1995 science fiction, dir. Kevin Reynolds, Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper:
IMDb. The world is covered
with water, but there's no shortage of hair product.
This is one of those films that got a reputation as the Worst
Film Ever, even before it was released; I think this is often the
reaction of the Hollywood press to someone who's perceived as having
got too big for his books, especially an actor turned producer, and
especially when a production runs well over budget and schedule. And
none of these films I've actually seen has really justified its
stinking reputation.
But also they're often not terribly good. Well, I liked Last Action
Hero and Ghosts of Mars, but they had least ad something to say.
This was conceived explicitly as a Mad Max ripoff, and all too often
that is obvious: why are the bad guys so grimy all the time, when they
have infinite salt water to wash in? Because in Mad Max everyone is
grimy all the time. Why don't the settlements have solar stills to get
plentiful drinking water from seawater? Bartertown didn't have one.
Why are the bad guys using jet skis? Because Mad Max has
motorcycles. The film was promptly christened "Wet Max" by crew and
outsiders alike.
Dennis Hopper is one of two actors here who've realised they're in a
piece of rubbish, and simply overplay it to have some fun. (The other
is the character I thought of as Big Hair Guy, Gerard Murphy as "The
Nord"). Jeanne Tripplehorn does her best, fresh off her role as the
victim in Basic Instinct, but is very much a junior partner.
I admit I watched the cinematic release; I'm told the later "Ulysses
Cut" helps some things make more sense, but my goodness it's over two
hours already and nobody here is so interesting to watch that I want
to see more of them.
So I have no idea where all this water is supposed to have come from,
so much that dry land is just a rumour. (By my rough reckoning, that
would require the addition of about three times the total existing
water volume on Earth, after melting all the polar ice.)
But I do know that urine is the body's true waste product, containing
actual results of metabolic processes, where fæces are mostly just the
undigested parts of food (yes all right plus bile pigments). In other
words it's about the most toxic thing to humans that a human body
produces. Any still which can make drinkable water out of that can
most certainly do it to sea water too. But no, the important thing is
that Kevin is a person just like us, he pees just like us. (We know
better of course, surely nobody really believes Hollywood stars are
human, but let's go with the fantasy.) Even if you believed all that,
you cannot get more drinking water out of a still than you put dirty
water in, and some of the water you drink leaves your system as
exhaled moisture and sweat.
I will give them credit for a great visual choice for the wind
turbine. I mean, the big advantage of the Darreius design (that you
can generate power from wine in any direction) is completely
irrelevant on a boat with a single anchor which will slide round to be
head to the wind anyway (and where do you store the 25,000 feet of
anchor line?), but it looks good. That's competent filmmaking if not
competent worldbuilding.
I wonder if anyone involved had ever actually been on a
catamaran/trimaran, though. The whole point of the thing is that you
have much less cross-sectional area than on a conventional hull. Those
below-deck spaces are huge.
I'm not going to go into the plot. It's a very silly plot, which would
be fine for a disposable summer film, but even at the original budget
the film had to be a Big Success, even more after the overruns, and so
it got people's expectations up. And mostly it's just there to provide
scaffolding for the action sequences.
Mad Max's marauders could get leather and spikes and petrol and guns
after the fall of civilisation; OK, they had places to loot. How did
that work here?
Of course I'm going to talk about the diving sequence. The air in a
diving bell gets compressed by the increased water pressure as you go
deeper. When you're at twice atmospheric pressyre (33-odd feet of
seawater), half the internal volume has flooded. Three times,
two-thirds. This is one reason why you don't take diving bells much
below 100 feet, the other being that the pressure is bad for you just
as it is with SCUBA diving. Here, we're supposedly thousands of feet
down.
And oh my, gills don't work like that. He should be constantly taking
in water through his mouth and expelling it through the gill slits.
And of course gills don't produce gaseous oxygen; they transfer it in
solution directly into the bloodstream.
On the oil tanker, the contents of the tanks look like crude. Crude
doesn't run jetskis. Crude doesn't burn from dropping a flare into it.
But if it were actually petrol, the guy on the raft would be dead.
There are monsters? And nobody else knows about them? Things that
impact your survival are quite important actually, you'd think they'd
spread the word.
How would you locate lat/long coordinates when you have no fixed
references? Do I really believe someone has remembered how to do
celestial navigation and kept an accurate clock? (Bearing in mind
that Earth's spin will have changed from the massive addition of
water.)
But in the end this just has nothing to say except "we can remake Mad
Max 3, only stupider and on the water".
I can forgive all the amateurishness of a Plan 9 From Outer Space
because it's clearly a passion project. Nobody here had passion, just
money.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.