Tuesday, November 21, 2006
DVD Review: Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut
A young man wearing a comedy oversized clock once said some very true words of wisdom. Don't believe the hype. Hype is a very large concern amongst the movie world, especially with the way nerds latch onto things. Whenever something comes along that we're excited to see, no matter how hard we try, we just can't seem to cease playing it up as much as possible, so in the end, we inevitably end up saying "Worst. Movie. Ever." Look at Star Wars. For years upon end, we all had ourselves convinced this was going to be the reason we were born. And then Jar Jar fucking Binks happened, accompanied by a script so stunted it makes the Silmarillion flow like it was written by Eazy-E.
I haven't been around the internet much - hey, taking the big step of moving in with someone is very time consuming - so I'm not really up on how much expectation and hype there really is for Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, outside of the original fanboy cries for it over the past years, and the usual fanboy cries of "OMG it sucks there's a clanking sound on Donner's credit!" Myself? I was hyped up for it a lot, so it fits that it's the first disc I've picked up in a while on its street date. So, as I hope you're asking, what's the verdict? It depends. If you're that guy who demands every little thing to be perfect and cries childhood rape if a sound effect is changed or enhanced, you're probably better off sitting in your room and telling yourself how great you are because you know so much about movies. Which I'm sure you'd rather do anyway.
But if you're a perfectly balanced movie fan who happens to like fun movies that aren't afraid to be emotional and slightly melodramatic, I think you're in for a treat.
But before I go into the details, a little backstory. Originally, Superman: The Movie and Superman II were shot by Richard Donner back-to-back, ala The Lord of the Rings. However, time and budgetary constraints meant that they had to stop filming Superman II three quarters or so of the way through and concentrate on getting Superman out for its release date. As we all know, that turned out brilliantly and the film was a huge, huge hit. Unfortunately for Donner, the producing team of the Salkinds, who he had clashed with during production, fired him, and hired British director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) to direct the sequel, and ultimately, Superman III. And we all know how well that turned out.
While originally having a reputation that indicated it superseded the original, time has not been kind to Superman II. As it stands now, the film shows a lot of potential but is undermined by some sloppy editing and some overly-comedic scenes, the kind of scenes which killed Superman III. A friend of mine once described the Superman series as a portrayal of alcoholism. Sober at first, nicely drunk by the end of II, stone drunk by the climax of III and waking up in a pool of your own vomit as Nuclear Man shows up in IV. To put it bluntly, III and IV never really had a chance, for various reasons. But II always had that potential, and thankfully, The Richard Donner Cut comes close to realizing it.
For starters, the tone is radically different. Gone are a lot of the movie's campy and comedic scenes, with Chris Reeve's Clark Kent and Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor providing the comic relief. There's no scenes of Non being overly dumb, and gone is the sequence where he tries his heat vision, only for it to not work, reminiscent of Godzooki trying to breathe fire in the old Hanna-Barbera Godzilla cartoon. Here, the three Kryptonian villains are presented squarely as a real threat, and it really helps the film's dynamic. Most of the scenes in Houston are gone, including Ursa's arm wrestling and the annoying kid with the British accent asking them not to kill his hillbilly poppa.
The film's central relationship also takes on a new dimension, and a much more satisfying both dramatically and thematically dimension at that. As in the original, Superman gives up his powers for Lois Lane, but whereas in the theatrical cut, the moral argument about Superman's position on Earth and his duty to its people was kept to a minimum, here it's central, and leads into my next point, Marlon Brando. Brando shot a bunch of scenes for II as Jor-El, but such was the Salkinds' nature, they decided to cut him out completely so they wouldn't have to pay his probably understandably high repeat fee. All I can say is, you fucking dumb idiots.
This is no disrespect to Susannah York, who played his mother in the first two movies and was saddled with having to take Brando's role in the second, which can't have been easy for anyone, much less a fairly decent but not amazing actress like York. But kudos to her, she did okay. But the fact that Brando's scenes were replaced with hers is sure proof that being obsessed with money makes people stupid. Brando's scenes here are incredible, two of which are absolutely standout performances, the first of which is where Superman tells Jor-El that he loves Lois. Instead of the theatrical, where it's a pretty brief 'are you sure this is what you want?' 'I love her,' Brando and Reeve have a full on argument debating Superman's "mission, and his selfishness for wanting to give up on the planet so he can be with Lois. The second scene is a counterpoint to this, after he goes back to the Fortress having seen Zod and his crew and the damage they've done.
In the theatrical, as far as I remember it had the shots of him walking back, and then cut away as he got there, not returning to the character editorially until he appears outside the Daily Planet asking Zod to "step outside," a line which incidentally is no longer in the picture in this cut. But here, it doesn't cut away at all, but again has an intense and emotional scene between Reeve and Brando, ending in a quite poignant and heartbreaking way which I'm not going to spoil here.
In addition to all this, both the opening and the ending of the movie is different, both of which are heavily linked to Superman: The Movie, or at least events contained within. In the theatrical cut, the villains escaped from the Phantom Zone after Superman sent a hydrogen bomb he had taken from terrorists in Paris into space, which then, via a terrible, terrible animation effect, shattered their prison. Here, it begins halfway through the first movie, where the two nuclear missiles have been set on their alternate courses by Lex Luthor. Remember where Superman rescues the first one and sends it into space, thus keeping his promise to Miss Teschmascher? That happens here, but it's that explosion that releases the villains.
The ending, well, all I can say is that it's not the magic kiss. The new ending, well, what should have been the original ending, is the same as Superman: The Movie, being that he turns back time. Some folks may not be able to deal with that, but the deal is that it was always the intended ending, and was only moved into the first film when they realized they had to stop working on II. Already being the ending for the first, it makes it little odd, but despite it perhaps being a little strange, it still works. And the new scenes are pretty neat.
It also has to be said that there are a bunch of new effects in the picture, and while they work as long as you can accept that this is not a big budget job, this ain't ILM. And this is one of the only real criticisms I have with the film, that the budget the production company was given by Warner Bros must've been pretty small and because of it, some of the effects look a little jarring. I would have loved to have seen Warner do a proper job on the flick and then throw it out in theaters, but I guess there's a limit to what the fanboys can achieve with their online petitions. But hey, getting the thing actually produced is an amazing effort.
The second thing that I picked up on is the editing of the film. Don't get me wrong, overall it's edited really well, and the pacing is a lot better than the original, but, well, some of it seems a bit choppy. I don't know how much this is down to Donner's input, whether he was asking it to be edited within the context of today's event movies or the editorial style of the late 70s, or whether it's down to the elements themselves that were found.
But like a few things in the film, it will really come down to how much you're into the movie in the first place. There are a few other things that may be slightly odd, like for example the scene where Lois discovers Superman's identity. Instead of the scene as it was in the theatrical cut, which Lester had shot, instead we have a scene made up of screen tests, being the only source of footage which matched Donner's original intention for the scene. It's a great scene, and much more intimate than the original, although some people may find it a tad strange, mainly because of the way the shape of Clark's glasses seems to change, being that it's two different screen tests edited together. But fuck it, it works.
At the end of the day, the fact that this cut even is exists is a pretty big achievement, and the fact that it's a huge improvement over the original is icing on the cake. Whereas Lester's cut suffered from silliness (the big plastic S anyone?), Donner's has a more serious and weighty tone, especially with the Brando scenes. Of course, being that it's been produced twenty-eight years or so since the film was shot, it's impossible to say whether or not the original flick would have ended up like this had Donner been allowed to complete it. Hell, it might have been better.
All in all, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut finally allows the sequel to sit proudly the original movie as a very good companion piece. It may not be what it might have been in 1980, but for a long time, people have loved to argue over whether Donner's cut would have been a big improvement over Lester's. Having seen TRDC, all I can say is, that's a big fucking yes.
As for the disc itself, well, it's decent. The audio and video quality is the big reason for buying this along with the film itself, as it has a pretty damn fine 2.40:1 anamorphic transfer and offers a 5.1 mix that had me wondering if my house was exploding. The film has also been rescored with John Williams' cues from the first that Ken Thorne had (pretty sloppily) adapted, and it sounds so much more classy.
The features are little, but not bad. You get a few deleted scenes, one of which explains how Luthor gets away from the Fortress of Solitude, and they're nice, but you can easily see why they were cut. There's a little featurette on the restoration and the editing of this new cut, which has a lot of Donner sitting at a mixer or a movieola, which is nice, but at around fifteen minutes, not really in-depth at all. There's also an introduction from Donner.
Probably the best extra is the Donner commentary with Tom Manciewicz. It's obvious he was very hurt by what the Salkinds did to him, and what Lester did to his film, and he's not afraid to show it. It's a entertaining listen, even if Donner is perhaps journeying towards senility.
The cover art, well, if you live in America, it sucks. In Britain, it's a little nicer, but still based around the same concept. You can buy the flick in a multitude of ways, either on its own or in the Christopher Reeve Collection or that huge ultimate boxset they're doing that includes all the movies plus Superman Returns. In the UK, it comes as a three-disc set with a copy of the two-disc Superman II theatrical special edition, and if you shop around, it's pretty damn cheap.
All in all, as I said above, it's amazing we actually have Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. It's a testament to the fans and their ability to nag people in their thousands, and it's really wonderful that Warners have done this. And for once we have a director's cut that far outweighs the original.
8.5 magic kisses out of 10
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