Waterworld (1995)

  This was technically the first movie I watched in the new year.  I'm sure I've seen it before but maybe not all the way through.  I remember it being a hugely expensive movie and I believe it's considered a flop, at least domestically.  It's pretty prescient in its premise of global flooding from the ice caps melting but the rest of it doesn't really hold up well.

There are two kinds of survivors in this post-apocalyptic world covered by the sea:  colonists who build little floating island communities with handfuls of dirt, and drifters who sail endlessly and survive by trading bits of flotsam for supplies.  The Mariner (Kevin Costner) is one of the latter, further set apart by having mutated to fit his environment with gills and webbed feet.  He just happens to be present the day a rival group of thugs led by Deacon (Dennis Hopper) attack the settlement and ends up taking on a woman (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and child (Tina Majorino) trying to escape the destruction.  To the surprise of no-one, the child turns out to be the reason Deacon was attacking.  She is an orphan with a tattoo on her back that supposedly translates to a map of the last piece of dry land in the world.  The Mariner doesn't believe in dry land and doesn't need it anyway but over the course of God knows how many days at sea with no-one else for company, he comes to like this frazzled woman and her adopted daughter and decides to protect them from the evil Deacon.

This isn't as bad a movie as people have made it out to be.  What would improve it immensely, however, is changes to the characters' ages and a restructuring of the love story angle.  I get that it was 1995 and Kevin Costner was a huge box office star but it makes no sense for a man of his age to be the Mariner.  Evolution takes ages and for someone to be that old and that far removed from Homo sapiens, a lot more people should look like that.  So make him about 17.

Conversely, the girl needs to be older.  She's supposed to be abducted/found/something from dry land as a child and have no memory of how to get back but also have a brand fucking new tattoo on her back at the age of 7.  That's objectively stupid.  Kids grow so fast that any tattoo would shift and be unrecognizable.  (Obviously, I know there are other reasons why you don't tattoo children but they are not germane in this instance.)  So make her about 17 as well.  She got the tattoo from something she barely remembers when she was a child.  It was a paper map that she memorized when she was kidnapped/lost/whatever and had tattooed when she got older because the paper fell apart.

You can keep the older female figure as a chaperone/comic relief but she needs to be mid-30s, not a young, hot Jeanne Tripplehorn.  The villains can mostly stay the same.  Hey, maybe even get Kevin Costner to replace Dennis Hopper (RIP) as a fun throwback.  He would be way more intense and sarcastic instead of unhinged, which could play well with the new dynamic.  Voila.  Paramount, I will be waiting on your call.