Using a captured Smoker jet ski, the Mariner chases down the Deacon, finding him on the remaining hulk of the Exxon Valdez.
They are rescued by Gregor in his balloon and taken to a new makeshift atoll where the survivors of the first atoll attack have regrouped. They resurface and find everyone gone and the trimaran destroyed. Since Helen cannot breathe underwater, the Mariner uses his gills to breathe for the both of them. When they surface, the Mariner and Helen are captured by the Smokers and used to flush Enola from hiding. Helen then realizes that former human civilization existed on land, and had not always lived on water. The Mariner puts her in a diving bell and swims her down to the ruins of Denver where he collects dirt and scrap from the bottom of the sea. Helen is convinced that Dryland exists and demands to know where the Mariner finds his dirt. They encounter the Smokers again, but Helen's naïve actions result in damage to the Mariner's boat, and he angrily cuts their hair to use to splice the ship's ropes back together. Helen rescues the Mariner from drowning in the sludge, and he agrees to help them escape on histrimaran he constructed.
However, Gregor accidentally launches the gas balloon they planned to escape in with only himself on board, dissapearing in the horizon. The leader of the smokers is "the Deacon", who wants the map so he can be the first to claim Dryland and build a city upon it with his crew,Įnola and her guardian, Helen, had planned to leave the floating city with Gregor, an inventor. The Smokers are searching for an orphan girl named Enola, who has a map to Dryland tattooed on her back. As they begin lowering the Mariner into the sludge, local pirates known as "Smokers" raid the atoll. When the mariner is revealed to be a mutant with webbed feet and gills who is able to breathe underwater, the fearful atollers vote to drown him in a brine pool they maintain for composting. With the centuries passing, the survivors eventually forget that they ever lived on firm ground, adapting a mythological place named "Dryland" is somewhere in the ocean.ĥ00 years after the apocalypse, a drifter, known only as "the Mariner", arrives at an atoll seeking to trade dirt, which is a precious commodity. Surviving humans were scattered across the ocean on ramshackle floating communities known as atolls, mostly built from scrap metal and decrepit sea vessels. In the beginning of the 21st century the polar ice caps melted and the sea level rose to cover every continent on Earth. The film's release was accompanied by a tie-in novel, video game, and three themed attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood,Universal Studios Singapore, and Universal Studios Japan called Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular, which are all still running as of 2014. The film also was unable to recoup its massive budget at the box office however, the production did later break even due to video and other post-cinema sales. The most expensive film ever made at the time, Waterworld was released to mixed reviews, praising the futuristic landscape and premise but criticizing the characterization and acting performances. The plot of the film centers on an otherwise nameless antihero, "The Mariner", a drifter who sails the Earth in his trimaran. The film illustrates this with an unusual variation on the Universal logo, which begins with the usual image of Earth, but shows the planet's water levels gradually rising and the polar ice caps melting until nearly all the land is submerged. The polar ice capshave completely melted, and the sea level has risen many hundreds of feet, covering nearly all the land. Although no exact date was given in the film itself, it has been suggested that it takes place in 2500. The setting of the film is in the distant future.
It was distributed by Universal Pictures. It was based on Rader's original 1986 screenplay and stars Kevin Costner, who also produced it with Charles Gordon and John Davis. Waterworld is a 1995 American post-apocalyptic science fiction action film directed by Kevin Reynolds and co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy.