Waterworld
Dir: Kevin Reynolds
1995
**
Waterworld has become quite the infamous Hollywood failure. However, while it's no masterpiece, the film itself is an average action film with an original theme/gimmick, it's not great but it's not terrible, it's just famous for loosing large amounts of money, even though in truth it broke even. Personally I don't judge a film by how much it makes or looses someone else, I rate it on how much money I feel I've spent on it, whether I feel it was money well spent or wasted. Many a great film has flopped and lost money, many a stinker has broken box office records. Creating a huge aquatic set was always going to be expensive but for what it's worth I thought it looked very impressive. For me the biggest issue was that too much was happening at once. The story should have been simpler and of two halves. The first half should have been a lost at sea experience with our protagonist living on his own self-sufficient floating island and with little dialogue. The second half should than have been the over the top Mad Max on water actioner it tried to be. The characters weren't particularly well written and a couple of the leads were unnecessary. The performances verge from standard to embarrassing but in my opinion it was all worth while for Dennis Hoppers bizarre performance as one of the strangest villains ever to be committed to celluloid.