Released thirty years ago, during the summer of 1995, Universal's "Waterworld" had a troubled to the big screen. Envisioned as "Mad Max on the ocean", the film tells a story in a distant future, where the the polar ice-caps have melted, and the entire planet is flooded, with small pockets of civilization surviving on sailing vessels and cities build to float on the water. Kevin Costner's Mariner has developed gills to survive underwater, a new wave in human evolution, but most of the fractured society struggles to exist and their presence is threatened the marauding pirates. Director Kevin Reynolds had worked previously with Costner, though the two would go on to have creative differences, with Costner seemingly taking over much of post-production on the film. The film would also have endless technical complications and accidents (filming a movie almost entirely set in the middle of the ocean sounds like an absolute nightmare), with the budget almost doubling, becoming the most expensive film ever made at the time. Despite all this, the film did decently at the box office, but not well enough to recoup the astronomical production budget, and the film ultimately got middling reviews. The story has some interesting ideas, some incredibly ambitious production design, but ultimately was failed by a script that didn't really add much depth to the overall premise, though the concept did go on to inspire a few adaptations and a theme-park water-stunt show at Universal Studios.
Originally attached to the project was composer Mark Isham, his score was incomplete, but tested poorly and was seemingly considered too introspective or minimal. Costner wanted a new sound for the film, and brought on James Newton Howard, who had scores "Wyatt Earp" for him the previous year. Howard himself was at a transitional point in his career, with his early work in TV and film a bit eclectic, jumping between drama, rom-com, thriller, etc. "Waterworld" was one of his first major blockbuster scores, and helped set him in the path to be one of the prominent genre composers for sci-fi and fantasy action scores. The score balances swashbuckling orchestral moments along with a varied palette including choir, solo voices, mixed percussion, woodwinds and various exotic instruments as well as heavy synthetic augmentation to provide an other-worldly sound. The score is not as prominently thematic as some of his later genre scores, but does feature a jaunty theme for the lead, and a more tender and mysterious theme for Enola, the girl at the heart of the story, and the promise of Dry Land. The score often focuses more on tone, color and action, rather than strict narrative structure, but it is still a fun listen and it is great to hear Howard begin to develop many of his trademark mannerisms.
MCA Records released the original soundtrack album, featuring over an hour of score. In 2017, La-La Land Records released a 2-disc expanded album, featuring an extra half hour of score, plus several alternates and demos. The film is not a personal favorite, but if you're a fan of genre film-making like me, there is still a certain joy to a film that is this ambitious, even if the end result is a bit cheesy and uneven (though an extended cut of the film does help add some extra richness to the world).
I present a total of fourteen new covers to pick from. The first six pieces are all taken from official marketing artwork, whether from the theatrical posters, or for art created later for home video or digital releases. The usual fixes include image enhancements, comp-ing overlapping images, text removal, etc. Of these, Cover 5 (using Blu-Ray art) was the biggest pain, as none of the source images had a clean separation between the landscape scene at the bottom and the characters on top, and mixing and patching all those elements was a headache.
Covers 7 - 9 showcase some rejected posters originally designed for the film. Covers 7 and 8 use two of Drew Struzan's pieces for the film (he had a few other sketches, but these were the two that were finished in full color). Both required edits. Having to make actual structure/content edits to a Struzan piece feels like a bit of a minor sacrilege, but it is also a pleasure to work directly with this quality art and adapt it to meet the current needs. Cover 7 uses the same base art that was used on La-La Land's expansion, though I never liked the design of that cover--the text feels sloppy, and clearly the image was not meant to be cropped how it was, and the title placement feels awkward, with too much dead space at the bottom, etc. I chose to keep the painted edges of the piece, as I like preserving that rustic, hand-painted feel, which compliments the world well (naturally to to this, you have to pull up the bottom edge significantly up and reposition it to frame your new composition). The other major element at play was that I chose to move Mariner and Helen swimming to the opposite side of the picture, and much higher up, and thus, leaving a clean space at the bottom for a traditional title placement. Fortunately it was relatively easy to blend all these new changes in without feeling too manipulated, as all the underwater colors and textured flowed into each other with ease. Again, relatively simple changes, but again, I think the end result gives you a much more successful image using that same source art.
Cover 8 was less involved, but again required shifting the art's edges (here really preserving that rough, pencilled look, which some might like, others might a cleaner crop). Mainly I edited the bottom ocean waves higher up into the image so they're more overlapped under Mariner, otherwise the ocean would barely have been in the image.
Cover 9 uses an original painting by C. Michael Dudash, a fine artist who mostly specialized in Westerns, who I was previously unaware of, but who had also painted a poster that was rejected for the final marketing. I tried a few different AI upscaling passes on the image, though sadly all the original sources were fairly low-resolution, and the effect didn't quite gain the detail or texture that I wanted, so I added a bit of a panel texture on top to give it just a bit more depth, though I really wish I had access to a better scan of the original piece.
The final five covers include various pieces of fan-created or commissioned artwork.
Cover 10 - 11 feature digital art by Yvan Quinet. Both required minor edits. Mostly expanding the sides of the image and cut-outs over the title for 10, and in 11 again raising the sea level significantly higher in the image and them re-matting it to fit around the Mariner.
Cover 12 uses artwork by Welsh illustrator Rich Davies, a fun poster, but one that again required structural changes to fit a square cover. I brought up the bottom of the image (the atoll city and ocean below) much higher up, and flipped it horizontally, so fill the gap on the left side of the image), then had to overlay the fire layers onto the characters below, and also moved the ski-jets into that area as well, as well as editing parts of the ocean to get the most variety in color in the limited strip of sea that I was able to display. I created a different effect on the title (rather than Rich's original white title), I thought since so much of the image was orange, it would be nice to add more of the cooler water colors to balance, and in fact, I ended up actually overlaying some of the ocean textures onto the title itself for good measure.
Cover 13 uses a fun, stylized piece of art by UK illustrator Tom Coupland, which to me feels somehow very....Floridian? A super groovy piece nonetheless. Again, vertical compression is the key here. Basically the bottom half of the piece all had to come up, but painting out and blending around a very graphic art style like this, especially with all the hyper detailed sea-foam splashes, etc., is a nightmare to have to matte out and blend when you don't have access to any of the original layers. This again was a royal pain to edit, but I think the end result still works, without losing too much of the overall image.
Finally, cover 14 uses an original digital painting by Paul Shipper, commissioned for Arrow Video's 4K UHD box set of the film. Fortunately, I was able to find a wider version of the art, which required little content editing (though Mariner's iconic trimaran is sadly a little buried at the bottom). Paul's likenesses are always spectacular, and I like the strong, contrasting color palette.
Hope you enjoy the collection, and let me know your favorites below!
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