tek's rating:

Waterworld (PG-13)
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streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

Well, this movie got a pretty bad rap, but I always wanted to check it out anyway. And now I have. I think it was okay... you know, not great, but certainly not as bad as its reputation suggests. I've always liked a good post-apocalyptic world story. Anyway, this is set like, sometime in the future. (So I could call it "science fiction," but I'd rather not.) Maybe a few hundred years from now, hard to say exactly. But the polar ice caps had melted, and so the few survivors are either traders (aka "drifters") who sail around, trading stuff; or atoll dwellers, who live on floating communities. And then there's "smokers," who are like pirates, and have fuel-powered boats and jet-skis, stuff like that, and even a small plane.

The main character is a drifter (Kevin Costner) who doesn't have a name, so some people just call him "Mariner." Others call him "muto," because as it turns out, he's a mutant: he's got gills and webbed feet. He doesn't seem to get on all that well with normal humans, which isn't surprising, as they don't seem to have much tolerance for mutants. Anyway, at one point he gets captured and nearly killed by some atoll dwellers, but then the atoll gets attacked by smokers, and one of the dwellers, a woman named Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), helps him escape during the confusion, in exchange for him taking her and a young girl named Enola (Tino Majorino) with him on his boat.

Unfortunately, Enola has a map tattooed on her back, which supposedly leads to dry land. Helen, as well as her friend Gregor (who escaped the attack in a balloon) want to find dry land, but then again, so does everyone else in Waterworld, though most consider it a myth. The smokers believe, though, and they want to get their hands on Enola. Which means there will be several confrontations with them throughout the movie. Not much else to say, really. I don't want to give away the ending or anything. But I definitely thought it was worth seeing, once.


post-apocalyptic index