So I finally get around to watching Waterworld, I’m not going to bother putting it in italics because only movies that have something to contribute to the human race, no matter how picayune, deserve italics, and this sucker was in the negative values when it comes to contributing something to the human race, I mean you could feel it sucking the virtue out of the world every minute it was playing on my VCR. 200 Million dollars, wasn’t that the figure, and how many months of overtime play, for what, so a 20 pounds overweight Kevin Costner (who is not one of my favorite actors anyway, he’s always got that smirk, even when he’s playing some terribly serious role like a divorced dad or something, there’s still that SMIRK lurking under the surface), so Kevin Costner can paddle around in the amazingly turquoise waters of wherever they filmed this turkey–no, calling it a turkey is doing a grave disservice to turkeys everywhere–this pile of steaming horse apples masquerading as “entertainment”, yeah, I understand that during the 19th century horse apples really WERE considered entertainment, people used to stand around all the time and watch sparrows pick the undigested grain out of them, and believe me, that would have been more entertaining than sitting through Waterworld.
And the worst part of it is, Leonard Maltin’s book gave it Three Stars! Three Stars!! I am hopping around the room like a furious deranged dwarf in a Wagnerian opera, kicking the furniture and cursing while the orchestra goes nuts around me, any minute now I will vanish through the special trap door in a puff of smoke, GEFUCKEN GEFUCKEN GEFUCKEN GEFUCKEN GEFUCKEN!!!
They never explain where they get the bullets from, for one thing. And they barely explain where they get all the friggin gasoline for their friggin jet-skis, what, an oil refinery in a boat or something, where are they getting the petroleum from to REFINE into gasoline, dork, oh I suppose there’s a oil rig still standing there after HUNDREDS of years and they all still remember how to maintain it, this incredibly complex piece of machinery that is the culmination of 200 years of the Industrial Revolution, no matter that they can’t even master basic things like finding out whether there’s any dry land anywhere, and they’ve got this basically Stone Age culture, no, they know how to run this imaginary oil rig which I don’t think they ever said really existed, there’s just this refinery.
And all the iron in this whole movie is totally uncorroded. Right, like you expose unpainted iron to salt water and salt air for 600 years and nothing happens to it, they’ve got all these friggin catwalks and iron cages and ladders and NONE OF THEM ARE THE SLIGHTEST BIT CORRODED, what, the Old Ones put magic spells or something on all this metal just before they arranged to have global warming melt the polar ice caps, so that not only would it last for hundreds of years without cracking or corroding, but that NEW METAL would magically appear somehow to replace metal that was used up. I’m talking about the FRIGGIN BULLETS, man, at one point they show the Smokers literally shoveling bullets into the machine gun, and what I wanna know is, where do they get all the friggin bullets, huh? Huh? A bullet is another incredibly complex artifact, gunpowder, a slug, a casing, a little thingie on the end, all of which require SEPARATE FACTORIES to manufacture, and are made out of BRASS, which has ZINC and TIN in it, and zinc and tin don’t grow on trees. What, they’ve got a floating zinc mine somewhere, maybe an oil rig that gives molten tin, and then they paddle it over to the floating bullet factory, and then more of the Old Ones magic spells kick in and gunpowder rains down from sky into buckets and they collect that and put it in the bullets.
And don’t tell me “Hey, it’s science fiction, you gotta have willing suspension of disbelief”. Buddy, I suspended my disbelief so far for this reeking green horse trough of swampwater with bugs floating in it that I got a hernia from holding it out at arm’s length, I’m going tomorrow to be fitted for a truss, thank you Kevin Costner.
And then you notice how the bimbo never gets her face dirty, only Kevin is allowed to look grungy, and what about that stick your finger down your throat revolting slow=motion scene where they’re SWIMMING and oh gee are they falling in love, I’m sitting there praying Please God send in Jaws, whoops, wrong movie, fuck fuck fuck. And then the part where he says solemnly, “I’ll breathe for both of us,” I’m leaping off the couch and running across the room banging my head against the wall just to make the pain stop, please god make it stop.
And then there’s the totally lame, no lame isn’t the word for it, I’m too pissed to go find the thesauraus, slang they made up for this sci-fi movie. It’s always tricky to make up futuristic slang but this one is so heavy-handed and sententious, “Got any–resin?” Give me a break. “You must have been–outwater–for a long time?” Sounds like high school kids nervously approaching the local neighborhood drug dealer for the first time, asking him, “Hey, man, got any–Mary Jane?” And the drug dealer just about busts a gut laughing.
And then he LEAVES at the end, after all this “oh we’re falling in love” SHIT, and of course you can read the tiny little Hollywood mind behind this, we’re talking SEQUEL here, yeah right, when Bill Clinton joins a monastery and Janet Reno wins the Mrs. America contest.
At least I didn’t pay any money to see it, thanks to my local Public Library. Support your local library, they are good people who save you from spending good money on something that’s going to make you throw up.
