Two words: Moist Max

Kevin Costner has a knack for making tedious versions of films I like. Waterworld is obviously Mad Max on water, and he's not exactly riveting in it, nor is it devoid of padding, but it's not all that bad. A famous flop that spent more money than it could ever recoup, I can still give it props for building all those structures on water and achieving several involved (and exciting) water action set pieces. We don't see a whole lot of those because they're extra complicated, so successfully making a movie that's almost entirely waterlogged is an achievement. Its biggest problem for me was the choice of music, believe it or not. If you're doing Mad Max (and I'm sorry, but you are), the music should rock a lot more, punk maybe, or some strange concoction these people might have produced. Instead, they give us grand, sweeping orchestrals that evoke wonder and swashbuckling. The dissolves preferred by the editing also make it seem like they thought they were making a shipwreck romance like The Blue Lagoon or Black Beauty. Which is of course at odds with the jet ski pirates and Dennis Hopper cartooning it up with his orange-skinned villain. And well, it takes much too long for us to like Costner's Mariner. He's a badass, fine, and grumpy, okay, but he's soon being violent with his love interest and throwing a little girl overboard, an attitude that only goes away in the third act where magically, he's a father figure and someone to love as a different formula takes over. So in the end, it's not a nautical disaster, sometimes it's even good (certainly before the girls board his sailboat), but after everything done, I can only call it okay.

Whenever I think of this movie, I think of the Simpsons Waterworld arcade game that just ate your money.