Why the Premise of Waterworld Makes Absolutely No Sense!

Have you ever really considered just how ridiculously implausible the premise of Waterworld is? I am aware that I am probably preaching to the choir on this one, but I have a really difficult time getting past the very idea of the movie. It’s an interesting concept but it really makes no sense. Usually when you have a science fiction story based on ‘what could happen in our future’ it is pretty plausible. The world of Star Trek, for instance, isn’t that outlandish in terms of what we presently know about space travel, how our military operates and how technology has changed our lives to date. Likewise, a post-apocalyptic story of Earth after a nuclear war or environmental disaster can be realistic (until you bring in giant bugs and mutants). On the surface, Waterworld comes across like a post-environmental disaster movie wrapped in a cautionary tale about global warming until you stop and consider how such a world would actually come to be.

First and foremost is the idea of the entire world being flooded… there just isn’t that much water in the world. Even if every bit of ice in the polar caps melted, there wouldn’t be that much water.  I remember an old issue of National Geographic had an article about the melting ice caps. Included with the article was a map of what the United States would look like based on estimates of how much flooding would occur from such an event. Now the flooding would be catastrophic; most of the coastal cities would be destroyed and Florida would be reduced to a sliver of its current size. (I was overjoyed to see that Michigan would be completely unscathed!) However, we are talking about losing at absolute most 10% of America’s land to the risen ocean and I have to imagine the rest of the world would suffer the same disastrous but not all consuming flooding.

Denver, Colorado is approximately a mile above sea level. Do you have any idea how much water it would take, world-wide, to bring the ocean levels up 5,280 feet? Now consider that Denver is not the highest point in the world… far from it. There just isn’t that much ice in the Arctic and Antarctic to make oceans levels rise high enough to envelop 99.99999% of the world’s land masses. Even the present coastal cities would still have skyscrapers and high-rises sticking out of the water. (Honestly, coastal cities would probably look more like New York City did at the end of A.I. than anything else.) But consider in one scene Kevin Costner was diving below the surface to the ruins of a huge city completely submerged deep under the sea. Unless a hell of a lot of comets fell to Earth and melted, there isn’t enough water. The only other thing that I could consider would be all the tectonic plates just sank down a few thousand feet for some reason causing the continents to drop below sea level… but that only creates more absurd questions like where did the mantle go? Did the Earth’s core implode? How? Why? Damn you Waterworld for making me ponder the premise of a crappy, crappy movie!

Okay, so let’s just say that the Earth could flood so much that only the top of Mt. Everest pokes out of the water. This just creates more questions. First of all, why only Mt. Everest? I know, I know… it’s the tallest mountain on Earth! (Technically the Big Island of Hawaii is the World’s tallest mountain if you factor in how much of it is beneath the Pacific… but I digress.) So I will assume that all the mountain peaks that surround Mt. Everest are included in the fabled dry land of Waterworld since they are all comparable in height, but what about K2 and the Karakorum range, created by the same tectonic collision as the Himalayas? K2 is only 778 ft shorter than Everest, surely that would be enough to create an island.

The Everest island also creates some new problems. Now I don’t know enough about this to be certain but wouldn’t the thin air be an issue? I don’t know if since the surface would be higher the air might be thicker (from water vapor?) and if the air worldwide would be thinner since the seas would be at such an elevation? (Again, unless the continents sank.) Would the air be so thin that everyone would suffer pulmonary embolisms? I could give the movie the benefit of the doubt here. Humans can adapt the thinner air so it stands to reason everyone may have adapted. Okay, fine.

Mt. Everest is too rocky to be fertile for cultivation. The Himalayas are a very young mountain range (geologically speaking) and therefore are very rocky. Compare the two major mountain ranges of the USA, the Rockies and the Appalachians. The Appalachians are older and as such erosion has taken its toll. They are smaller and have a great deal of fertile soil allowing for vegetation to grow upon them. The Rockies are much taller because they are younger, meaning erosion has not had much of an effect. As a result, true to their name they are in fact rocky. Mt. Everest would have had to suffer hundreds of thousands of years of erosion (and that may be a grave under-estimate) to make it hospitable to the lush vegetation seen at the end of the movie. And if such a span of time had indeed passed, the humans would not have had the jet-skis, guns, boats, or even wood that they used to survive. All of that stuff would have eroded, rusted or rotted away.

This leads me to my next problem with Waterworld… where did the humans get all of that stuff? I mean, yeah they surely salvaged what they could, but what were the circumstances involved? What I mean by that is how quickly did the disaster that caused the ice caps to melt take place? Was it a slow development or did it happen quickly? If the disaster happened gradually, the humans should have had more… a lot more at their disposal. As I’ve said before in my Skynet evisceration (http://enigmasociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-skynet-is-stupidest-super-computer.html), humans are smart and therefore are like cockroaches when it comes to survival. Humans would have created massive floating cities, multitudes of aircraft carriers, built onto higher elevations… anything to survive. If the disaster happened suddenly, then they have way too much stuff. Where did all the wood come from… driftwood? Fine, where did the nails come from to put them together? Or the hammers to pound the nails? How did people manage to keep operational planes without the parts to keep them running? What about the fabric for sails or clothes? It just doesn’t add up.

I also have to point out that Dennis Hopper could not possibly use the oil inside the Exxon Valdez… it’s crude oil (at least that’s what was spilled on Prince William Sound). He would have needed a refinery to make the oil even slightly usable, let alone create the gasoline needed to run jet-skis and planes. This also has me asking where are all the other massive ships? What happened to the other oil tankers or the battleships or the aircraft carriers? You would think that there would be huge groups of people living on those huge boats. What about nuclear submarines? I’m not sure what the half-life is for their reactors, but it would seem like they would be very useful.

For that matter how the hell do the humans of Waterworld survive? Okay, I can see the urine recycler to make fresh water. That technology exists now (although I am not sure where they would get fresh filters). I can also see eating fish and seaweed. However, humans need more than that. For instance, none of those things contain much Vitamin C or calcium. Does everyone in Waterworld have brittle bones and scurvy? I can let this go to a certain extent as human bodies for thousands of years have adapted to what is available in their environments, but we need things like carbohydrates from grains to survive as well. Where else will they find the energy to process their piss?

One of the major plot points of Waterworld is that Kevin Costner’s character (creatively called “The Mariner”) has evolved gills and webbed feet, making him the first human to truly adapt to this water-logged planet… except that the story only takes place vaguely a few hundred years from now. Evolution does not work that fast! I must also point out that The Mariner’s adaptation is extremely unique. To my knowledge, only one animal on Earth has evolved both gills and lungs… and that is the aptly named Lungfish. A human developing the means to breathe underwater, a completely unheard of mutation in Homosapiens, would be a huge advancement and likely not one to happen in a mere few hundred years! Besides, it would be more likely for a human to evolve amphibian-like skin that can absorb the oxygen and “drink” the water just by making contact with it. It would make more sense from an evolutionary standpoint as humans don’t stay submerged long enough in water as to necessitate gills but would come in skin contact with salt water enough to justify a means to absorb the liquid but not the salt itself.

So in addition to having terrible writing, lousy acting (I still love you Dennis Hopper… RIP), and being far too boring for a sci-fi adventure flick, Waterworld is also completely implausible in every way. Now I am assuming that you already realized that Waterworld was an outlandish concept to begin with but now maybe I have highlighted just how wrong the premise of the story and plot really are. I only hope the box office poison that is Kevin Costner doesn’t infect Superman Returns as he for some ungodly reason has been cast as Jonathan Kent. If only Christopher Reeve had never been paralyzed and was still alive. I just have a feeling that part would have rightfully gone to him… but that can be saved for another time.