Before watching the movie:
Kevin Costner’s boondoggle passion project on the water. A post-apocalyptic bomb. That’s all you hear about this movie. An expensive project nobody asked for, nobody saw, and nobody talks about except for secondhand derision. I don’t really know enough to say any more. But especially in a culture of superlatives, hardly any reviled movie is as bad as they say.
After watching the movie:
Long ago, melting polar ice caps flooded the world. The surviving humans are forced to scavenge and trade with the scraps of the lost society and the rare elements of nature they can find. A nameless Mariner who has traveled further than anyone else, arrives at a walled atoll to trade items no one else has ever seen before. One trader, a woman named Helen, is the guardian of a founding girl named Enola, who has a strange tattoo that some say is a map to the mythical Dryland she supposedly came from. The atoll people discover that the Mariner is hiding hills, and webbed feet, they intend to recycle him as an abomination, but they’re interrupted by a gang of Smokers, pirates that use rusty motorboats and airplanes powered by “go-juice”. The Smokers raid the atoll looking for the girl with the map on her back, which their leader the Deacon plans to use to take them to a new life since the oil tanker they live on is running out of fuel. Helen and Enola try to escape with elderly inventor Gregor in a dirigible, but it accidentally takes off early, stranding them. Helen frees the Mariner and demands he take them to Dryland in exchange. The Mariner, a surly loner, doesn’t like having extras on his boat, especially not a chatterbox like Enola, and insists that Dryland doesn’t exist, but he’s just a smidge too honorable to leave them to die in the ocean. The Smokers, still after Enola’s tattoo, are now in pursuit of the “Fish”‘s boat, and for the Deacon, who’s down an eye thanks to him, it’s personal.
This was the peak of the antihero era and the Mariner is wholly unlikeable. He’s cordial enough when trading and meeting other seafaring wanderers, but he has no patience and almost no respect for Helen and Enola, and while his arc is around coming to respect these bothersome intruders, the place he starts out from makes that arc pretty unhappy to watch. And Helen really does spend a while being annoying and nagging and undermining him by underestimating him, so he comes off as right to be so rude. Meanwhile he’s absurdly capable in a fight including being outlandishly prepared for anything, so this nasty guy is a super cool clever fighter whose only mistake is letting himself get slowed down by these two.
The world is pretty solidly built, I suppose. Everything is made of centuries old salvage and we have to get a sense of multiple cultures that have only known life at sea. Sometimes it’s at a level of camp that clashes with the gritty, brutal tone they seem to be trying for, but the parts that don’t seem to fit are the most fun to watch. Dennis Hopper brings life onto the screen playing a cartoonish villain, but also he feels like he doesn’t really belong.
There is so much production value on the screen by the end. I’m sure most of the expense (which was record breaking at the time but now sounds pretty small for a blockbuster) went to the practicalities of shooting almost the whole thing on and under the water, but the Smokers in particular look really expensive. There’s so many of them, and their wardrobe and gear is all cobbled together and rusted out, and then there’s all the smoke, fire, and explosions around them. They put so much into the look of this movie, but unfortunately the script didn’t fully live up to it.
The tonal dissonance is more pronounced than I really realized while watching but actually everything except what it feels like they thought was the point is actually pretty fun, it’s just held back by the choices they made for the Mariner’s personal arc. It’s already a bit of a throwback to earlier adventure movies in places, maybe it was hurt by the era it was made in.
Yesterday's Movies 