WHAT A WORLD!

By RICHARD CORLISS

It's pitch time at a movie-studio story conference, and two junior execs simultaneously jump up on the table and announce: "This one has everything! A desperate battle for survival! Mother Nature on a rampage! Heroic attempts to achieve the impossible! A psychological crap shoot with zillions at stake! And, at the center, a stark battle between two strong-willed men. It's got the potential for great movie melodrama. We call it The Making of Waterworld."

The location nightmare of Universal Pictures' adventure movie has been assiduously chronicled: how the Waterworld shoot in Hawaii was threatened by crew injuries and tsunami warnings; how a huge set sank toward the end of shooting; how the budget ballooned from $100 million to what now may be twice that; how the star, Kevin Costner, and the director, Kevin Reynolds, fought over various aspects of the film until Reynolds stormed out during the editing. Things can go wrong in movies; it's part of the gamble. On Waterworld, everything went wrong.

Costner and the editing team rushed frantically to get the movie into theaters for its opening this Friday. The studio spent about $12 million in the past six weeks on postproduction, including 11th-hour reshoots. Universal publicists insisted on calling these scenes "snippets," but by then defensiveness was rampant. At the film's press junket, each journalist was subject to two security checks before being allowed to enter the screening room. While the film played, edgy Universal brass stood along the walls of the theater to monitor the crowd's reactions. "Please," a studio publicist jokingly begged a reporter before the junket began, "just shoot me now."

Well, Universal has a right to have the blues. It was bad enough for the studio that a little Mad Max ripoff originally written for B-movie schlock king Roger Corman grew into the most expensive film ever made. It's worse that Waterworld, in its final ambitious form, provides a slow ride on very bumpy surf. So much effort expended, to so little effect.

It's the postgreenhouse future. The ice caps have melted, and the world is a vast briny sea. Most people live in giant docking stations, atolls, built on water. Prowling the sea like Poseidon's angels are the Smokers, bad guys led by the one-eyed Deacon (Dennis Hopper). The Smokers are looking for Enola (Tina Majorino), a 10-year-old with a map tattoo that may point the way to dry land. With her guardian Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the girl hitches a ride on the trimaran of an outsider--part man, part fish--known as the Mariner (Costner). If anyone in this scurvy world can help them, he can. Hey, he can do anything. As we see in the opening scene, he knows how to transform his urine into drinking water.

If Waterworld weren't an original script (by Peter Rader, David Twohy and at least four uncredited rewriters), it would be the kind of film that makes you want to read the book it was based on, to find all the rich detail the movie leaves out. For despite the toil of hundreds of artisans, Waterworld is a series of hints and promises, weird turns and blind alleys.

Reynolds had a noble aim: to create a fantasy landscape through the trappings of realism. That artistic prerogative cued the decision to shoot on the water-something Costner was warned against. "I'd never shoot a picture on water," says Dan Gordon, scriptwriter for Costner's Wyatt Earp and a veteran scuba diver. "I'd told Kevin I'd blue-screen it. But I literally don't think he heard me. He was too excited about the visuals in his head."

Aside from the logistic nightmare, setting a film on water restricts the palette: sky blue, water greenish and, for the atoll, Industrial Revolution brown. The texture of the set design gets lost in this brooding cinematography. At times the action is as murky as the images--a result of dense plotting and the bizarre accents of a few actors. Too often, the viewer asks a question no popular film should allow: "What's happening here?"

It's to Waterworld's credit that it does not try to be ingratiating or facetious in the manner of so many comic-book adventures. The characters are convincingly portrayed as being obsessed with survival, not with making nice. But this means that they are often in a very bad mood. The film is basically two hours of bickering punctuated by chase scenes. The middle portion--when Helen and Enola escape with the Mariner, then get on his nerves with their chatter, attitude and seaworthlessness--is any host's nightmare of those people who drop in uninvited and never leave. Loner man, rasping woman, balky daughter: they become an immediate unhappy family.

The folks at Universal may be unhappy now, but that will pass. The picture could, after all, be a hit. If not, Seagram, which recently purchased MCA, Universal's parent company, from the Japanese media giant Matsushita, has little to worry about. Matsushita paid for most of the movie; Seagram gets to keep the box-office take. Some conspiracy theorists even think that the money overrun was condoned by longtime MCA Pooh-Bah Lew Wasserman. "Lew would never let a picture get this far out of control unless he wanted it to happen," says a Costner colleague. "I love all these stories about executives wringing their hands at Universal! If Wasserman was wringing his hands, it would be to put them around somebody's throat. This was the lever to get the Japanese to sell the studio--there's no doubt about it."

Costner has also had a rough patch lately. Star of left-field hits like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham, Oscar-winning director of Dances with Wolves, he has seen his last three films (A Perfect World, Wyatt Earp, The War) disappoint at the U.S. box office. Splitting with his wife Cindy was painful, public and pricey, reportedly costing the actor $80 million. His share in a South Dakota resort has stirred rancor among aboriginal Americans.

But Costner is still a force, a resourceful guy and a powerfully laconic actor. So even if Waterworld takes a dive, his bankability should be intact. "I don't think anybody expects his career to end," says Mike Medavoy, whose Orion Pictures released Bull Durham and Dances with Wolves. "He's one of the few international movie stars who have the old Hollywood glamour."

Already Costner has made a smart move: he is slated to star as a golfer in Tin Cup, from Bull Durham's Ron Shelton. And after that? Well, we know two junior execs with just the project. It has everything: a desperate battle for survival ...

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles