Here there be spoilers.
Who wrote it?
Gregory Poirier - credited on (amongst others) The Lion King 2, A Sound of Thunder and National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
When was it written?
When was it written?
This draft is dated 20.12.95, eight days after the last.
How long is it?
How long is it?
119 pages (down from 122 for the first)
What's the broad structure?
What's the broad structure?
Act 1 = 1-27
Act 2a = 28-57
Act 2b = 58-98
Act 3 = 99-119
What's the context?
Act 2a = 28-57
Act 2b = 58-98
Act 3 = 99-119
What's the context?
This is the second of three drafts Poirier wrote for producer Jon Peters, and it's a little tighter. There's no indication of why it was so hot on the heels of the first draft. Perhaps the studio wanted a polish before Hollywood shut down for Christmas.
What's changed (and works better)?
- There's a better sense of Brainiac's physical deterioration. Nobody is allowed to look at him, not even his alien slaves.
- Clark's state of mind is explained a little better; his sense of feeling homesick but with no home to go back to. It's just that this doesn't feel very much like the Superman we've known up to this point. He grew up in Smallville; surely if anywhere is home, it's there?
- Superman's Sisyphean task is outlined better. He spends most of his day fighting for others, but the more he does, the worse things seem to get. I understand Kevin Smith's argument that Superman is about hope, but sometimes to get to the hope, one has to endure despair.
- There's more subtext between Clark and Lois; when he asks her what she'd do if Superman decided to move on, he's actually telling us he's tired, that he's thinking about doing so.
- The civil servants of Metropolis no longer conspire to steal Superman's body (a scene in the first draft has them attempt an autopsy and fail miserably). Instead, Lois sneaks into the tomb behind Brainiac's minions only for them all to discover the body is gone. This also draws Brainiac's attention to her for the first time.
- Brainiac's recruitment of Silver Banshee and Parasite is made marginally more interesting; he's curious as to why not everyone is out searching for the body, and charges them with marshaling the dregs to do so.
- One of the major issues around Brainiac is also addressed; he's a genocidal maniac, a genius, a telepath, a telekinetic, and practically a god. Why doesn't he go search for the damned body himself? It turns out he can't, as Earth's atmosphere speeds his decay. Without Kryptonian DNA he's too vulnerable. It doesn't exactly plug the plot hole as much as whack a plaster on it, but it's an effort.
- Superman is careful not to fatally injure the cops under Silver Banshee's command, as they aren't responsible for their actions. Which is mighty nice of him.
- Parasite now comes after the infiltrators in the tunnels, which makes far more sense than sending Doomsday, who in the initial draft... gets stuck.
- Lois tells Clark he was the one she really missed, not Superman. In the first draft, she admits this to an empty room. In the second, it's moved up and done face to face, giving Clark a much more powerful reason to consider quitting the cape once and for all after Brainiac is defeated.
- No rod through the brain for Brainiac, which is a step down on the brutality scale. He's still genetically dismembered though.
What's changed (and still doesn't work?)
- Batman's dialogue is gone, but his cameo remains, and is still completely redundant.
- Silver Banshee's super-cheesy introduction has vanished. The male models and death-sex are gone. Unfortunately almost everything else about her remains. She just doesn't fit.
- Poirier addresses a major plot hole; if Brainiac destroyed Krypton, he must have acquired Kryptonian DNA already. So why does he need Superman's? Unfortunately it's fudged with some nonsense about Brainiac not having perfected his DNA harvesting technique when he destroyed Krypton.
- Silver Banshee frees the prison population to hunt for the body. This would be a nice idea if she didn't advertise it as a chance to win their freedom... something she just gave them for nothing.
- Phin-Yar is explained a bit more, just not necessarily any better. Superman's powers will come back when he remembers why he belongs here. But if this is the case, his powers would have begun to wane even before he died. Setting this up earlier as the reason he loses to Doomsday would have been at least consistent. Ultimately Phin-Yar still comes across as a lot of sub-Star Wars new age mumbo-jumbo. And I like mumbo-jumbo.
- In this draft it's the army (not a band of Daily Planet reporters) who are planning to attack Brainiac's ship through the sewers. The General in charge owes Lois a favour, so she and Jimmy get to go along. Unfortunately this idea is somehow even dumber than the first. I'd buy vigilante reporters over a high-ranking officer allowing reporters to tag along on a secret military incursion into the heart of an alien star ship.
- Brainiac is now destroying one building every hour until the body is delivered, but this doesn't heighten the tension any. We know the whole city, if not the whole planet, is to be destroyed anyway, so it raises no tension at all. Eradicating large portions of the city's populace is also counter-productive to the search.
- Parasite's aversion to feeding off the sick is better explained, in order to set up his leeching from Superman in the final act. The denouement still doesn't make much sense, though, because up until that point Parasite hasn't been particularly discerning. He's harvested the energy of hundreds of people. This sets up the psychological damage carrying all these voices is doing to him, (something which is never paid off) but it's never established that he's leeching ailments until near the end of Act 2. Are we seriously supposed to believe nobody he'd absorbed before that point had something wrong with them? Even if we assume so, there's a huge logical disconnect between a brain condition like epilepsy and alien radiation poisoning. I just didn't buy it.
Conclusion
There's only so much anyone can do in eight days. These are incremental changes which do slightly improve the story; less dumb stuff happens in slightly less dumb ways. However, the storyline is still unwieldy, with far too many deep problems to address in a polish. It would take Poirier another two months to address some of these when he turned in his third draft.
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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you are the creator or originator of any material you feel has been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)
