by Alex Rudolph, Contributor

The first thing we see in The Postman is Kevin Costner looking out over a desert that used to be the Great Salt Lake. He's dirty and weary and his only companion in the post-apocalypse is a pack mule. The second thing we see is Kevin Costner jumping on a trampoline, just for funsies.

I could list plenty of moments and plot points from The Postman, the 1997 mega-bomb that Costner directed, produced and starred in, and they'd make it sound like a fascinating movie. Here's one: Costner's unnamed protagonist, later called "The Postman," loses the mule when a neo-Confederate army captures him and boils his pet down into stew. The situation is remedied when The Postman is given a horse, but loses it when he's starving and needs to boil it down into stew. The Postman has one-sided conversations with two animal companions and he eats both in stew form.

Here's another: A married woman, played by Olivia Williams, is so impressed by The Postman's ability to deliver mail that she asks him if he has "good sperm" and will impregnate her. They share a surprinsgly long sex scene, scored by dramatic strings, in which she is naked and he remains fully clothed.

One more: At one point, on a hunt for "big lion steaks," one of the neo-confederates is about to kill The Postman but is himself quickly killed by a lion. No explanation given, just a deus ex machina lion in the Utah desert.

Sorry, last one: Tom Petty plays himself. After the world fell to war and disease, Petty gave up music and became the mayor of a peaceful outpost on top of a dam. Tom Petty does a terrible job acting as Tom Petty.

On paper, I'm describing a bizarre would-be cult classic. I'm telling you about Buckaroo Banzai or Big Trouble in Little China, movies full of left turn weirdness, that revel in having fun. The Postman is not fun. The Postman is thoroughly serious and it lasts three hours. That magical Utah lion is played as chilling, that sex scene played as erotic. And I can keep pointing out bananas aspects of The Postman all day. I can tell you that Larenz Tate, playing The Postman's self-appointed protege, has rechristened himself "Ford Lincoln Mercury" because he strives to drive cars, and you'll think "surely that's played for laughs," and I'd have to wiggle my hand in that "sorta?" motion. Kevin Costner gives Larenz Tate a slight "you serious, dude?" look and then everything continues in its regular stern fashion for the rest of your wasted night. The Postman is as exciting as you would expect a movie titled The Postman to be.

And so the question, of course, is "How did we get here?" Costner was on fire in the 80s and 90s. I had forgotten, before writing this, that Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Bodyguard were released in four consecutive years between 1989 and 1992 (with JFK, still a huge success, coming the same year as the much bigger Robin Hood). No other actor did that. Not Brad Pitt, not Will Smith, not Mel Gibson. Tom Cruise almost did, but his hits were a little more spaced out and he wasn't as in control. Costner produced the last three films in that run, and, most significantly, made his directorial debut on Dances With Wolves. That film, despite being 181 minutes long and a western, made its budget back nearly 20 times over before hitting home video. It won the Best Picture Oscar and briefly revitalized its genre.

Costner created his own competition. Dances With Wolves' success led to him producing and starring in 1994's Wyatt Earp, which failed because of its huge budget and because Tombstone, a film about the same handful of real people, had come out six months earlier. Costner still had a lot of juice, which he mostly spilled one year later on Waterworld. People remember that movie as a bomb, which isn't entirely true-- the film made money after it hit VHS and LaserDisc. Costner earned the leeway to produce and star in Waterworld, the most expensive film ever made up to that point, but the budget was so big that it would have had to also be one of the five or six highest-grossing films of 1995 to break even (it ended up being number nine).

James Cameron, the other guy famous for going over-budget in the 90s, succeeded every time he made the most expensive film ever. As a result, he never really had to grow as a storyteller. Critics could deride his dialogue and regurgitated stories, but his gambles paid off. For a long time, I thought that's how you ended up with Avatar-- this weird guy's ego just never got checked, and eventually he was putting applying future technology to first-draft sci-fi where Sam Worthington white saviors a bunch of "can you believe this woman is as strong as any man?" cliches of indigenous people.

Maybe that's true. Maybe, though, you can be so strong-willed that a crushing failure won't leave you questioning your methods. I now believe that Avatar was inevitable. Titanic could have stumbled the way every studio executive thought it would and James Cameron would have found a way to get human wallpaper Sam Worthington floating around in front of a greenscreen.

I think Costner is similarly firm in his convictions, as much a rock as Cameron. He makes Westerns and baseball movies and one PR disaster will beget another but who cares, damn it. Waterworld's perceived misfire was so dramatic that MAD Magazine parodied the spectacle with a list of fake reasons it had gone overbudget. That was my introduction to the idea of budgets. I learned about the money it takes to make a movie at the same time that I learned you could become a laughingstock for spending way too much of that money on a film that asks "What if, instead of no water, The Road Warrior had a bunch of water?”

Waterworld failed for a while and then it made its money back. But it was supposed to be massive. Had it succeeded immediately and unquestionably, it could have been its decade's Star Wars, and that meant it was released into the world alongside comics and video games. There were Waterworld action figure playsets, a pinball cabinet and, most famously, a still-active live stunt show at Universal Studios theme parks.

Think about how you would react to that kind of failure. If your face took up half of the poster for inverse-Star Wars, you would probably keep yourself from immediately making the same mistake.

Costner didn't care. He still says he likes Waterworld. He still points out in interviews that it went into the black on home video. The next year he made the quietly successful golf movie Tin Cup and then got to work on The Postman.

I can kind of see why a studio would give him the funds to make another very long post-apocalyptic movie two years after a different studio got burned by his last very long post-apocalyptic movie. For how closely he's associated with Waterworld, Costner didn't direct it. His last effort in that capacity was still Dances With Wolves. I guess you might assume he had another one of those in him.

Waterworld was secretly a western, but The Postman laid those genre trappings on thick. It's Kevin Costner riding through the desert on a horse. What do you need, a roadmap? Like The Road Warrior, The Postman is a Sergio Leone or John Ford story transposed onto post-civilization wastelands.

Unlike that movie, or any of Costner's financially successful westerns, there's barely any action here. The neo-Confederate army is led by General Bethlehem, played with wild, shouting anger by Will Patton. Patton and his goons deserve a better film. They study the writings of a dead survivalist nut named Nathan Holn, who had an unfortunate Jordan Peterson outlook on the world. Even before society was wiped out, Holn thought men had been robbed of their masculinity, and everything his followers do is based on getting more manly. The last one to dinner doesn't get to eat, so you have to hustle. Anybody can challenge the leader for control of the Holnist army, but if you don't win, you get castrated. Only white people are allowed to serve, because obviously they’re racist. In a scene that really foretold the coming of Jordan Peterson, General Bethlehem openly weeps when he repeats clichés like "fortune favors the bold." They're bizarre, but there are a lot of them and they've got guns and swords. Their numbers make up for their ridiculousness.

To make a looooong story short: Costner's character is captured by the Holnists, but he escapes and stumbles upon a skeleton in a mail truck. He takes the mail sack, becomes The Postman and wanders between towns, telling people he's delivering mail for a new American government. He’s a liar, basically. In one town, somebody asks if New Yorkers made it through the apocalypse and The Postman claims that not only did they survive, they've got plays back on Broadway. It would probably make me feel pretty shitty if I found out other people were watching Phantom of the Opera in Manhattan while I was eating grass and living without heat in the middle of a "three-year winter," but everybody cheers. Larenz Tate's Ford Lincoln Mercury believes the lie and does a bunch of work to actually rebuild the postal service. The Holnists catch up to The Postman, who defeats General Bethlehem. Thirty years later, the world has been completely rebuilt (people have traded their rags for normal clothes and there are extras casually sailing in the background). A large bronze statue is revealed not of the young Black man who did all of the work, but of the middle-aged white guy who lied about working.

Dances With Wolves made $424 million on a $22 million budget. Seven years later, The Postman made $20 million on an $80 million budget. I cannot stress how dull it is, how little chance something like it ever had of becoming a crowd-pleasing blockbuster.

Movies don't fail this way anymore. Directors don't get this much leeway with budgets this large. When The Postman was released, it didn't get video games or comics and that was its penalty for following Waterworld's failure. But it got made. It didn't get an action figure line, but it got $80 million and what must have been a "who gives a shit" level of oversight.

Here’s what I mean: Time passes strangely in The Postman. Coster will show up in a new town after what seems like a day, only for dialogue to later communicate that weeks have gone by. So many months or years have gone by between the beginning of the film and the final confrontation between Bethlehem and The Postman that the big bad guy doesn't even recognize the hero he's been chasing. The story is so boring that its most interesting character has forgotten why he's shown up. Successful blockbusters are tight machines. This is a sloppy list of things Kevin Costner thought were interesting.

Like most truly mediocre films, The Postman vanished from the world. You don't find DVD or VHS copies of The Postman in thrift stores because nobody bought it in the first place. It is an R-rated movie about how delivering the mail could undo the damage of a world war, a plague and maybe atomic bombs.

Kevin Costner was destined to have a career lull in the 90s. He was never smarmy or ironic. The same qualities that made an actor perfect to play Robin Hood or the boy scout District Attorney who tried to crack open the big lie around a president's assassination would make him seem like a dinosaur when the culture shifted. We're talking about a man who would have been too sincere for Forrest Gump. He would have had to smirk to survive in 1999.

The world had moved on by the time Costner made his Dances With Wolves follow-up, and it had done it several years earlier, but nobody was seeing the signs. After a string of bombs, Costner was allowed to make one last one. He literally filmed a scene where a crowd of people applaud a statue he had commissioned of himself. I wonder what it was like, to be given so many chances but never play it safe. I wonder if he unwittingly closed the door behind him when he made The Postman, in the same way Michael Cimino did in 1980 with Heaven's Gate. Mostly, I wonder where that giant Kevin Costner statue is today.

James Cameron’s successes feel as inevitable as his steadfastness. Avatar 2 comes out the day I’m editing this and as much as Cameron’s talked about the possibility of its failure, there’s no way that thing makes less than a billion dollars by the start of the new year. Costner’s vision was strong but the art he was making hit big as often as it vanished. People are still giving Cameron the money to make his stuff because he delivers big returns. Marvel movies are inevitable. Even when a Star War like Solo disappoints, it ends the year having made money. We can think of Suicide Squad as a miss, but it had the seventh-best opening for a superhero movie. They made a sequel and gave its star character a spin-off. The kind of budget it takes to make The Postman does not get handed to anything that could fail.

I don’t think we need more movies like this. But even the least interesting movies can make the world more interesting. The Postman is fascinating to think about. For that reason alone, I hope we one day get back to a world where studios burn this kind of money again. Light it on fire. Embrace the evitable.