KEVIN Costner’s Waterworld is the costliest and Costnerest movie ever made: about $175 million plus another $25 million for advertising and such. At the thought of the humanitarian goals achievable with that kind of dough, this mega-doughnut is enough to sink your stomach. Two hundred mil for the biggest millstone this side of Batman Forever! Even if we could suspend our disbelief, what are we to do with our dismay? From the opening voiceover relating or recapping that the polar icecaps have melted, turning the world into one huge ocean, the survivors having to start from scraps and mother wit, absurdity is upon us. Given the cooling of the sun, predicated but unstated, what melted those icecaps? Perhaps at the news of Costner’s folly, they dissolved in tears.
We are on an unbroken expanse of water, over which the Mariner (Costner) sails his spiffy trimaran made of discards and ingenuity. Sometimes it has an underwater hull for sleeping quarters and storage; the rest of the time we see no such thing. How could this hull be attached? How could a sail, even such a colorful one, drag a hulled trimaran forward at better than a snail’s pace—a land snail’s, at that?
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