The antagonists of the film are fittingly named “ Smokers ” who are basically pirates who chain smoke cigarettes and rely on gas-guzzling modes of transportation, unlike The Mariner who prefers wind as a renewable resource for his catamaran. They lock him up to eventually be killed or “ recycled ” instead of, you know, actually utilizing him as a fucking asset. They sentence him to death because apparently it ’ s not cool to develop mutations that actually allow you to fully survive in this new world covered with water. However, once they find out that evolution has caused him to develop webbed feet and gills, things quickly get ugly. When The Mariner arrives with a jar of dirt (the most precious commodity), the villagers allow him entry into their domain. The survivors of the great flood built dwellings called “ atolls ” designed to keep terrorizing stragglers at bay. If you ’ re going to make a filtration device for drinking water, I ’ d prefer to utilize ocean water before your own urine, but to each their own. In the first scene of Waterworld, we are introduced to Costner ’ s Mariner character recycling his urine through a contraption that allows him to consume and pour it onto his small, potted lime plant.
![waterworld movie scene waterworld movie scene](https://www.schnittberichte.com//www/SBs/4183/cap023.jpg)
Examples include rising sea-levels, shrinking glaciers, decreasing snow and ice cover, warmer oceans and more frequent and intense extreme weather events (ahem, Hurricane Harvey ring a bell?). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ’ s (IPCC) latest takeaways in 2014 indicated that there is stronger evidence of the many ways that the planet is experiencing effects from human-caused climate change. According to NASA, Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.2 percent per decade. Daily image updates provide data on the current conditions of Arctic sea ice with September holding the lowest levels. However, climate change is very much in our political and daily conversations today.
![waterworld movie scene waterworld movie scene](https://d2j1wkp1bavyfs.cloudfront.net/wp-content/legacy/posts/b97ef1fd-f9f0-4fee-8ddd-8e699b4419ad.jpg)
Sadly, the conversation focused on excessive explosions, extravagant practical sets built on water, and fight scenes on jet skis, and not the plausibility of this one day actually happening, or a reflection of what humans are doing to our planet. And since there was lots of drama around the film ’ s troubled production and budget overages, folks ultimately wanted to see what all the hype was about. In 1995, most people were excited about another Kevin Costner film. While the representation was embellished, it still draws attention to the cause. The Sierra Club set out to debunk the film ’ s timeline and concluded that sea levels would have to rise 216 feet to submerge major cities underwater, and the length of time for the polar ice caps to melt entirely was estimated at around 5,000 years while Waterworld only implied decades. The Universal Pictures logo before the film provided a time lapse with sea levels rising to submerge landfall while voice-over narration vaguely discloses "the polar ice caps have melted, covering the world with water." This sets the stage for the dystopian future but fails to ever mention a year in which the story takes place or what exactly caused the earth ’ s current condition.
![waterworld movie scene waterworld movie scene](https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Waterworld-hopper.jpg)
![waterworld movie scene waterworld movie scene](https://i.redd.it/okef6l42n58y.png)
I revisited this laughable and cringe-worthy film in order to deliver this important message to you, dear BMD readers: although Waterworld was a critical and financial flop at the time of its release, it today serves as an eerily prescient environmental parable. With a final budget of $235 million, Kevin Reynold ’ s sci-fi dystopian thriller was revolutionary in its design and ambition but fell short in several aspects.
#WATERWORLD MOVIE SCENE WINDOWS#
Michael Jordan returned to the NBA, Windows 95 launched, and we were all blessed with what was then the biggest blockbuster ever: Waterworld.