Waterworld

Here's an interesting fact about Waterworld: although it is often referred to as a colossal flop, it eventually (thanks to VHS and DVD sales) made over $100 million in profit. Another interesting tidbit: the movie currently holds a 78% rating from Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which indicates that most critics give the film a positive review.  To be honest with you, when I learned that this popularly lambasted epic was both critically and commercially successful, I felt my first urge ever to watch this movie.  I had always assumed that it was a big, expensive puddle of suck, not worth wasting my time on.  However, after a Costner fan heard me ridiculing the movie (to be fair, it was more of a dig at The Postman, which I like to call "Dirtworld"), they hit me with the facts and I was helpless to resist.

The film opens majestically, with the voice of Hal Douglas (the "In a world..." movie trailer voice) supplying the introduction.  In the distant future, the polar ice caps have melted and water covers the Earth.  Humanity has become splintered on the Waters of this World, with many banding together in scrap heap settlements.  Others find themselves as lone drifters, sailing across the globe.  And then there are Smokers, the bullies.  The Smokers use gas- and oil-powered boats to loot, plunder, and murder the timid innocents in floating settlements.  The leader of the Smokers, the Deacon (Dennis Hopper) has promised his group that he will take them to dry land.  You see, he has heard a rumor about a little girl with a map to land tattooed on her back.  One of his men, the Nord (Gerard Murphy), went undercover to a settlement and actually found the girl.  Enola (Tina Majorino) is an orphan in the settlement, looked after by the kind Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

"I will trade you three tots for a glimpse at your sweet back tat."

One day, a strange drifter (Kevin Costner) sails into the settlement, looking to trade a jar of dirt (which is naturally rare --- does this mean he's seen Dry Land?) for money, which he intends to spend on some necessities and then leave.  As luck would have it, the settlers discover that the drifter is a mutant (he has gills and webbed feet!) and plan to kill him; before they can do it, the Smokers attack.  Seeing the drifter as their only way to freedom, Helen and Enola free him and escape the settlement.  But the Smokers are soon chasing after them, intent on grabbing Enola and discovering the path to the oh-so-elusive Dry Land.

That doesn't sound so bad, does it?  I mean, aside from the incontrovertible fact that all movie boat chases are lame, it doesn't sound awful.  In broad strokes, there's really nothing wrong with Waterworld.  For starters, it looks great.  If you told me that they melted the polar ice caps to film this, I would believe you.  The sets are enormous and elaborate.  The wide shots are impressively land-free.  Even the costumes and the props are all pretty cool.  This is definitely what the world will look like after the inevitable zombie apocalypse, when flatulent zombies cause greenhouse gases to increase and the polar ice caps to melt.  In a lot of ways, the production values of this movie remind me of an uber-expensive version of a Road Warrior marina show.

A lot of thought went into the groups in the movie, too.  I like that there are evolutionary next-steps, like Costner's character, because that makes sense.  I don't know how much sense, because I don't know how far in the future it would take for that kind of evolution to be plausible, but I like it in my ignorance.  I like that there is a lot of religion in these hard, water-filled times; it makes sense.  I also like that normal humans hate and fear mutants, because that also seems like our naturally human reaction to the new and unknown.  Besides, I'm a huge X-Men fan.  I thought the importance that the Smokers put on cigarette smoking was pretty interesting, too.  There are a lot of details in this movie that are very impressive and clever.

The cracks in Waterworld become apparent once you turn the volume up.  The script is bad, the plot is dumb, the editing is poor, the direction is ineffective and the acting is awful. 

A fail wrapped up in a flop.

The first sign that something is wrong with this movie is actually in the very first scene.  It begins with a nice shot of Kevin Costner's ass and, right when you think that this is going to be about gluteus maximii, you see a stream of urine.  Great.  Now it's a fetish video.  Actually, we see Costner butt, pee, and then he pours the pee into a Brita filter (or something), gargles it, and then spits into his little lime tree pot.  While I think that this is certainly one of the more memorable scenes in the film and it offers an interesting look at the science part of this science-fiction epic, it's not exactly a great introduction to the hero of the story.  Typically, in epic movies, you want the hero to seem larger than life, maybe dangerous or cool, but definitely a force to be reckoned with.  The first thing Waterworld teaches us about its hero is that he drinks urine.  Not exactly the iconic establishing image most filmmakers go for.

Normally, I would condemn the director for following a screenplay that opens with pee-flavored mouthwash, but with a screenplay this wretched, that might have looked good by comparison.  If you don't believe me, here's a sample bit of script, taken from Dennis Hopper's wealth of terrible lines:

Well, I'll be damned. It's the gentleman guppy [Costner]. You know, he's like a turd that won't flush.

Ha.  Ha.  I get it.  It's a poop joke.  Does anyone want to explain why anyone in a Water World would need water pipes to flush anything?  Or why Kevin Costner's (nameless) character decides to take Helen on an undersea voyage only minutes after escaping some Smokers that they assumed were still following them?  Nobody wants to stick up for these script choices?  I don't blame you.  This is a story that has the look of an epic, but the focus is ridiculously myopic.  In a whole world of ocean, you're telling me that we have to keep running into the same handful of characters?  By the way, the far future is awfully Caucasian with Midwestern accents.  I didn't realize that Wisconsin was so well-known as a center of maritime excellence.  What happened to everybody else?  Are the British just floating in the waters a few miles above merry old England?  How about the Japanese and everybody else?  For a movie whose production crew spent so much time making sure the details were right, this script feels curiously under-edited.


I realize that I have left out several other plot-related head-scratchers, but I can only get so angry without deleting everything I type.  So, in case you're curious, here are a few other problems that popped into my head as I watched:

• What is everyone eating?  They make a big deal about Costner catching a fish, so how does a ship full of Smokers manage to get fed?
• Where do the cigarettes come from?
• Why do the Smokers play with flares and fireworks when they celebrate if they are on an oil tanker?
• Was it worth the eye-roll to reveal that the Smoker oil tanker was the Exxon Valdeez?
• Okay, I buy into the notion that the Smokers get all their fuel from the 'Deez.  Where did they get all their gas-powered jetskis and the airplane from?  Were they floating out at sea?
• Why does anyone need to capture Enola?  Why don't they just make copies of the map?
• If Enola was tattooed so she could find her way home, why did they tattoo her where she couldn't read the tattoo?
• Where is all the oxygen coming from?  It looks like plants are a rarity in this world, so how is everybody breathing?

I'm sure there's more, but the more I list, the more depressed I am that I sat through the whole thing.  Well, at least nobody can lie and tell me that the ending totally makes the movie worthwhile.

I actually don't completely hate this movie.  It's stupid, sure, but it's not too painful to watch.  I thought the actors were one-dimensional, but with a script like this, what do you expect?  Costner was okay as the nameless sailor, but he was far more entertaining and appealing when he was looking out for himself instead of being a traditional hero.  If nothing else, I can honestly say that Kevin Costner's performance is without shame; at no moment does he appear to realize just how silly this movie is, and he treats every garbage scene like it has complex meaning behind it.

"What about striped pants, semi ponytail, and seashell earrings (found where?) sounds silly?"

Dennis Hopper was in his full-fledged 90s movie villain mode here, and he is comically evil.  To call this acting "bad" misses the point.  His overacting fits the movie well and adds some humor (unintentional and otherwise) to a pretty serious movie.  I wasn't impressed by Jeanne Tripplehorn or little Tina Majorino, but it's not like they were butchering their lines.  You can't put crap into a blender and get a delicious strawberry milkshake.  Still, they weren't good.  Kim Coates was pretty terribly as a nutty drifter, but the rest of the cast is pretty inoffensive.  I noticed R.D. Calls in a minor role and, if you ever had a doubt that Jack Black was a struggling actor in Hollywood, here's his bit part:

The direction was bad, if you view it from a working-with-the-cast perspective, but I will give Kevin Reynolds credit for framing several cool-looking scenes.  If this was a silent movie (with no subtitles) this would look like a solid flick.

Is Waterworld a good movie?  Not even close.  What it is, though, is a solid idea for a good movie.  While I cannot fathom why it gets such critical leniency from major critics, it's not a terrible film.  But it's not good.  At all.  I would give it a pass and say that it's fun to laugh at and dub it Lefty Gold, but it's a long movie that feels even longer.  To watch this movie and pay attention to the whole thing is pretty exhausting.  If they cut 40 minutes out of the final product, I would probably recommend it.  As it stands, though, it is more effort than it's worth.

Battlefield Earth

"Better than Star Wars" - an actual John Travolta quote about this film

Did you know that the full title of this film is actually Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000?  The shortened title sounds like it might be halfway decent (if you didn't know any better), but that subtitle...yeesh.  Let me take the understated route and say that any movie set 1000 years in the future has a decent chance of looking silly unless they spent years speculating about the future of technology.  Is that a fair statement?  I think I'm being damn generous.  This isn't my first bought with BE.  When it first hit the video shelves after its disastrous theatrical run, I tried to watch this with my friends at No Bulljive; excessive drinking and a break to play Frisbee in the rain didn't come close to making this watchable.  What made me think that watching it on my own, years later, would improve the experience?  I had a theory.  This time, I decided to watch the Saga of the Year 3000 in 15-20 minute chunks.  That way, the pain gets spread out over a period of weeks and I don't spend the night with self-loathing.  What made me decide to endure this pain again at all?  I caught a few minutes on TV and laughed out loud.  What can I say?  I like to mock.

Entertainment Weekly published this.  Who knew they could be kind of funny?

Let's run through the plot as quickly as possible, because that's where a lot of the hurty brain feelings come from.  In the year 3000 (A.D., I guess...which calendar do the aliens follow?), humans are an endangered species.  An alien race called the Psychlos has conquered the Earth, using it as...um...well...maybe they're draining our resources?  I'm not sure.  They like gold, though.  Anyway, the Psychlos live in dome-covered cities, spread across the globe, with their largest settlement being in New York Chicago Los Angeles Denver (?!?).  Humans are either used as slave labor or they eke out an existence in small bands, hidden from the Psychlos.  Jonnie Goodboy (Barry Pepper) lives with his tribe deep in the Rocky Mountains.  Basically, he's a caveman, just without a decent cave.  Fed up with eating dirt for dinner, Jonnie goes exploring to see just how much of his tribe's legends are true.  Along the way, he teams up with a hunter, Carlo (Kim Coates).  While they're busy making friends, the two are captured by some Psychlos.

So far, it's not good, but it could be worse.  There's a Star Wars: Episode III-worthy shout of "Noooo!" in the beginning, and it's stupid to think that human speech devolved into animal grunting without any noticeable physical changes.  Oh, and the fact that a miniature golf course withstood 1000 years of weather and is still recognizable is pretty ridiculous, but that's as bad as the introduction gets.  It never gets this good again.

Enter the Psychlos.  Terl (John Travolta), the security chief on Earth, is eager for the end of his time on Earth; he has paid his dues by living on our stupid planet, and now he wants to leave.  That's too bad.  Terl's boss shows up and tells him that his stay has been extended indefinitely, thanks to something he did with "the Senator's daughter."  Wait...that sounds familiar...is that the movie where Travolta asks someone what is worse than rape, and it turns out to be...wait for it...rape?  Never mind, that's The General's Daughter.  I never thought I would be comparing that movie favorably.

Anyway, Terl comes up with a plan.  When he sees that Jonnie, a common "man-animal," is smart enough to wield some Psychlo technology, he decides to educate Jonnie.  Why?  Um.  The end game has Jonnie and some other man-animals working mining machines to dig up gold in a radioactive area (where Psychlos can't go), so he can buy his way off the planet with (radioactive, and therefore useless to the radiation-shy Psychlos) gold, as well as with some blackmail videos he has stored up and creatively edited.  How does Terl teach Jonnie to mine?  He has Jonnie sit in front of a learning machine (we call that a television in America) that shoots education right into his face.

"Get ready for the money shot, er, an unnecessarily complete education, Jonnie"

Wait...the Psychlos have monitoring drones, but not mining drones?  That makes no se --- AAAUGH!  BRAIN HEMORRHAGE! 

Jonnie learns the Psychlo language, their history, his own history, mathematics, and all sorts of other things that have absolutely nothing to do with gold mining.  With his new-found education, Jonnie sees the weaknesses of his enemies, and teaches his fellow man-animals that now is the time to fight like an animal because four legs good, two legs bad! be inspired by the United States Constitution (really) and fight for their right to completely exterminate the Psychlo race.  The movie ends with cavemen destroying spaceships with 1000+ year-old fighter jets (let that sink in...it's okay to scream...) and teleporting (They can teleport?  Why do they have space ships, then?) a nuke to the Psychlo home planet, which destroys it like a friggin' Death Star.  That's right, humanity is saved by nuclear weapons.  Whoops, I'm sorry, nuclear weapon, singular.

Here's a fun quote from the movie: "I'm going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a diet of kerbango."  Whaaat?!?  Waaas?!?  Thaaat?!?  First of all, I love that Psychlo children are called "baby Psychlos."  That would be like telling someone that I slept like a human baby last night.  Basically, this begs the question, "as opposed to what...?"  Also, on a more personal note, that line almost made scotch come out of my nose, which only upset me more.  Just terrible dialogue.

Why is Battlefield Earth one of the most notorious movies of the the modern film era?  Sure, my description of it might sound kind of dumb, but is it really that much dumber than the bulk of what Hollywood churns out every year?  I don't think so.  No, BE plumbs the depths of awfulness by doing everything you can do in a movie poorly.

Let's start with the acting.  It's horrible.  End of story.  Honestly, John Travolta is as horrible of an overactor has ever, and his worst tendencies come out in force whenever he plays a villain.  Forest Whitaker was surprisingly bad as Travolta's lackey.  Barry Pepper was the worst, though.  The combination of his awful acting and his character's ridiculous dialogue puts him forever on my shit list. 

"The Academy saw this movie and wants my award back?  Aww, man...!"

The direction by Roger Christian is even worse.  It's not bad enough that the special effects look cheap, which is about all I expected this movie to do right, but everything in this movie is cheap.  The opening credits look like they were done with Power Point.  The Psychlos all have different accents, which is such an unnatural choice for actors to make that it had to have been made by the director ("John, you can be from Victorian England, and Forrest, you can be from Gruntsville, Oklahoma").  The camera work is wretched.  Every chase scene, which is normally something I would assume you would want to imply speed in, is filmed in slow-motion.  The camera tilts at random times, for no effect at all.  Even the transition wipes between scenes looked amateurish.  No wonder this director never helmed another major motion picture after this (or before, either, to be honest).

But maybe it all looks cool, right?  'Fraid not.  The costume design is laughably bad.

Barry Pepper, or the worst X-Men character from the 90s?  You decide.

I'm always impressed when primitive characters have long, flowing hair that is both tangle-free and not dread-locked.  It tells us so much about the culture of these man-animals, that they have lost all educated knowledge, but have still found a way to produce and use Suave shampoo.  The man-animal design is kind of stupid, but the Psychlos are where the real stupidity comes in.

Psychlos are 8-foot tall humanoids with very large skulls, bad teeth, and a lot of hair.  I don't know exactly why they wear riding pants and cod pieces, but it's certainly not for the cool factor.  What bothers me most are the mittens they call hands.  Look at the size of those things!  They are bigger than their faces and, when you watch the actors try to use them, are clearly awkward and nearly useless.  Well, at least they all attain their 8-foot tall stature by wearing Kiss-style platform boots.

The primary reason Battlefield Earth is one of the worst movies in modern cinema is not because the acting/directing/special effects and costuming were bad.  Sure, with all of that going against it, BE was going to go down as a wretched film, but it could have built a cult following if it wasn't so inept.  You see, the man-apes are acting like they're in a B-movie update of Planet of the Apes, but the Psychlos are acting like they are in a wry, British comedy about ne'er do wells who keep stabbing each other in the back (only, you know, ridiculously unfunny).  Travolta's accent doesn't help.  There are two completely incompatible tones at work in this movie, and neither one is good; the man-animals are never inspiring or clever, and the Psychlos are never evil or funny enough to make their backstabbing interesting.  Funny-bad movies typically get that way because they are played straight, but are absolutely ridiculous.  This movie tries to poke fun at the villains by making them petty and stupid, but their efforts to ridicule anything pale in comparison to the pure hate that your creative mind will come up with.

But is this the worst movie ever made?  I doubt it, but it certainly deserves to be in the competition.  If you are too stupid to take my advice and leave this one alone, do yourself a favor and put it on when you plan on falling asleep or passing out.

Still not convinced?  Well, let me tell you how awful this movie is.  When Terl drops off Jonnie to mine gold, he leaves a monitoring drone to make sure they are working.  Jonnie's plan is to travel to another location and teach all his caveman friends how to fly fighter jets because, obviously, they haven't rusted and turned to dust over the past 1000 years.  And they certainly weren't used to fight the Psychlos 1000 years ago, and are technology that they are not prepared to battle.  But what about the gold, Jonnie?  Don't worry about it.  He's just going to fly to Fort Knox and pick up the amount that Terl demanded from the mine.  You might be asking yourself how stupid these man-animals are to hand over bricks of solid gold and expect someone to believe that they were mined that way.  Apparently, not as stupid as Terl, who accepts the gold without question and apparently never checks his monitor drone to see if some man-animals took a flying vehicle for a joyride of a few thousand miles.  What does it use for fuel?  Stupidity?  Thank goodness that these gold-hungry aliens haven't found one of the largest (and most famous) stashes of gold in the world in their 1000 year reign!  Uh-oh...I think I taste bile.  Time to forget about this movie again.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Say what you will about the Resident Evil series, this fact is undeniable: every movie features a model killing zombies.  That's got to be worth something, right?  After the success of Resident Evil: Extinction, the filmmakers had the chance to make a fourth movie in the franchise.  But what could possibly follow an extinction?  And that is how Resident Evil: Afterlife came to be.

The movie opens with several dozen super-powered Alice (Milla Jovovich) clones attacking the headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation and its chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the man ultimately responsible for turning the world into zombies.  Why are there dozens of Alices?  Why do they have super-powers?  Don't expect to find out much in this movie.  It's not terribly important, though, since Wesker kills all the Alice clones with a bomb and injects Alice Prime with a chemical that makes her a normal human again.  Well, I suppose normal is relative, since her next act is to survive a helicopter crash, uninjured.

Having destroyed the Umbrella Corporation headquarters and presumably killing Wesker (even though he reveals his own super-powers), Alice tries to meet up with her friends from Extinction, at the supposedly zombie infection-free town, Arcadia.  Alice finds and flies a two-seat propeller plane to Arcadia's coordinates in Alaska, but finds only the abandoned remains of her friends' plane.  She then finds Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), her friend from the last movie, crazed and with amnesia.  Together, they look for more surivors down the Pacific coast, eventually landing (barely) on a prison roof in Los Angeles.  There, they meet a motley bunch of survivors, including their leader and former pro basketball player, Luther (Boris Kodjoe), a narcissistic movie producer, Bennett (Kim Coates), and Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller), the only man still locked up in the prison.  These survivors have new information about Arcadia: it's not a town, but a boat that travels up and down the Pacific coast, broadcasting its zombie-free atmosphere with its current coordinates, around the clock.  But Alice's plane can only hold one passenger at a time, and she was lucky to land safely once.  How will they ever reach the safety of Arcadia?

Do you really want to know about the acting?  Alright, fine.  Milla Jovovich is fairly pretty and shoots things in the head.  I would criticize her acting, but the script wisely avoids giving her varying emotions, so she actually comes across as reasonably capable here.  Ali Larter, on the other hand, is not terribly talented, and not even a slow-motion, water-soaked action sequence is going to change that.  Boris Kodjoe is reasonably likable and Bennett is thoroughly unlikable --- which means that both played their parts well.  I've seen potatoes have a stronger likeness to real humans than Wentworth Miller, whose archnemesis continues to be his confusion of "raspy voice" with "intensity."  Shawn Roberts gets to do his best Agent Smith impression, but comes across as a generic evil character.  Granted, many of these characters come from the video game franchise (although, oddly enough, not Alice), so their ridiculousness might come from the source material, but I don't care enough to research that thought any further.

I have to admit that writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson does a good job connecting this film to the last chapter in the series.  While I only vaguely remember the first two movies, the third one wasn't bad and included explanations for the Alice clones and (I think) Alice's super-powers.  The opening scene was a nice nod to fans of the film franchise, even if he did effectively negate all of those plot developments only minutes later.  And killing the clones and de-powering Alice made the movie more accessible to casual viewers, which was another smart move.  And that might be the last time you ever see a Resident Evil movie called "smart."


Technically, this is a pretty solid action movie.  The special effects are very good and the primary ass-kickers are women, which is a nice change of pace.  The characters and dialogue are lacking, but that's not too shocking for a video game adaptation, is it?  The problem with this movie is that we have seen it all before.  Zombies with weird mouths that, when they get ready to eat you, look like starfish?  Check.  Weird, starfish-faced dogs?  Check again.  Villain who all but places his hands on his hips to shout "MWA-HA-HA"?  Triple check.  The zombies aren't even a credible threat for most of this movie, if they ever were.  Instead, Wesker and the Umbrella Corporation are the enemy, and their ultimate plot is obnoxiously ridiculous; they are effectively a technological Big Brother, aware of everyone important, anywhere, despite the fact that the world has been falling apart for a few years now.  None of this adds up to a bad movie, exactly, but it's just not very fun to watch.

Is it too much to ask for a single, likable character in my action movies?  I don't think so, and I know that Milla doesn't have the chops to be that character.  This movie is somewhat stupid, but not silly enough to be fun.  It just travels the same path as the last few movies, without the innovations introduced in the third, and arrives at the same end, more or less.  A side note on the ending: when it's all said and done, I don't think they have worked out the logistics (food, water, travel, fuel, etc.) of their actions.  I guess it just boils down to this: I am bored with this franchise.  The movie made nearly $300 million in the box office, so a fifth movie (I know!  Five!) seems inevitable, but I'm not really interested.