Line #42 Headscratchers/Waterworld


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3	* The only other living thing we see in practically the entire movie is a giant... [[BuffySpeak fish-eel thingie]] that the Mariner lures and kills for food. Seriously, what the hell was that thing?
4	** The novel referred to it as either a "sharkphin" or "whalephin", memory's fuzzy. Apparently it was an escapee from WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender before that series even existed.
5	** For that matter, why does this fish-thingie have a ''vertical'' mouth? No mammal has such a thing, nor do any known shark or even fish. The creature could be a mutant, but what would be the evolutionary advantage of such an up-and-down mouth?
6	*** No advantage at all. Possibly it's some kind of giant mutant flounder, and it's the ''eyes'' that are in the wrong orientation?
7	*** Or maybe its head is just twisted sideways to snap up the "bait". Fish may not have necks, but eels and certain long-bodied sharks are flexible enough to do that.
8	** For that matter, do the other large sea animals such as sharks, whales, orcas, still exist, or were they wiped out by giant weird fish?
9	*** Probably a mix of that and whatever accelerated evolution Waterworld is clearly undergoing.
10	*** If it counts, one of the props on the set of the stunt show at Universal Studios (the Hollywood version, at least) is a huge, partly-butchered hammerhead shark.
11	** According to a comic miniseries the "Sea Eaters" and the mutants were both the result of genetic engineering from before the world flooding.
12	** The ''real'' question is, if humans are as scarce as the film makes them seem and all four-limbed marine animals (pinnipeds, sea turtles) can be presumed extinct due to lack of breeding sites, why the heck was that thing hunting a ''four-limbed'' silhouette? There's no particular reason why it would associate such a shape with prey, as odds are good it's never actually seen a critter shaped like that before. Heck, why was it even bothering to hunt ''near the surface'' in broad daylight? The open ocean's upper layer is all but lifeless in the daytime; it's only after dark that zooplankton, filter-feeding fishes, squids and other animals that would've survived the global flood migrate above the thermocline.
13	*** It's possible that there are other, smaller varieties of sea-mutant that are set up for locomotion more like ancient sea creatures with four flukes. But also remember that the Mariner probably doesn't always use a more traditional swimming stroke, especially when underwater, if he keeps his legs together and swims "dolphin style" he wouldn't have a four-limb profile.
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15	* It may be instinctive but I always found it funny of Helen to maniacally start covering herself after being rejected by Mariner. After letting him examine her naked body for a minute long.
16	** A better question is how is she so smooth and hairless?
17	*** Some people are that way naturally.
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19	* The fact that no one taught Enola ''how to goddamn swim''.
20	** People keep harping on this and then deleting the explanation when it's put on the page. The fact is that there are a ton of people who live their lives on the water and don't learn to swim, in part because they don't always have the opportunity (you can't just stop most boats and go for a swim out in the deep safely, like you would a motorboat on the lake). The only non-drinkable water the Atoll is shown to have is the "recycling" tank which obviously you're not going to swim in, and swimming in the ocean probably puts you at risk of all sorts of creatures (there's likely stuff that's smaller than the seamonster but still nasty). Plus it's made clear throughout the movie that Helen is extremely overprotective of Enola and probably didn't want to put her at risk by teaching her to swim.
21	** Historically, a lot of sailors on ocean-going vessels didn't know how to swim, in part because if you're thrown overboard far from land, you have little hope of stumbling across rescue, and thus being able to swim just prolongs your suffering.
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23	* Why would the Mariner have a diving ball if he can breathe underwater?
24	** Given the film's ArtisticLicenseBiology (see main page), perhaps he can only breathe for short periods, and the diving ball is for longer underwater forays.
25	** Presumably the Mariner was born to human parents, and was taken care of by humans until he was old enough to fend for himself. The bell could be left over from when he still had an air-breathing relative to build it for.
26	** He's shown storing things he takes off the ocean floor in it, and bringing them into the air to take a better look at them. It's probably also more convenient to ride down in it than swim all the way and get to the bottom tired, and gives him a better landmark to come back to than just an anchor chain or something would.
27	** Ascending with a load of materials scrounged from the bottom would be a huge effort, but if he brings an air-filled balloon down with him, ''it'' can haul his gleanings up to the surface. He loads it with a fraction of his own weight in salvaged goods and then lets it go, swims up himself, and collects his bag of trinkets.
28	** He can breathe at depth, but not ''see'' at depth. An air-filled chamber can be used to isolate luminous fluid from sea life from the surrounding water so it won't be diluted, and could potentially hold a small flaming lamp for a few minutes if he needs ''bright'' light.
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30	* Why do only the smokers have working modern technology? They refine their own fuel from the oil on the tanker which explains why they can use the jet-skis etc, but where are they getting things like guns and bullets that no-one else has?
31	** They've been raiding for a long time. Possibly there is (or used to be) a flotilla of old military ships roped together somewhere, still afloat but out of fuel, that they stripped of all their weapons, ammo and so on.
32	** The better question is how they are actually refining this oil. There is a reason refineries aren't built ''on'' the water!
33	** There are other groups with working modern technology, in a deleted scene the Smokers talk as if it’s unusual that the atoll we see them raid has no ammo or oil.
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35	* The Mariner's water purifier. If "sea water is hard on the filters," wouldn't urine be just as difficult to desalinate, if not more so?
36	** Urine is generally less than 0.5% sodium. Seawater is around 3.5%.
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38	* Why are water-breathing mutants so universally despised? You'd think at least some tribes would consider them to be incredibly useful demigods, essentially a situation-specific Hercules come to life. Even if those tribes were a small minority, the tremendous advantage having such mutants among them, and being willing to breed with them, would give would ensure such tribes quickly dominated the rest in terms of both wealth and numbers. It's the equivalent of treating bronze as sacred and attempting to destroy the secret of iron forging as an abomination. The few tribes who don't buy into this religion are going to destroy the ones who do.
39	** Fear and jealousy, fear of what the mutants might become capable of and jealousy over being able to survive better.
40	** Presumably, if there ''are'' societies that willingly interbred with mutants, they interbred enough to ''become'' mutants themselves after a few generations, so no longer have the need to use boats or cluster on piddly little atolls of salvaged junk. Provided they've found a way to lick the fresh water shortage (sucking fluids out of fish? migrating north to chew on whatever's left of the polar ice?), they could have simply moved completely beneath the surface, leaving the gill-less bigots who detest them behind to die out.
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42	* Why did Enola's parents send her away from the Dryland. It would have been a much safer place for her to grow up.
43	** The sheer number of possibilities is too much to go into. Just off the top of my head: maybe there was an outbreak of illness so some people left, and when the adults realized they weren't going to make it they gave Enola the tattoo as a sort of "here's where you can find her relatives". Just that there were no relatives because the outbreak killed everyone.
44	** Could be that there ''was'' only one family on the island when Enola was little. Her parents died when she was still far too young to fend for herself, leaving her with only a very frail grandparent to care for her. Realizing they wouldn't live long enough for Enola to become self-sufficient, this elder used the last of their strength to set sail, heading out in desperate search of other humans who could provide for the girl after they, too, were gone. The grandparent perished shortly before their sailboat was found, ending up in the water, and the child was discovered all alone by Helen's people.
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46	* What ''is'' the Dryland? If the water covered all the continents, shouldn't it be, at best, barren mountain tops?
47	** Dryland is the top of the Everest. This is shown explicitly in the full version of the ending, where they casually find the plaque commemorating the conquest of the mountain by Hillary and Norgay. And yes, the fact that it is a tropical forest with a nice sandy beach instead of a bunch of barren rocks makes no sense, but that's hardly the only nonsensical thing in the movie.
48	*** The rising waters displaced the atmosphere, so the temperature and air pressure is just about the same modern-day sea level. Centuries of waves and rain and erosion have washed up enough sand onto the rocks to form a beach. And the flooding took long enough that tropical plants and animals were able to migrate there.
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50	* Where did all of the water come from? If every bit of ice melted and all the water vapor in the air fell to earth, there would only be an extra 300 or so feet of water. A lot of land would be submerged, but nowhere near enough to make the remaining land a mythical place that's nearly impossible to find. Heck, the water level was high enough during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods that a lot of land, especially in North America and Africa, ''was'' underwater for a while.
51	** A somewhat reasonable explanation (if taken with a huge grain of salt), besides the ice melting mentioned in the beginning of the movie, could be an astronomical event. Maybe some large body gravitationally disturbed the Oort Cloud at the edge of the Solar System and sent several ice-rich comets or other bodies towards the inner Solar System where Earth is. Enough of these fragments may have fallen on Earth to add water to the already rising oceans. This is actually the most accepted explanation for most of the water that Earth has: collisions against water-rich bodies in the early Solar System.

Context Headscratchers / Waterworld