Since I seem to be on this nostalgia trip, let me tell you how I loved to annoy the crap out of my older brother by belittling some cool new piece of tech he had bought. A shiny new TV, a new VCR, things of that nature. He would show them to me, all proud as a peacock, and say something like, “This TV can display one million colors!” and then I would reply with some snarky comment that would send him right up the wall. Lovely.
I fondly remember one particularly successful remark of mine in that regard when he showed me his brand-new VCR once. He spent a lot of money on it, and now he was going to show me what that thing could do. He put a tape in it, pressed ‘play’ and then ‘pause,’ and said, “Look! It has a still picture like a photograph! Sharp as a modderfokker!” I looked at the picture for a second (which was, in all fairness, indeed pretty sharp), then turned to him and said, “But why, on God’s green Earth, would you ever want that? It’s a VCR, man! That picture is meant to be moving! They actually advertise that thing with this? ‘A still picture as a photograph?’ That’s idiotic!” Fair to say, dear reader, it took a rather long time before I was allowed to watch movies at my brother’s house again. Luckily, we made amends just in time to watch Waterworld. Yay!
Ah, Waterworld… Costner’s very own multimillion-dollar flop of a movie that sank more money than they lost extras during filming. What? You want a plot? Really? All right… In the future, the polar ice caps have melted, and now the whole world is flooded. Kevin Costner developed gills and is now Aquaman.
Right, so the ice caps have melted. Both of them. All the glaciers too, and now, everything is sea. No land anymore. Hence the title. The few survivors that are left are divided into two camps: the losers, who build a rickety, ramshackle, floating sort of fortress village made from driftwood (I guess) and dead people. No, really: they recycle their dead so that they can grow food on them. Nice thought, no? Yeah. The other camp, the cool one, is the pirates. They are led by a one-eyed Dennis Hopper, and their home base is a humongous old oil tanker. Isn’t that cool? Yeah, it is! The pirates get by by raiding that fortress village (and others like it? I don’t know, man! They just show the one!)—which, as it turns out, is not so fortress-like at all.
Then, that Ichthy Freak gets involved, gets captured, and then escapes with a woman and a little girl in tow. Oh, and he also has this really cool catamaran, which he uses to sail around the world to look for the mythical ‘Dry Land,’ with a capital D and a capital L, and in quotation marks. It’s that mythical. And the pirates are also looking for it, because they’re running out of oil and cigarettes, and without those, life isn’t worth living anymore, I understand that, and it just so happens that the little girl has a map to that wonderful place tattooed on her back, and the pirates want to cut it out, so they can lay it nice and flat and get there first. In the end, Aquaman wins.
So, basically, this movie is about torturing small children.
Now, there were some folks around, back then, that found it necessary to point out that there hadn’t nearly passed enough time yet for mankind to evolve gills and that, therefore, this movie was stupid. Now, first, I don’t think that’s quite fair, because, to be honest, it never really gets clear how much time elapsed between the melting of the caps and the emergence of fish-man. So, that’s one thing. Second, how bitter are you, you sad, depressed, misanthropic, horrible human being? How bleak and completely devoid of any pleasure is your life? If it’s really that barren, that cold, and that stark and loveless, then why, for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t you just end it all, right now, hm? Why poison my world any longer with that vicious, vitriolic, and vile attitude towards life? Just… just go to sleep now, okay? Lie down here, why don’t you, on this nice little bed I made you, and don’t you mind that rusty axe on the wall there, or this tiny drop of cyanide in your honey-sweetened tea. Hush now, darling…
‘Trolls’ would probably be their modern-day moniker. ‘Assholes,’ I’d say. Fuck you.
Anyway…I do realize that this movie is pretty stupid, but I don’t care; I love it nonetheless. We need moronic movies, don’t you understand that? Because if we didn’t have them, how would you ever recognize a smart movie, hm? This, my padawan, is called ‘completeness.’ Yin and yang, you know? You can’t have one without the other! The world is perceived through opposites. So, in that effect, Waterworld plays its own little but very integral part in holding up the fabric of reality itself. How’s that this for a dumb movie review?
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