Our family thourougjly enjoyed it. The storyline is very creative and highly detailed. Good vs evil a movie made in the best tradition of old style Hollywood. I get it Mr. Costner. The concept of hope and then glory from oppression by the Postman is just terrific. What we believe and hold dear as Americans is portrayed here. The score is wonderful too.

This movie was panned by critics and largely shunned by audiences as well, a fact I always found confusing because to me it has always been inspirational and uplifting.The movie takes place in an unspecified year, although if you use clues in the movie you can infer a date of somewhere around 2015 or so. Set in an alternate future where the United States has fallen after an un-specified war/disaster, the population of the country has reverted to an agrarian, old-west inspired collection of city- states.The unnamed 'Postman' (Costner) is a drifter who scavenges what he can and performs Shakespeare for food and shelter when he passes thru a friendly town. After discovering a crashed US Postal Service truck, the Postman dons the deceased driver's uniform and hatches a scheme to get free food and lodging from walled-off towns by concocting a story about a restored US government that is re- starting postal service.What he underestimates is the power and inspiration the simple idea has to the populations of these towns that live in isolation from one-another and in fear of a wandering conscript army led by a brutal warlord that grows by parasitically feeding off their resources. Without his knowledge, his deception inspires an actual re-birth of postal service, with deliveries performed by an inspired younger generation of voluntary carriers that revere the larger- than-life image of him passed along in stories from town to town.What's fascinating to me about this film is how it highlights the power of something we largely take for granted in this day and age: communication. Not too long ago the majority of humanity lived and died within the place they were born. Information from outside their town or village was brief and sporadic, typically limited to what information you might glean from traveling merchants and the like. Technology and infrastructure upended that, and fortunes were made feeding our intense human interest in communicating and learning about the world around us.In our modern world, even those who live and die within a few square miles typically receive news from across the world with casual ease; radio, television, phones, newspapers, etc. And even those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder can afford to place a telephone call or write a letter or email to family thousands of miles away. It's easy to forget that for the vast majority of human history the ability to communicate with people more than one hundred miles or so from where you lived took weeks or even months, if it was even possible at all. Before the telegraph, the pony express was vital because it reduced communication over a few thousand miles to 10 days.Against a backdrop of dangerous wilderness and a violent militia, people who would brave these risks to bring communication back to the world is inspiring, and that is what I always think of when I watch this movie. To me, it's a caution not to take the wonders of the modern world for granted and a reminder of the power of communication to enrich our lives. And, I suppose, a story about how one person at the right time and place can inspire change that affects thousands or even millions of others.I've heard critics say that the movie plays as cheesy or maybe that it plays to Costner's ego or something. Good and evil are clearly differentiated here; the film doesn't challenge you with complex ethical questions and definitely plays as an epic hero story, but that didn't bother me. I guess it comes down to whether you think the story is over-idealized to the point where it becomes simple minded and child like; to me it does not.

Box-office busts intrigue me. I often find myself enjoying them, despite their poor critical reception. This was a fairly major box-office bust, but as with any film, I would suggest seeing it for yourself to see if you like it or not. This is easy to do on Netflix; if you're not into it, you can just stop it and try something else.The problems I found were the length — at almost 3 hours long, it was SLOW, at least much of the time… 80-90 minutes would have been plenty, and would have made this a much tighter film — it's corny and unimaginative; no real subtlety here, too much predictability; Kevin Costner is in just about every scene, and, presumably because he was also the director, so there was no one to rein him in; the music was boring, cliché, and unimaginative, very much like the movie.And yet, I made it through to the film's conclusion, probably because I'm stubborn and wanted to see how it would end, and also because the basic premise is unusual — a dude's decision to impersonate a postman in a dystopian world somehow leads to redemption for a great many people. This in itself is rather ridiculous, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief and look past this, which I guess is something to be said in the film's favour.

When everyone thought Kevin Costner have learned from the Waterworld disaster, he stroke back with this. Just wishful thinking. The postman is simply Waterworld on the ground. A post apocalyptic world with some bad guys that have as their leader a very very bad guy. The best way they have to have fun is harass people around. Have seen that before? Yes, you have. Since Mad Max script writers have been insisting on the idea, translating it to different environments as if that was a way to make something new and creative. And, heavens! I really can't understand the true obsession American script writers have with the "Militia" thing. Must perhaps be due to the fact that in USA the gun rules since the old west times and their psychology can't get rid from that fetish.