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Show Page 4 August 18, 1995 Etc ‘Waterworld’: Will This Most-Expensive Movie Sink or Swim? By John Horn ~ AP Entertainment Writer UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. (AP) — Unmerciful ocean currents. Deadly script problems. Huge cost overruns. A directorial walkout. Cutthroat media. “Waterworld” has faced just about every obstacle —- except one: the audience. The most expensive movie ever ived in theaters, as a h yearof struggle gives wayto the first moviegoer’s reactien to the opening scene: a web- toed Kevin Costnerurinating in a cup and drinking its purified con- tents. There can — and probably will — be books written about the many things that went wrong making “Waterworld.” But becausethe film cost some $175 million, the final chapter of the ““Waterworld” stery can’t be written until the crowds decide whether the futuristic thriller is worth the price of admission. “LT hope the film will be remembered as a really great action movie that stretched the genre a little bit,” Costner says. “It’s a really good movie. But for me,it doesn’t match up with my sensi- bility.” Thereare twotests for ‘“Waterworld” — one accounting and the otherartistic. Due to its cost, the movie will have to gross about $150 million in domestic theaters to be on course simply to break even when all markets, including foreign and homevideo,aretallied. Potentially more importantis the appealof the story itself —-a dark portrait of a post-apocalyptic world where meited polar ice caps have inundated almostall of the Earth’s dry land. Costner plays a character named the Mariner, an often churlish loner who, as an unfilmed part of the script hasit, murdered his own father. The Mariner lives on a hodgepodge trimaran that would whip Dennis Conner’s fastest Americas Cup entry, The boat is the Mariner's escape not only from dangerous heodiums named Smokers(led by Dennis Hopper) but also from any other humancontact: He wants to be left alone With mutated toes andtinyslitlike “gills” behind his ears, the Mariner is able to swim at Olympian speed, a handytalent given the abundance of ocean. The battle-filled story follows the Mariner as he reluctantly rescues a young girl named Encia (Tina Majorino) and the adoptive mother, Helen (Jeanne Trippiehorn), from the Smokers. Enola bears on her back a strange tattoo that may be a map to dry land — whoever has Enola, therefore, has hope. A key plot point that never made it to the screen helps explain Enola’s link to soil: She was found as an infant floating at sea, bobbing in a basket with dirt init. Director Kevin Reynelds (‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”) left the film in late April in a dispute with Costner, producer Chuck Gordon and Universal Pictures. Costner, who gave up a percentage ofthefilm’s profits for finishing funds, says Reynolds’ cut was all explosions and no story or character; Reynolds declined to be interviewed. ina furious spateof last-minute editing, Costner supervised the making of a new “Waterworld.” The Academy Award-winning director of “Dances With Welves” was doubiy handicapped from the start: A release date was bearing down like a runaway train and people disagreed about his own character. Costner thought the Mariner should be angry anddistant. Universal preferred Audie Murphyin mahi mahipants. The studio’s target was financial, and it had sometelling arrowsin its quiver: Costner played somewhat unsympathetic characters in both “Wyatt Earp” and “A Perfect World” — and neither film wasa hit. Costner mostly prevailed. In the finished film, the Mariner throws the verbose Enola overbeard in one scene, wallops her mother with an oar in another. “T think what you'll see is women want me te be more romantic and not so hard on the women,” says Costner, adding that he won't let box-office considerations trumpstory essentials. “T had to fight .1e mentality of the studio: te love Kevin Costner, you can’t be that way. ‘You can’t just hit somebody like that.’ said, ‘I think that’s wrong.I think he’s actually very generous —- she didn’t wake up floating. She just woke up with 2 knot on her head.’ “I think that it’s really attractive to be around somebody that you don’t know what they’re like, and maybe you think you don’t like them and then at the end you do. . If the Mariner's antisocial, you have to showthat.” The debutof “Waterworld” has been preceded by the most negative media coverage of any movie | | | since 1963's “Cleopatra,” which cost $213 million in current dollars. The most expensive movie made before “Waterworld” was last year’s “True Lies,” which cost about $115 million. Costner and producer Chuck Gordon, who oversaw the eight months of Waterworld” filming, understand why a movie this costly attracted the attentionit has. What they can’t understand is the venom. “T don’t know whatI’ve done to people,” Costner says. “I don’t knowif they have it out for me. Usually, when somebody has it out for you, it’s like you've done something to them. So I can’t trace mylife and find what I’ve done to anybody, do you know whatI mean?” Adds Gordon: “So many people seem to want this movie to fail. Andit’s really disgusting.” If the negative publicity has any advantage, and it may net, it at least builds awareness and lowers the audience’s expeciations. “People are coming in expeciing just this total debacle, and they seem to be enjoying the movie — not everybody, but a majority of people,” Gordonsays.“It’s almost like they are shocked. There'sstill a movie there.” Indeed, the movie features its share of overwhelming battle sequences and special effects. Some of the movie’s millions are notvisible, however, since they went into off-screen delays, not onscreen action. And one sceneinvolving a giant sea creature looked incompiete and confusing. If Costner and Gordon could do it over again, they say, they would make sure the script was ready before film was loaded in the cameras. And they would not underestimate the hardship of work- -~ Associated Presa Kevin Costner (above and below) and Jeanne Trippiehorn star as the Mariner and Helen in the futuristic action-adventure “Waterworld.” Although the costly production got tepid critical response and was immersed in controversy over a bloated budget, audiences madeit No.1 at the boxoffice after it opened July 28. ing on water. ‘The Net’: Forgetable Movie Shot Full of Holes By Jay Boyar OrlandoSentinel If “Demolition Man” was the movie that got the buzz going on Sandra Bullock, “Speed” was her first blockbuster, and ‘While You WereSleeping” wasthefirst time she carried a film, that would make “The Net’ Bullock's first completely forgettable motion picture since she becamea star. By all rights, this one should van- ply has no idea what he’s doing. Itake that back. He knows what a produceroughtto know: how to latch onto a hot topic and a hot star. Winkler also appears to have picked up enough fromthe directors he has worked with to give his film a certain second-hand slickness. It’s possible that The Net could haul in a respectable boxoffice total, although that would be very depressing ‘This would-be director’s idea of building suspense is to have peopie chase one anotheror type furiously on their keyboards. (They also talk to their keyboards a lot, in hushed, urgenttones. Is the dialogue (by screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris) really as flat and phony as it seems? Or does it just sound that way because the characters ish from herofficial celebrity bio even beforeit hits video. As cyber-whiz Angela Bennett, Bullock is a lonely gal who works at home and spends her nights are so insubstantial that they're reaily virtual characters? We're offered a lot of information about Angela, for example. Butit addsuptoso little in terms of actual personality that the movie oddly seemsboth over- and underwritten. And speaking of Angela's personality: When are filmmakers going to realize that just because Sandra Bullock isa't blond, that doesn’t mean she isn't sexy? There really ought to be something other than losers and nerds forthis appealing actress to play. ‘Net’: Hitchcock on the Internet By Jack Mathews (c) 1995, Newsday You do not have to own and operate a personal computerto follow the plot complications of Irwin Winkler’s cyberspace thriller “The Net.” The story, about a professional computer nerd whohas herlife electronically erased by an Internet terrorist, is such derivative Hollywood suspense it could have been titled ‘‘Hitehcock for Dummies.” “The Net,’’ written by enough peopletostart a basketbali team,stars Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, a free-lance software doctor who tracks downand kills viruses in corporate computer programs and geis them back online. The saving grace of “The Net” is Bullock, whose sunny disposition and warm accessibility makeheran irrepressible protagonist, even while putting the lie to her character. munching on computer-ordered pizza by the glowofa virtual fire- BUCUseracueeits place. Angela’s quiet existence changes suddenly when she comes into possession of a computer disk thatis, of course, loaded with ultra-hush-hush data. As a result, she becomes fugitive, electronically stripped of her identity by the evil geniuses whoareplotting to destroy her and, not incidentally, our entire American way of life. In theory, this “Pelican Brief’’meets-Johnny Mnemonic premise is certainly intriguing enough — particularly the notion of a person's identity being erased oraltered simply by tampering with computer files. The problem is that producer-turned-director Irwin Winkler (“Night and the City,” “Guilty by Suspicion") sim- NATURAL GAS FIREPLACES Quer at odeCooganDEP. 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