Clearer Waters - Did Waterworld Wake Us Up to Climate Change?
It’s the infamous “flop” that was the butt of every late-night host’s soggy jokes in 1995. But a generation later, is Waterworld having the last laugh? We take a fresh look at the enviro-blockbuster that tried to enlighten us about our climate crisis.
good.film
2 years ago
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Pop quiz, hotshot: what do ‘Hollywood blockbusters’ and ‘progress on climate change’ have in common? Even if you know your Greta Gerwigs from your Greta Thunbergs, your answer might be, ‘not much…?’ But wrangling a movie mega-production worth hundreds of millions, and changing the minds of hundreds of millions of people about climate, have more similarities than you might think. Both are huge undertakings that demand careful control… both involve big ideas that are spearheaded by a ‘star’… and to be honest, both require the passage of time to accurately assess their success.
(BTW, our judges would also have accepted, “They both need a greenlight from a group of old white men to proceed.” Just kidding. Not kidding.)
Produced a decade before Al Gore frightened us into action with his skyrocketing CO2 graphs, Waterworld did achieve success at the box office (yes, actually!)... but perhaps its greater success lay in planting the first mainstream seeds of climate change awareness, at a time when climate change was still being referred to as “global warming” (if it was even mentioned at all). It just took time for these seeds to grow past the weeds - and by ‘weeds’ we mean, the groupthink in Hollywood, who wrote off Waterworld as a massive, fishy, stinky, box-office bomb.
Let’s clear this up right up front: Waterworld wasn’t a flop. With a then-unheard of budget of $172 million (a record up until that other little ocean-based disaster flick, Titanic), the film grossed $88 million at the North American box office, which definitely isn’t great. But the overseas takings saved the equation: Waterworld’s worldwide total pushed ticket sales up to $264 million, making it the 9th highest-grossing film of 1995. The cherry on top? Universal Studios’ theme park attraction Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular has been running non-stop since the film’s debut nearly 30 years ago. So, ‘flop’ status officially squashed.
Why Does Waterworld Get Such a Bad Rap Then?
The problem was, the ocean-based shoot was a logistical nightmare. Everything that could go wrong did, and once the word got out, the horse (or should that be, ‘fish-man creature with gills’?) had already bolted. Waterworld had been declared DOA - a waterlogged failure - mid-shoot on the high seas off the coast of Hawaii, because if bad luck came in waves, Waterworld had been smashed over & over like a tsunami. Kevin Costner nearly died when he got caught in a squall while tied to the mast of his trimaran. His co-stars nearly drowned on their first day of filming after being thrown from The Mariner’s boat when the bowsprit unexpectedly snapped. And when it wasn’t the cast in mortal danger, it was the sets: Slash Film recounts that “the multimillion dollar [floating] set, built in an enormous offshore tank, was hit by a hurricane during production, leading to the entire thing sinking to the bottom and requiring a second one to be built.”
Believe it or not, that little exercise used up all the available steel in the Hawaiian islands - extra steel had to be flown in from California for the rebuild at enormous expense. Waterworld was a disaster in the making, and people knew it. The knives were out, and the negative chatter was rife. And this was all off-line, before ‘chatter’ was even a thing! When the much-hyped blockbuster was finally released on July 28, 1995 and promptly failed to bust any serious blocks, Waterworld quickly - and unfairly - became the go-to term for underachieving, and the butt of jokes in mainstream culture everywhere.
So - Waterworld’s Message Got Overshadowed?
Big time. Waterworld’s screenwriter, Peter Rader told the BBC he and director Kevin Reynolds were adamant that they wanted to make “something that heralded this urgent concern for the planet, but in the guise of a popcorn movie”. It was meant to be a low budget version of Mad Max in the middle of the ocean. In other words, a fun Friday night out that would, Trojan-horse style, sneakily get people thinking about how climate change would affect them personally. And there’s nothing more personally affecting than having to drink your own wee.
Yep. The dystopian, ocean-bound reality of Waterworld hits us from Kevin Costner’s very first scene, where we witness him distilling drinking water from a… very personal source. We can’t be certain, but we’re pretty sure most audiences had never seen action stars Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford or Keanu Reeves drink their own jetstreams. And yet here was The Bodyguard himself knocking back a foaming beaker of the devil’s lemonade - a real Hollywood leading man first. It’s mildly hilarious to bear in mind that was people's first glimpse of the most expensive, most hyped-about movie ever made. 1995 audiences must’ve thought Kev was taking the pi… well, anyway. Cheers everyone.
Okay, home brew aside, we’re giving credit where credit’s due to the Waterworld crew. In 1995, global efforts to combat and reverse climate change were only just beginning. The hole in the ozone layer had been discovered a mere 10 years earlier - a blink in global terms. Earth Summit, pretty much the first international effort “to focus on the impact of human socio-economic activities on the environment”, had taken place just three years prior. And yet tinseltown greenlit an entire blockbuster around the watery apocalyptic premise of the polar ice caps melting. You have to wonder if a major movie studio today would use a cataclysmic environmental catastrophe (like a 25,000 foot rise in sea levels) as a premise for a summer tentpole - it feels just a bit too real.
Perhaps that says more about the naivete of 90s audiences; they probably believed climate change was a long way off, if they believed it at all. They could just munch their popcorn and enjoy the flying jet skis. But that’s even more credit to go in Costner & Rader’s column; they put their atolls on the line to tell a story that they felt was urgent. We know now that they were right: urgency is the order of the day. We’ve seen too much by way of devastating climate change by now not to act.
Was Waterworld Ahead of its Time?
Sure, as an A+ Hollywood barnstormer, Waterworld may leave a bit to be desired. But as an eco-parable rewatched through a 2023 lens, there’s little doubt that the film played a major part in raising mid-90s alarm bells. Critic Ann Merchant claims the film “has become a cultural touchstone in dramatising how climate change could impact us.” Manchester University’s senior lecturer in film studies, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, wrote that “[Waterworld] has some important points to make about our ecology, fossil fuels and environmentalism in the 1990s.” And Dr Peter Gleick, a world-renowned expert on water and climate issues, is on record as stating that the action pic is “even more relevant and on target today than it was when it came out.”
Waterworld contains another ironic modern-day premonition (if you squint): the roadmap to the last sanctuary of dry land, AKA the message to save all of humanity… being espoused by a skinny tween with plaits?! Remind you of anyone?? Call it art pre-predicting life…
Much has been written and said about the enormous cost of Waterworld. Sure, $172 million dollars was a lot of money to spend in 1995 “just for a movie”… (hold up, that’s still a lot of money for just a movie). But consider for a sec the ad budget that an organisation like say, The Ocean Foundation would have to spend to raise awareness of climate change. For a global issue that requires global reach, there’s few platforms reachier than a big budget motion picture. If our quick maths are right, Waterworld cost $1.27 million per minute - only a scooch more than the price of a single, one-minute long commercial in the 1995 Super Bowl ($1.15 million), yet with a message that reached people globally. As we know, awareness is the first step in taking action - and that’s a bargain for a worldwide campaign on climate change.
Okay, we’ve stated our case, and some may still write off Waterworld as a silly, soggy mess with no merit. But the best example of the prescience of Peter Rader’s big-screen ideas might come from an unlikely source: the United Nations. Rader recounts that in 2019, “I was invited to be a part of the very first round table on Sustainable Floating Cities at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, alongside a team of specialists. A model designed by the architect Bjarke Ingels was created for the occasion and placed in the middle of the table. I couldn’t believe my eyes - it looked exactly like our Atoll from Waterworld. It was immensely satisfying to be in a room where concepts I came up with three decades earlier could actually help us.”
So let’s hit refresh on that non-flop Waterworld. Aside from being a pretty tight action flick with the bad guy from Speed and Robin Hood playing Aquadad, it might be the 90’s first example of Hollywood noticing our troubled blue-green rock and actually giving a shit. With a message that taking action on climate change can be as simple as the small, daily, doable things we all hold in our hands, Waterworld can be proud of its legacy. Just don’t say the “F” word.
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