, and certainly not enough for him to 'breathe' through them. I assume that his head isn't mostly hollow so he can take in water through his mouth and have it flow out behind his ears. Also, I don't see how a few inches of webbing between one's toes could possible aid in swimming all that much. The constant exposure to the sun plus reflected rays from the water should lead to old, wrinkly, melanoma laden skin, but instead the good guys have perfect tans and skin, and the bad guys just have a bit of sunburn? Did people somehow have the foresight to save several lifetime's supply of Coppertone?"
Murray J.D. Leeder: "Also: not only can the girl not swim, but she and Helen can't fish. When the world is flooded, don't you think it might be one of those important skills everyone would be taught?"
"The Mariner and Helen go galavanting about the oceanic floor (featuring a Coke can in the trashiest product promotion ever), and then they're actually surprised when Enola is abducted in their absence!"
Lisa Shock: "OK, it's been a while since I saw it, but the guys smoking on the Exxon Valdez made no sense at all. Who stored up all those cigs, nice dry cigs? It's also EXTREMELY dangerous to smoke around mostly empty petroleum containers. When full, you could drop a lit match into a drum full of oil or gas, and nothing much will happen since there's very little oxygen inside. But a little vapor in a room full of air is explosive! I was also was surprised that with so many ships out there that no one
had found the island. I also wondered why there weren't more predatory species there. If the water rose quickly, all animals would have fled to higher ground. The ones who made it to the mountain top which became the island would then compete for food and fresh water. Horses are pretty delicate. I would think that the leopards, lions, goats, and yaks would be better survivors. I guess I expected it to be more
crowded."
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Copyright 1996 by Phil Farrand. All Rights Reserved.