Corrected entry: If Kevin Costner's character has gills, and can breathe under water, why would he have a device for someone else to breathe underwater? He very states that he is a loner, and does not travel any way but alone. I can see building one after he picks up his extra passengers, but beforehand doesn't make since.
Correction: Before he gets to the metal island he is seen using the same bubble as a basket to put his treasure in. He might have been smart enough to know to turn it over.
Corrected entry: When preparing to address the people, Deacon puts on a hat. A few seconds later, the hat is suddenly missing.
Correction: He has simply taken his hat off before speaking to the people (which is a common thing, some people will remove their hat prior to speaking, even though they wore it to wave to a crowd). And he has plenty of time to do so while the camera is not on him.
Corrected entry: Right at the beginning Costner uses a machine to convert his urine into drinkable water. Any machine which can make urine drinkable would work perfectly well on seawater. Urine has far more contaminants than seawater.
Correction: In the directors cut of Waterworld, the Mariner says that they can't use sea water because the salt clogs and ruins the filter.
Corrected entry: When Costner blows up the Exxon Valdez with his flare, we get a shot of the deck from up high. Halfway through this shot, Hopper and his crew suddenly appear from nowhere, along with the railing he is leaning on.
Correction: While it is a weird looking shot, it's not a mistake, the camera has just pulled back far enough to reveal them. You can tell this is what happens because there are two objects on the deck and their position changes also, consistent with the camera angle changing.
Corrected entry: The Mariner takes Helen down to the sea bed in a makeshift 'diving bell'. He tells Helen there is only enough air for one person. The depth they dive to is shown as quite comfortably exceeding 200m. (To save this turning into a science essay I'll include this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyle's_law). Regardless of suspension of disbelief, there is no way that a bell of that size would carry enough air for even one person at that depth for that long. There's also the matter of decompression stops when they return to the surface. The Mariner wouldn't need them but Helen certainly would. It could be argued that the deco stops occurred off-screen and the audience doesn't see every second of their trip. Fair enough however The Mariner has no depth gauge. That would also assume he is not only aware of decompression as a concept, but is familiar with a specific set of decompression tables and schedules, to the point of having them memorised on the off chance he ever takes a human diving. Highly implausible.
Correction: Who says the mariner doesn't need decompression stops? He has gills and webbed toes, but even a fish can't move from the ocean floor to the surface without literally exploding. The "knowledge" of decompression must be instinctual for him, as is whether to breath through lungs or gills. He knows to stop for Helen because he must stop for himself as well. The first half of this mistake is valid but the second half is not. Perhaps a resubmission might be in order. This is why it's wiser not to list several issues in a single entry.
Rather more alarmingly, Boyle's Law states that if the temperature remains constant, pressure and volume are inversely proportional. This means that if the original posts comment about 200m is accurate, the pressure would be at least 21 atmospheres worth. Therefore, even though the volume of the air bubble should reduce to 1/21 of the original volume, the footage shows the bell being approximately 1/3 filled with air even when they"ve dived all the way to the bottom. Ludicrous.
Corrected entry: How far ahead in the future are we anyway? Hundreds or maybe thousands of years? Do you know how long tankers like that can stay at sea? Twenty or thirty years at the most. That's a rather short time for everyone to forget about dry land.
Correction: It is never revealed how far into the future the movie takes place. The statement about how long the tanker can stay at sea is complete speculation; since there is no (known) land it has no place to be but at sea. The bottom of the Valdez is encrusted with barnacles, the outer hull is covered in rust and engines have been replaced with people rowing. It looks like it may have been at sea for centuries.
Corrected entry: Where do the smokers get their cigarettes from? Cigarettes do not have an indefinite shelf life. The tobacco will dry out after just a few months and after a few years they would crumble away. Given that the smokers certainly don't have the capacity to grow tobacco or manufacture cigarettes, and the cigarettes they are smoking could not have survived since the global disaster that caused the sea to rise, there shouldn't be any around.
Correction: Cigarettes are usually packed in packages wrapped in sealed plastic, and if stored carefully, they will last quite a long time. They certainly would dry out and not be exactly pleasant to smoke, but beggars can't be choosers in thier case. They'd likely smoke anything.
Corrected entry: When the smokers attack the metal city, Enola and Helen go up to Gregor's windmill to try and escape with him. Though the battle is raging outside, you can see a calm, Smoker-free lagoon with no signs of an attack happening through any of the windows in the windmill.
Correction: The portion of the lagoon seen through the window is relatively calm, however right after Gregor throws the rope and it gets stuck, you can see a smoker on a jet ski enter the view right before the shot changes.
Corrected entry: If it has been so long since the water levels rose that no one remembers a time when dry land was above water, how did the little girl come to have such an accurate map to it tattooed on her back?
Correction: Probably because she came from dry land. Her family tattooed her back and sent her out to sea in a basket because they knew they were dying and that there were people out on the sea who would want to find the land. This is mentioned at several points later in the film; Helen mentioning "the basket we found Enola in," and Enola saying "I'm home" at the end.
Corrected entry: Featuring the Exxon Valdez in the movie is a nice piece of social commentary. However, when the real Exxon Valdez was repaired and placed back into service after the Prince William Sound disaster in 1989, it was rechristened the Sea River Mediterranean.
Correction: The ship was renamed EXXON Mediterranean (type Exxon Mediterranean into a search engine). This alleged mistake is already covered under trivia.
Corrected entry: Since all the Jet Skis in the movie seem to be from the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, and the Exxon Valdez can only hold so much oil, and it has probably been centuries (at least) since the water level rose, there would probably be a very strict oil rationing law in place for there to be any oil left at all. Certainly not enough for the villains to be as profligate with the use of the Jet Skis as they are.
Correction: You are assuming lots of things. There are no laws in this movie, it has become everyone for themselves. So who is to say that there is an oil rationing law. Second, maybe there was more than one oil tanker and the Exxon Valdez was the last one and so therefore everyone was DESPERATE to find dry land.
Corrected entry: The villains have many cans of Smeat laying about. Why won't they eat it?
Correction: The Deacon and his crew want the people he rules over to believe that he has finally found dryland. Throwing it to them before he makes his speech makes them believe this.
Corrected entry: If dirt is rare and expensive, look of the amount of dirt on the floor throughout the wooden islands, etc.
Correction: Its not a wooden island, it's metal, and the "dirt" isn't dirt, it's rust.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Mariner dives Helen to show her the sunken cities in this rare bubble, you take a good look at the underwater panorama. However, you will not find a single fish, despite it's suppose to be full of monsters and creatures.
Correction: If the polar icecaps melted and flooded the oceans with freshwater to the extent that the whole planet was underwater (that can't happen, but that's by the by) then every saltwater fish in the sea would die; their body chemistry would be totally disrupted as the salt in the sea was drastically diluted.
Corrected entry: If Kevin Costner can go down to the bottom of the ocean and get dirt he should be able to get things from the sunk cities a lot more valuble than dirt.
Correction: The Mariner (Costner) does in fact go to the bottom of the ocean to get more valuble things than just dirt. Crayons, shells, National Geographic, and in the extended version a workable CD player is one of the many items that the Mariner gathers from the ocean floor.
Corrected entry: Can anyone explain to me why the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker that ran aground at one point, is still afloat, yet there is no sign of any military ships (except the sunken submarine). Military ships tend to be more "sink-proof" than civilian ones.
Correction: The fact that there are no military ships shown in the film does NOT imply that there are none in Waterworld. Maybe there are, but they simply are not there in the storyline of the film.
Corrected entry: At the end when the three jet-skis are about to crash, the explosion goes off a bit too early.
Correction: The explosion goes off right when it's supposed to. The two smokers that aren't the Deacon hit each other first then explode, then the fire ball covers the screen's view of the Deacon's jet-ski.
Corrected entry: When the mariner questions the woman about the little girl's drawings, she says "she's like a mirror, she draws what she sees." Later she claims the mariner "has things no one else has seen" like "that reflective glass". What do you think a mirror is, woman? And why do they have "normal glass" and not "reflective glass"?
Correction: The term "mirror" and an actual mirror don't have to be called the same thing especilly when Helen has never seen an actual mirror. To Helen, it's quite possible that a mirror is a reflection from the water.
Corrected entry: Wouldn't the Jet-Ski's be useless as there wouldn't be any fuel available for them if all the land is flooded in water?
Correction: The Smoker's HQ is the Exxon Valdez, which is partially full of crude oil. They are cracking it into gasoline.
Corrected entry: At one point, the mariner trades a handful of dirt for water and a potted plant that has more dirt in it than he originally traded.
Correction: Most likely considering the circumstances, the plant was not planted in dirt. More likely some other less expensive medium.
Correction: Not understanding a character's motivations or reasons is not a mistake. While he might have not needed there are numerous reasons why he might have kept it and there is no mistake in keeping it just because he might not need it.
Lummie ★