Lately, my modus operandi after watching a film has been to put on the Chillhop station on YouTube and get to typing.  I did this upon completing my viewing of Waterworld (1995).  Once the music started, the first song to come on was from an album called Everything Fades to Blue by an artist going by the name Sleepy Fish.  You do not have to listen to all the tracks or look at the whole video.  All I hope for in sharing with you this moment is that you appreciate the irony of the clip and this movie.  Before seeing Waterworld, Everything Fades to Blue was as close as I had ever come to experiencing one of the more legendary flops in cinematic history when you consider the amount of money that went into making Waterworld.  The fact that it had never before been in front of my eyeballs might be surprising considering everything else I have seen.  Anyway, consider this oversight corrected.

The first sight you see is the Earth behind the Universal logo, the planet’s seas rising to form a Waterworld.  Something went wrong, causing the ice caps to melt and for the oceans to cover the planet.  Sailing the depths is the Mariner (Kevin Kostner).  His vessel is a large catamaran, and he is a member of a group of people known as the Drifters.  They are solitary people, sailing alone and scavenging whatever they can find, and the Mariner is no exception.  Following a run-in with another of his kind, he heads for what passes for civilization in this post-apocalyptic scenario on what is referred to as an atoll.  It is actually just a pile of junk on which live a group of people who are barely surviving, and the Mariner goes there to trade, mostly for fresh water.  His arrival is met with suspicion, and he is uneasy about being there for long.  He exchanges dirt for their form of currency, and goes to exchange it for water and other supplies.  The person who sells him the goods is Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and she is surrogate mother to a precocious little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino).  Her precociousness is not the only thing that sets Enola apart as the Mariner notices a distinctive tattoo on her back.  The skin art draws interest from a number of people, including a group of bandits that call themselves the Smokers.  They go by this title because they all smoke cigarettes . . . in a world where nothing has grown for centuries.  It is that kind of movie.  For now, the atoll denizens take the Mariner for a spy, especially after he refuses to mate with a woman they offer to him.  They also discover that he is a mutant, with gills and webbed feet that allow him to swim better underwater.  So, they imprison him but the next day the Smokers attack.  Their leader, the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), is determined to capture Enola.  Helen and Enola try to escape with village philosopher and inventor Old Gregor (Michael Jeter), but his blimp takes off before they are ready and he flies away without them.  In desperation, Enola and Helen turn to the Mariner, freeing him and making their getaway with him on his catamaran.  At first, he wants nothing to do with them.  He even advocates throwing Enola overboard because he sees her as an annoying kid that will only waste precious fresh water.  Helen pleads for Enola to remain, being willing to offer her body in exchange for the girl’s continued presence.  He refuses her gesture but grudgingly allows them to stay.  Meanwhile, the Deacon has not given up on finding Enola.  They have a sea plane that miraculously still works, and it finds the catamaran.  Thus, the chase continues.  During it, Enola begins to endear herself to the Mariner, forming a bond as he teaches her to swim.  As the three get closer to what Enola and Helen believe will be dry land, they run into another trap set by the Smokers.  They narrowly escape this one, but Helen is now suspicious as to whether they will reach their destination.  In response, the Mariner puts her in a makeshift diving bell and takes her to the ocean floor where the remains of a city lie.  Guess what happens to Enola while she waits on the surface?  Right, she is captured by the Smokers and they trash the Mariner’s catamaran.  Helen and the Mariner think they are doomed to die adrift at sea until Old Gregor’s flying contraption glides overhead.  He takes them to group of survivors from the atoll, who are split on what their next move should be.  The Mariner has no conflict as to what he will do.  Taking any weapons he can get, he heads for the rickety oil rig that comprises the Smoker’s base.  Fighting his way aboard, he comes face-to-face with the Deacon holding Enola hostage.  When the Mariner’s demands for letting the little girl go are refused, he uses a flare to ignite the crude in the hold and sink the ship.  There is some action ridiculousness as the Mariner retrieves Enola.  They are saved by Old Gregor’s blimp, but the Mariner has to retrieve Enola once more when the Deacon proves too stubborn to die.  Once safely in the sky with the bad guys defeated, Old Gregor realizes he had been reading Enola’s tattoo upside down all these years, and they set out in what they hope is the right direction.  A few days later, they spot land.  Not far from the shore, they locate a few huts with the bones of former inhabitants and markings similar to the ones on Enola’s body.  All this means nothing to the Mariner, apparently, as he heads back out to sea and the movie ends.

One of the problems with Waterworld is that there are details like why the Mariner cannot stay on land that need at least some context to be understood.  He says something about how the land “doesn’t move right.”  Do you know what that means?  I, for one, do not.  Some other things that do not make sense I mentioned in my synopsis.  The movie is vague about other things, though one is a topic that is of interest to a Catholic film reviewer.  It regards Enola and her tattoo.  She also has visions of land and the creatures that inhabit it.  She draws them, and because no one is familiar with them, she is suspected of having some kind of divine insight.  This aspect caught my attention because it is similar to the visions God can grant us.  In my experience, especially with charismatic prayer, I have witnessed people see things that could only come from God.  Such sight is also well documented as being something God has given to many saints over the centuries.  This becomes a moot point when it is revealed that Enola is simply sketching things from memory.  How this little girl got away from the only dry land left and ended up where she did, who knows?  Again, this film is not big on the details.  Still, she engenders a faith in something that others are not privileged to possess.  This is met with an angry skepticism by the Mariner, who at one point claims that you have to be a fool to believe in something you have never seen.  If that is the case, then I guess I am a fool for God.  However, that does not fully explain the situation.  I was about to say that I have never seen God, but that is not an accurate statement.  I may not have laid eyes on a bearded fellow descending from bright clouds with trumpet blasts, or any other stereotype you can conjure.  Instead, God has been present to me in moments like at the charismatic prayer meetings I mentioned, or being there to help a homeless person in any way I can.  Indeed, God is there when the Mariner saves Enola from drowning, or Old Gregor drops a line from his airship.  You, too, can view God if you know how to look.

What I would rather never look at ever again is Waterworld.  I figured it would be bad, and the poorly explained plot points only confirmed my suspicions.  What I was not prepared for was how much a jerk is the Mariner for most of the film.  Between that and the silly action, this one is a hard pass.