History WMG / WaterWorld

[[WMG: This film is set thousands of years later in the same universe as ''Film/{{Reminiscence}}'' and ''Anime/{{WeatheringWithYou}}'']]

Forget the opening graphics. That is just an artistic display from the filmmakers. The Waterworld is remnants of a human colony on another planet, which suffered global warming and turned the colony into a post-apocalyptic wasteland as it was cut off from other human planets. It might even have been an ocean-themed amusement park similar to Westworld given that the smokers live aboard a ship called Exxon Valdez, probably a remake of the original. The real one would never have survived for that long. It also explains how there is so little Dryland despite the cities being located only a few hundred meters beneath the surface. Maybe the colony planet never had mountains taller than that. This also explains the whale-like monster. That is a native life form to that planet.

* Disregarding the deleted scene indicating that Dry Land at the end of the movie is the peak of Mt. Everest but also taking the sunken city visited being Denver into account, a flood map program will show you exactly how much of the world would still be above water for this to work--setting it to 4400 meters indicates that most of the Tibetan Plateau is still above water, the Andes have become a volcano, and--interestingly enough--Mr. Ararat, the supposed resting place of Noah's Ark, is also still above water.

[[WMG: ''Waterworld'' would've been the future of ''[[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Pokémon Sapphire]]'', had Team Aqua suceeded.]]

* Conversely, ''Film/ThePostman'' would've the future of ''Pokémon Ruby'', had Team Magma has suceeded in their plan to use Grodoun to drought the the world.

The main JustBugsMe about the film is that there simply isn't enough water on the planet, solution? Just add water. A large enough ice asteroid would explain why the sea level is so high, it also caused the mass extinction of most of the other types of creatures on the planet which is why we don't see many. Also maybe the asteroid contains lots of sodium to explain the salt levels in the water.

* That's a neat idea - so many stories have "water looters", like in ''Series/{{V}}'', but this idea inverts that.

It's been long enough since the ice caps melted that people aren't quite sure why or how it happened. But, it stands to reason that it ''must'' have happened because of someone/thing, right? So the people, looking for someone/thing to blame end up inventing a quasi-religious belief that the mutants (the only people who would seemingly benefit from all the water) created the situation. As such, mutants are hated, despite the fact that they'd be really handy to have around, because it's "totally their fault" anyway.

[[WMG: The Literature/EarthseaTrilogy is set in future waterworld]]

Humanity is too busy surviving and fighting each other to realize that the evolved sea life has managed to create their own landmasses to restart civilization.

My theory is that the ice caps did melt, but acted as they would in real life, flooding islands and costal areas. The flooding of several nations ended up sparking a nuclear war, causing many to flee by boat. The EMPs generated by the nukes wiped out navigation equipment and led to many people being stranded. These people would find shelter on oil rigs and large ships. The radiation would accumulate on the coastlines, because one: many large cities are costal, and two: radiation caught in rivers would eventually make its way to the coast. Anyone who acually found dry land would die of radiation poisoning. After generations passed, everyone assumed that dry land was now underwater. In reality, most of the worlds landmass still exists in various forms, from post-apocalyptic wasteland, to small villages and surviving wilderness, to rebuilt civilizations. Everybody in Waterworld are just wandering around the middle of the pacific convinced that dry land isn't real. Oh, and this explains where the pirates get their gas, ammo, and factory rolled cigarettes. They trade (or more likely steal) from land-based societies. Hell, they may even have originated on land, starting out as raiders who stumbled across an oil tanker, and discovered that there's a bunch of defenseless morons out in the middle of the ocean who don't know that land exists.

Aliens didn't just drop off water, they deployed some bizarre wormhole to drain their water onto our planet to escape [[Eldritch Abomination something horrible]]. The heat of the portal's energy simultaneously melts the ice caps causing the world or at the very least those that survived to believe it was just he ice caps. Alien wildlife overtakes the ocean and somewhere deep below Waterworld is an alien refugee civilization. Various new environmental factors mutate the lifeforms left, i.e. The Mariner and anything like him.