If you find yourself biking up Dundas West on a mid-July evening, the asphalt radiating heat back onto your pasty body, your face frozen in a grin half euphoric and half pained from the sheer effort of existing—it might be a good night to go see the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld.
This summer has not been the best. Everything feels off. As you scroll through photos of cute friends and acquaintances on the beach and on patios, exulting in the dapple of a seemingly endless golden hour, you wonder why the joy of the season has eluded you.
It could be your aging parent or your aging pets or the job that causes you to clench your jaw so tightly at night that you now wear a mouthguard. It could be the wildfire smoke that choked the city during a weird week at the end of June, the sky a woozy burnt orange, the air tightening your chest and making every living thing around you shrink a little bit more. It could be the sinking feeling that the vibes, as they say, are deteriorating.
In bad times, you often seek water. You spent many lockdown winter evenings submerged in a hot bath re-reading the Sandman comics. As a bullied kid, you were consumed by swimming lessons, letting the chlorine fill your nostrils, sinking deep. When the public pools reopened last summer, you plunged into the deep end off the Christie Pits slide and listened to the surface rumblings of happy kids yelling, things almost feeling normal again.
And so, in this spirit, you plunge into Waterworld; an unapologetic Mad Max rip-off that imagines a future where the polar ice caps have completely melted. As one might expect—and as Steven Spielberg warned Kevin Costner himself—it is very hard to make a movie almost entirely on open water, and the film was beset with challenges. Kevin Costner worked six days a week and almost died during a stunt. In 1995 it was the most expensive film ever made; naturally it flopped. It is also deeply and hilariously sincere, and all of these facts put together ensured that it was ruthlessly mocked. This is pretty much all you know about Waterworld.
"It is so exquisitely dumb that it feels like a deep tissue massage for your brain."
In the cool darkness of the Revue Cinema, however, another fact slowly reveals itself to you: Waterworld is fucking awesome. It is so exquisitely dumb that it feels like a deep tissue massage for your brain. Kevin Costner’s character is called the Mariner, a drifter who is also kind of an asshole. Early on, it is revealed that he has webbed feet and gills, in a reveal that is so insane I dropped my popcorn. When the big baddie—Dennis Hopper—descends upon the waterpeople wearing a leather duster on what appears to be a heavy metal skidoo, you are all in. Later, he says Costner is “like a turd that won’t flush.”
More significantly, Hopper is an oil pirate—a ‘90s climate terrorist—commandeering the rusted ruins of the Exxon Valdez with a gang of chain-smoking miscreants held in thrall to nicotine. He is seeking a young girl with a tattooed map to what may or may not be the last patch of dry land on her back, and the Mariner finds himself reluctantly in charge of protecting her and her caregiver, Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He is a grouchy and occasionally violent caregiver, and in one troubling scene he saws off their hair with a knife as punishment for perceived slights (i.e. Helen rolled her eyes at him or something). Later, he saves them from becoming sexual currency for another horned-up water pirate, but seems very annoyed about it. This man-fish is no catch.
He is also in charge of deflating dreams. In a scene that could be construed as heartbreaking or hilariously overwrought, Costner encloses Helen in a homemade diving bell and drags her beneath the sea to show her the last remnants of dry land, in the form of the late great city of… Denver. As the Mariner drags a stunned Helen through the once-great Colorado vistas, he shoots an accusatory glare in her direction, and at us, the unwitting viewers. You did this, he seems to scold.
As silly as Waterworld is, it represents a very special type of film that feels almost endangered: the big-budget action blockbuster with a social conscience. Mad Max: Fury Road and even the Avatar(s) followed in this tradition, drawing an indelible line between the good guys (the renegades, the water protectors, the reef people) and the bad (the colonizers, the land extractors, the maniacs who farm women’s bodies).
While Waterworld’s particular level of earnestness may seem a bit simplistic, there is a comfort in participating in this unified front with a theatre crowd—one that chortled when the Mariner helps Helen “breathe” underwater by giving her a big ol’ smooch (ew!), and cheered when the Exxon Valdez blows up real good and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
There is solace to be found in big, dumb movies with earnest ambitions, and Waterworld may be just the distraction you need—righting the balance and flooding your brain with enough serotonin to strike out again and face whatever the future holds.
If you find yourself biking up Dundas West on a mid-July evening, the asphalt radiating heat back onto your pasty body, your face frozen in a grin half euphoric and half pained from the sheer effort of existing—it might be a good night to go see the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld.
This summer has not been the best. Everything feels off. As you scroll through photos of cute friends and acquaintances on the beach and on patios, exulting in the dapple of a seemingly endless golden hour, you wonder why the joy of the season has eluded you.
It could be your aging parent or your aging pets or the job that causes you to clench your jaw so tightly at night that you now wear a mouthguard. It could be the wildfire smoke that choked the city during a weird week at the end of June, the sky a woozy burnt orange, the air tightening your chest and making every living thing around you shrink a little bit more. It could be the sinking feeling that the vibes, as they say, are deteriorating.
In bad times, you often seek water. You spent many lockdown winter evenings submerged in a hot bath re-reading the Sandman comics. As a bullied kid, you were consumed by swimming lessons, letting the chlorine fill your nostrils, sinking deep. When the public pools reopened last summer, you plunged into the deep end off the Christie Pits slide and listened to the surface rumblings of happy kids yelling, things almost feeling normal again.
And so, in this spirit, you plunge into Waterworld; an unapologetic Mad Max rip-off that imagines a future where the polar ice caps have completely melted. As one might expect—and as Steven Spielberg warned Kevin Costner himself—it is very hard to make a movie almost entirely on open water, and the film was beset with challenges. Kevin Costner worked six days a week and almost died during a stunt. In 1995 it was the most expensive film ever made; naturally it flopped. It is also deeply and hilariously sincere, and all of these facts put together ensured that it was ruthlessly mocked. This is pretty much all you know about Waterworld.
"It is so exquisitely dumb that it feels like a deep tissue massage for your brain."
In the cool darkness of the Revue Cinema, however, another fact slowly reveals itself to you: Waterworld is fucking awesome. It is so exquisitely dumb that it feels like a deep tissue massage for your brain. Kevin Costner’s character is called the Mariner, a drifter who is also kind of an asshole. Early on, it is revealed that he has webbed feet and gills, in a reveal that is so insane I dropped my popcorn. When the big baddie—Dennis Hopper—descends upon the waterpeople wearing a leather duster on what appears to be a heavy metal skidoo, you are all in. Later, he says Costner is “like a turd that won’t flush.”
More significantly, Hopper is an oil pirate—a ‘90s climate terrorist—commandeering the rusted ruins of the Exxon Valdez with a gang of chain-smoking miscreants held in thrall to nicotine. He is seeking a young girl with a tattooed map to what may or may not be the last patch of dry land on her back, and the Mariner finds himself reluctantly in charge of protecting her and her caregiver, Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He is a grouchy and occasionally violent caregiver, and in one troubling scene he saws off their hair with a knife as punishment for perceived slights (i.e. Helen rolled her eyes at him or something). Later, he saves them from becoming sexual currency for another horned-up water pirate, but seems very annoyed about it. This man-fish is no catch.
He is also in charge of deflating dreams. In a scene that could be construed as heartbreaking or hilariously overwrought, Costner encloses Helen in a homemade diving bell and drags her beneath the sea to show her the last remnants of dry land, in the form of the late great city of… Denver. As the Mariner drags a stunned Helen through the once-great Colorado vistas, he shoots an accusatory glare in her direction, and at us, the unwitting viewers. You did this, he seems to scold.
As silly as Waterworld is, it represents a very special type of film that feels almost endangered: the big-budget action blockbuster with a social conscience. Mad Max: Fury Road and even the Avatar(s) followed in this tradition, drawing an indelible line between the good guys (the renegades, the water protectors, the reef people) and the bad (the colonizers, the land extractors, the maniacs who farm women’s bodies).
While Waterworld’s particular level of earnestness may seem a bit simplistic, there is a comfort in participating in this unified front with a theatre crowd—one that chortled when the Mariner helps Helen “breathe” underwater by giving her a big ol’ smooch (ew!), and cheered when the Exxon Valdez blows up real good and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
There is solace to be found in big, dumb movies with earnest ambitions, and Waterworld may be just the distraction you need—righting the balance and flooding your brain with enough serotonin to strike out again and face whatever the future holds.