I streamed Waterworld and wet myself with shame. The pain was real, but I watched anyway. Because masochism.

Here are 25 waterlogged observations about the 1995 box-office disaster.

• The best part is before the movie starts. The Universal Pictures globe’s Polar Ice Caps melt and Florida disappears. Ahhhh, pause right there.
• Waterworld taught everybody the dangers of global warming, convincing us to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere in order to save the earth from climate change. (Edit: Nevermind, that didn’t work out.)
• Waterworld is basically The Road Warrior if Australia sank. Loner on gadget-rigged vehicle? Check. Feral-type kid? Check. Goofy guy on flying contraption? Check. Classic Western-style attack on village? Check. Super-cool, apocalyptic punk aesthetic? Not so much.
• Kevin Costner is supposed to be an athletic mutant dolphin-man. But I spy belly pudge. Somebody had too many on-set shrimp poppers.
• I’m sure Costner would prefer to think of it as “hockey hair,” but that’s a mullet, baby. Underwater, the thinning top sticks to his scalp — and now it’s a skullet. He looks like Riff Raff freediving. Imagine if Busby Berkeley directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s just a splash to the left.
• Dennis Hopper’s “The Deacon” villain seems like director Kevin Reynolds said “Give us a little Blue Velvet‘s Frank mixed with the Speed bomber, but more like a pirate, and, what the hell, let’s pull out your eyeball,” and Hopper said, “Fuckin’ A, can I have a shoulder parrot?,” and Reynolds said, “No, Dennis, no shoulder parrot,” and Hopper said, “Aw, fuck it. Let’s go.”
• Jeanne Tripplehorn plays the heroine, who ends up on Costner’s boat and takes care of a little girl (Tina Majorino) who likes to draw. Drama ensues because of a fight over Costner’s crayons. Waterworld is now shown in pre-schools across the nation to teach children to share. I made that up.
• Jeanne Tripplehorn (whose name should have ensured her a role in Jurassic Park) looks like an animated Disney character magically transported into the realm of the flesh. Her facial configuration defies algorithms, and god bless her for that. Tripplehorn’s big break was in the schlocky Basic Instinct, Tom Cruise cheated on her in The Firm, and she probably had fingers wrinkled like prunes for years after Waterworld. Yet miraculously she made it out of the 1990s with her dignity intact. I love you, Jeanne Tripplehorn.
• Tripplehorn has this curious resting-mouth-face thing, where her lips are closed but also open because of a little gap in the middle. Stanley Kubrick could have put her in a movie called Mouth Wide Shut. I’ll bet in high school she drove teachers crazy by whistling and pretending it wasn’t her.
• It’s weird how Costner dumps his boat sail on Tripplehorn, then concusses her with an oar. She was already stuck under the sail, butthead. He also throws the little girl in the water even though she can’t swim (“What kind of a jerk grows up on Waterworld and never learns how to swim?” — Ally Sheedy, probably). Then he cuts off both women’s hair as if they’d consorted with German soldiers in WWII. Somebody please slap Costner with a mackerel.
• When Costner puts Tripplehorn in an air bubble and takes her on a tour of underwater cities, why doesn’t she get the bends? She’d definitely get the bends. I demand realism from this people-who-survive-without-fresh-water movie.
• Waterworld explains that people hydrate by drinking their urine, but after the opening scene’s eliminant chug, we see no further piddle imbibement. This is why the movie is not called Peeworld.
• The villains live on an oil tanker that turns out to be the Exxon Valdez, which in 1989 dumped 11 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound. Waterworld turns that into a joke, and The Deacon worships the Valdez’s vodka-drunk captain, Joseph Hazelwood. Ha ha, that’s pretty funny. No doubt hundreds of thousands of otters, seals, eagles and sea birds got a big kick out of it after they washed off the crude. The seals probably did that slappy thing as an ovation.
• Waterworld is a case study in why action scenes don’t work on water. “Oh look, that boat is getting closer to that other boat” sure sets the heart to racing. “Can a sailboat outrun a jet ski? Maybe it can … if it has a secret extra sail!” Whoa dude. This movie dunks.
• You know what’s really exciting? Seeing Costner jump into action by mounting his boat and cranking hand pedals. Said no one ever.
• A small plane gets stuck to a boat’s mast, flying around it in circles, and I had a flashback to a grade-school game called tetherball, and how I didn’t have any friends and played tetherball alone, pretending I was two people knocking the ball back and forth, until the reality of my pathetic isolation became too overwhelming and I gave up, the ball dangling and unraveling slowly like my crushed childhood soul. Thanks, Waterworld.
• Holy moly, is that a Jack Black sighting in the airplane scene? In the 1990s, Jack Black shows up briefly in so many movies, it’s like he drove around in a pizza-delivery car from one movie set to another, trying to earn tips. “I’ll hit my mark in under 30 minutes, or the cameo’s free.”
• There’s another scene where three villains on jet skis are heading toward a little girl in the water, but Costner bungee jumps to rescue her, and the jet skis collide. Didn’t these guys ever learn to yell “I got it!” in Little League? Oh yeah, just like there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no baseball on Waterworld. Makes sense now.
• Costner has mutations such as webbed feet, and gills behind his ears. That’s nifty, but you know what would have been really cool? If he squirted ink when swimming away. (I have a cousin who can do that after a trip to Chipotle.)
• When Tripplehorn asks Costner why he declines a sexual transaction, he says it wouldn’t seem right unless she really wanted to, and this is why the movie is not titled Incelworld.
• The little orphan girl has a map tattooed on her back, and it shows the way to Dryland. Turns out her parents wanted her to find her way home if she were ever lost, so they tattooed the map in the one place the little girl would never see it. Her parents were kind of assholes.
• Why are most of the people on Waterworld so … Caucasian? Should I even ask?
• Guess I also shouldn’t ask about sunburns and skin cancer. Or about all the clean-shaven faces. Demanding realism from Waterworld is like demanding a comprehensive selection of Ingmar Bergman films from Netflix.
• Some of the people on Waterworld speak another language called PortuGreek. Nice half-assed “world building” there, squishy. Or I guess “water-world building.”
• At the end, Costner attacks the Exxon Valdez, blows it up, and sinks it. Yay, good guy wins! Wait a minute: The ship housed hundreds of non-villainous people, all waiting for The Deacon to lead them to a better life. Costner is the villain! I’ve been watching Waterworld wrong all along!
• When they find Dryland, the women complain of Land Sickness. Um, that’s not a thing. Then, with bare feet they climb a mountain to watch Costner depart, instead of just waving from the beach. Which goes to show, fish-men and visitors stink after three days.