There is no getting around the fact that Waterworld is basically The Road Warrior on water. The film owes a huge debt to what George Miller brought to the Mad Max franchise and you can see how much of an influence it is on Waterworld. Unfortunately, Waterworld doesn't even come close to matching the Road Warrior in any way, shape or form. That's not to say this is a bad movie, it's just not in the same league.

This is literally only the second time I've watched this, the first being back in the theater opening week. Well, I did see the Waterworld Stunt Show at Universal Studios and I remembered more about that show than I actually did of the movie. It was funny, but when the Smokers attack the floating town/barge, my memory went straight to the Stunt Show first and it was crazy how much of the set piece is replicated in the show itself that for a second there, I actually thought I was at Universal watching the show and not the movie.

All I really remember of the movie is the core group of actors consisting of Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tina Majorino. So, watching it today, it blew my mind to see Jack Black in this one as well. What the hell! Also didn't realize that Robert Joy was in this as well and I totally forgot about Kim Coates.

As for the story, beyond looking like Road Warrior, it also bites the plot from it as well. Instead of gas being the precious commodity, it's dry land that everyone is after. It's not a bad film as I mentioned earlier, I just think the tone of the movie is wrong. Too many 'jokes' with the 'painted eye ball' gag, the hair cuts, the Exxon Valdez nod, But the biggest farce is Dennis Hopper. The moment they signed him on as the main villain, I knew that he would be a big ham about his role, which itself distracts from the movie in my eyes. I like him as an actor in pretty much everything he is in, I just think it would have been better to go with an actor that would come across more villainous than clown. The movie is still worth a Rent none the less.

With all that said, the one thing I remember most about Waterworld is not the budget, the story, the actors. It's Kevin Smith. Huh? Yup.

I was amazed rewatching this to see how middle ages a lot of the design was, the atoll had towers like castles, the woman, whatever her name was had a bodice and dress on, you had a crazy "wizard" making his flying machine, etc...

I loved the stunt show, yeah, I was amazed how well it replicated what was in the movie.  And of course, at the show you had the people with buckets throwing water on the audience, it was all kinds of fun.

I remember after having a discussion with a friend of mine about how they might remake the movie, I kept thinking they should push the genetic engineering story so there's mutants all over the place, you have a big action piece in the floating lab where they make "new" people, throw some more pirate swashbuckling in there...

It was prohibitively expensive THEN.  Though now you could probably CGI the water, bluescreen it outside so you get natural sunlight (like they did with Star Trek), artificial set extensions and so on...  everything's in a better state than it was in the original, you could go to cruise ship cities and aircraft carriers turned into floating gardens, and there's this really cool new boat I found that's just broken the water speed record that the Mariner could use.

And the medical lab is essentially just a hospital location with a bunch of tanks and half-people in there like Alien 3, there's fish people and gill people and people bred to just have bunches of children to repopulate the planet...

And of course the big change is that, of course, you couldn't actually DROWN the entire freakin' world, so there's much more dryland but no one can find it because the magnetic poles reversed or something, it's a well-kept secret, maybe there's a secret society protecting it-- maybe they have advanced tech like in Cloud Atlas...