Waterworld

WATERWORLD
USA 1995

This is not a bad film..... it could have been more interesting if they would have gotten George Miller to do it... then, it may really have had a PUNCH to it.... as it is, it is another Hollywood sized film that is a brilliant technical masterpiece, but otherwise, rather weak, or lacking in content and context.

The story itself is rather plain, or just one dimensional, making the film appear shallow, when it needs depth the most. Can Hollywood do anything besides the traditional story of the hero that goes out to save the world.? Or in this case, to find it.?

Or, perhaps, this film suffers from the lack of solid direction, if it wishes to get away from the single storyline that deals with a lonely man who wants to have nothing to do with the world in any shape of form. In between, he performs a heroic act, which constitutes of getting rid of a group of people that do not have much respect for survivors, specially the lonely ones.

If there is a theme that may stand out, it is the one that serves the film little purpose. Everyone around him is overly preoccupied with finding land, whereas this man wants to have nothing to do with it, and some of it may be due to good reason, he is a mariner of sorts, more of a fish than he is a human. But nothing is said and done, or shown, that might show his development, or how he came to this point, with no survivors, or family. Thus we end up coming to see a story that has already started, and we are not going to find out anything about it, except what he is doing now.

The film, is excellent, technically, but when it comes to the rest of it, I feel that is falls short. It might be nice to find out more about this mariner and his affair with the rest of the world, and his reasons for disliking them.... it might have made the film a little more intense and attractive, rather than so pretty and somber at the same time.

Dennis Hopper is interesting, but the role could have been better suited to an unknown who would have let it all hang out, making a more formidable adversary for the mariner. As it is, the battle is short lived, and the film is unclear. The reasoning becomes foggy at this point, and the whole thing unclear. Maybe this was meant to be a four to five hour film, and the fact that it was cut up this much already, to bring it down to three hours, makes it tough to follow and understand.

It is terribly choppy, and at times loose. Sequences do not often jell and fall into place as easily as one would have enjoyed and liked to see, from a film maker that has been, in the past, a good story teller.

3 GIBLOONS

DIRECTOR:             KEVIN REYNOLDS
CINEMATOGRAPHY: DEAN SEMLER
MUSIC:                    JAMES NEWTON HOWARD
CAST:                       Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino, Michael Jeter, Gerard Murphy, R.D. Call, Kim Coates
SUPER FEATURES: Road Warrior on the water.!!! Not as good, though!