Postman is the story of a really cool guy who is attractive to women and loves soup, played by Kevin Costner that starts out as a loner doing very well to survive in a world that is stacked against him. Eventually, he begrudgingly decides to use his awesome skills to help others around him.
This is a very similar premise to Waterworld, and also shares the similarity that details of the post-apocalyptic future don't add up under scrutiny.
The premise has potential to be really interesting, but that is hampered by the movie taking itself too seriously. This is a really super wacky premise, and I feel they really needed to embrace that more to get the story working.
Say what you will about Waterworld, they really went for it full force and held nothing back. Postman on the other hand, definitely feels like it is holding back. It feels like it was an attempt to atone for Waterworld somehow maybe. On premise alone, this is a crazier idea than Waterworld.
The movie takes place in a post-apocalypse that is very vaguely described. It kind of seems like it might have been a nuclear war, but there isn't a lot of concern about radiation, and middle-aged people are established as living in pre-apocalyptic times, so something involving radiation doesn't quite add up. Maybe it was just mass civil unrest, but most of the people seem more like passive victims than people who rebelled, so I don't know. A big detail and plot reliant element is that there are no forms of broadcast or signal based communication, so an EMP maybe?
At any rate, it is the kind of non-descript KAKAEWOK situation that survivalists types are imagining. The main aspect is that the government is down for a period of about 30 years, but the environment isn't damaged to the point that hunting for food and living in a lodge in the woods isn't out of the question.
Costner is a wandering adventurer type; somewhat like he was in Waterworld. I suppose the difference is, this time, he doesn't start out perfect. He is a competant survivor, but he isn't this super skilled warrior that knows everything and is better than everyone else. He is kind of a bum. While he wanders alone, others are forming organized villages and the overall situation seems to be that the world is in a state of slow recovery from whatever vague disaster broke modern society. He goes to a survivor village to put on a little donkey show in hopes of getting some soup from the residents.
This is where we meet the villain and see what the main problem is. There is this warlord type guy that formed a little army and strongarms the settlements in the general area for resources. As we find out, he came to power in the wake of whatever happened. The nature of the apocalyptic event(s) remain vague throughout. While Warlord Guy wasn’t the cause of the apocalyptic event, the movie kind of paints him as a main factor curtailing development and rebuilding. He is the bully stealing lunch money.
Apparently, he maintains his little army by impressing conscripts from the villages. It would make more sense to target younger people or even to first seek volunteers using the promise of stature and fortune within his hierarchy, but he sees Kevin Costner trying to make a quiet exit from the village, and that is his guy. An already middle-aged guy that has a memory of the former in-tact society and will inevitably be resentful of his impressment and therefore could never fully be trusted to complete any task without direct supervision, and if there was a real battle, has a good chance of being a non-shooter. Yes, this is the perfect guy to be a new recruit in his army.
So, only about two or three days after Costner was impressed, he is given a task to complete alone without direct supervision, and to the surprise of all, exploits that situation to desert the Warlord Guy's army. As I describe this, this is pretty crazy, and we aren't even to the craziest part, so it is ironically impressive how the movie managed to make all this kind of boring.
Costner takes shelter in an abandoned mail truck with the skeleton of a dead postal worker still behind the wheel. I guess whatever the event was, it involved some people just dying instantly right in the middle of whatever they were doing. Luckily, the Postal worker jacket is his size, and he can wear it to stay warm. He is reading found mail in the truck when he has another idea to scam some soup.
He shows up at a village claiming to be a postal worker on duty delivering backlogged mail from before whatever happened had happened. It makes sense that since the mail truck was found nearby, there would be letter(s) addressed to addresses that would be in the village. The village chief begrudgingly lets him in to deliver that mail.
To cut to the chase, this eventually leads to him accidentally forming a cult that worships the United States Postal Service. This movie should be amazing. This should be one of my favorite all time movies, but it is delivered in such a plain package, and the production is far too "mainstream" and it sucks fun out of it.