Last summer, it was announced that Universal is developing a miniseries sequel to the 1995 Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld. For a movie that has acquired a reputation for being the quintessential “good-bad film,” critical reaction to the news was surprisingly positive. As Observer pointed out, rebooting a failed or flawed film was far preferable to Hollywood’s usual practice of remaking films they got right the first time with middling results.
And yet Waterworld isn’t a good-bad film. The reason it fails to fully cohere has nothing to do with poor production values (they’re excellent), hammy acting (everyone – serial scenery-chewer Dennis Hopper excepted – knocks it out of the park), or poor direction. Kevin Reynolds is never less than competent here. There is an admirable clarity of movement throughout, and several scenes have a Brian De Palma-esque stylishness about them. Nor is the admittedly shonky central premise – the film is set in a distant future where the polar ice caps have melted, covering all the world’s landmasses with water – a fatal weakness. (It certainly wouldn’t be for The Matrix, released four years later and based around a similarly crazy concept.)
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No – Waterworld’s problem is that it’s a film about family, trapped in the body of a sci-fi epic.
How It Starts
Universal Pictures
The opening scene establishes the film’s Mad Max aesthetics and the film’s protagonist, the Mariner, as one of the hyper-masculine loners who form Kevin Costner’s stock-in-trade. It involves a fellow sailor adrift on the ocean who foolishly tries to steal food from Costner’s battered trimaran and gets his comeuppance at the hands of the Smokers, a group of ocean-going bandits.
Only when the Mariner arrives at the Atoll – a floating trading post – does the movie begin to flaunt its true credentials. Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is the guardian of Enola (played with impressive maturity here by a nine-year-old Tina Majorino), a child whose back, tattooed with seemingly indecipherable symbols, is said to bear directions to the film’s MacGuffin, the fabled “Dryland.” Among the many criticisms of Waterworld is the sheer number of hats the script forces the film to wear – now an adventure movie, now a chase caper, now a dystopian epic (Kevin’s Gate indeed) with a somewhat garbled environmental message behind it. But the one thread that runs throughout the movie is the relationship that develops between the Mariner, Helen, and Enola: a makeshift nuclear family, with the Mariner and Helen as second-time-around lovers and Enola as their child.
A Shift in Focus
The tonal shift occurs deep in the second act. This being a Kevin Costner film, the symbolism is laid on a bit thick. During the key scene, Helen gives the Mariner one of Enola’s drawings – a picture of her, Helen, and the Mariner holding hands – and as the Mariner’s tough-as-nails persona starts to soften, he begins acting as a caregiver. He saves Enola’s life out of love rather than a sense of duty, gives her crayons to amuse herself with, and even teaches her to swim, in a flawlessly choreographed and moving scene (beautifully scored, as is the entire film, by nine-time Oscar nominee James Newton Howard in the form of his life).
Quite what couples had to say – or were supposed to think – about this piquant commentary on the changing nature of parenthood is unclear, and it weighs heavily against Waterworld that it never seems to speak coherently to broader truths. Given that Waterworld was released in 1995, perhaps this is unsurprising. At the time, many of Hollywood’s movers and shakers had been born in the 1960s, when divorce rates were rising, and many other ’90s blockbuster sci-fi films also feature the nuclear family, its breakup, and its subsequent reimagining as defining motifs. Will Smith’s hotshot pilot in Independence Day (1996) acts as a surrogate father to his partner’s child, while Stargate (1994) – also directed by Roland Emmerich – sees Kurt Russell’s Army captain acting as a father figure to a teenager on an alien world, ultimately gaining a measure of redemption for his implied role in a gun accident that killed his son on Earth. Even two of the biggest sci-fi television series of the decade, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, had characters in the main cast - Doctor Crusher and Captain Sisko - who were raising children as single parents.
The archetypal example of this tendency is, of course, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), in which the titular character is described by John Connor’s mother, Sarah, as the closest thing to a father John ever had. Enola’s surrogate family is likewise central to what Waterworld is. If Universal is to pay any attention to the original other than as a jumping-off point for a reboot, it should be to take note of this theme.
At the time of writing, no details about the reboot have been released, except that the new installment will be set 20 years after the film’s events and will feature the same characters. One hopes the reboot will offer a chance to plane some rough edges off the original, such as its Neanderthal gender politics. For all her spunk, Helen’s agency is only ever depicted against the backdrop of her role as a caregiver, and a scene where the Mariner sells her (he later changes his mind) is both gratuitous and offensive.
But to ditch the family dynamic in favor of going all-in on the “Mad Max on water” trope that is the film’s calling card would be to miss the point. For all its faults, Waterworld’s emphasis on human interaction makes it a far more complex, layered, and dramatically successful film than its detractors give it credit for.
