Curator Watchlist
A big, ridiculous, and often impressive post-apocalyptic adventure that’s easier to admire than to love. The scale, practical stuntwork, and production design are the main attractions; the story is thin, the tone is blunt, and the movie’s reputation for excess is not entirely undeserved.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 15m
Director: Kevin Reynolds
Starring: Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn
In a futuristic world where the polar ice caps have melted and made Earth a liquid planet, a beautiful barmaid rescues a mutant seafarer from a floating island prison. They escape, along with her young charge, Enola, and sail off aboard his ship. But the trio soon becomes the target of a menacing pirate who covets the map to 'Dryland'—which is tattooed on Enola's back.
Kevin Reynolds
Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn
A big, ridiculous, and often impressive post-apocalyptic adventure that’s easier to admire than to love. The scale, practical stuntwork, and production design are the main attractions; the story is thin, the tone is blunt, and the movie’s reputation for excess is not entirely undeserved.
Waterworld is the kind of movie that gets remembered as a joke, then surprises you by being much more interesting as a piece of physical filmmaking than its reputation suggests. The open-water production, miniature work, and stunt choreography give it a tangible, hard-earned scale that modern digital spectacle often lacks. It really does feel like a giant, absurd gamble committed to film.
That said, the movie’s strengths are mostly mechanical and visual. The plot is familiar, the characters are sketched in broad strokes, and the film often seems more invested in its floating junkyard ecosystem than in dramatic momentum. Kevin Costner’s drifter is functional rather than magnetic, while Dennis Hopper leans into cartoonish villainy with enough enthusiasm to keep things moving.
If you’re in the mood for a lavishly overbuilt action movie that treats its own ridiculousness with total sincerity, it has a strange appeal. If you want elegance, wit, or narrative discipline, this is not the place. But as a monument to practical blockbuster ambition, it’s far more watchable than its legend implies.
matt lynch (3★) · 1118 likes
Not secretly great or anything but certainly not as terrible as legend would have it. Either way the production design, miniature effects, and stuntwork are completely unbelievable, and it takes serious suicidal audacity to try to shoot something of this scale on the open water. Imagine George Miller directing this.
Eric Hatch · 1042 likes
One of the wettest worlds we’ve seen, from the standpoint of water.
Murderbytv (2★) · 638 likes
All I chose to remember about this movie was watching Kevin Kostner drink his own pee.
Sean Fennessey (3.5★) · 540 likes
This kinda rocks?
David Sims (2.5★) · 538 likes
“Writer Peter Rader came up with the idea for Waterworld during a conversation with Brad Krevoy where they discussed creating a Mad Max rip-off.” huh ya don’t say
The clearest ancestor for the desert-tribal, scavenger-culture energy and the stripped-down survival logic.
A more disciplined, more exhilarating version of the same chase-and-survive blockbuster grammar.
Another Kevin Costner-led post-collapse epic that mixes earnestness, scale, and a famously divisive reputation.
For a similarly grand, strange, and sometimes unwieldy sci-fi epic built on elaborate world design.
A big-budget adventure that also lives or dies on its technical ambition and physical production challenges.
For viewers drawn to large-scale practical spectacle and a production that feels engineered to the edge of disaster.
Another sea-bound survival story where the environment itself becomes the main antagonist.
For immersive maritime craft, tactile action, and a strong sense of life aboard a dangerous vessel.
A bleaker, more intimate take on post-collapse survival and the bond between guardian and child.
A weird, influential wasteland adventure with scavenger humor and a grimly playful sense of survival.
For a more eccentric, mythic, and arena-driven take on post-apocalyptic spectacle.
For a notorious 1990s production that became part spectacle, part cautionary tale about studio excess.
post-apocalyptic survival, environmental collapse, adventure on the open sea, outlaw communities, quest for a promised land, mutant identity, resource scarcity, found family
post-apocalyptic, adventure, action spectacle, science fiction, practical effects, stunts, dystopia, survival, campy villain, 1990s blockbuster