Who wrote it?
Kevin Smith - Writer/Director/Actor who established himself with Clerks and went on to write and direct Mallrats, Jersey Girl, Chasing Amy, and Dogma (amongst others.) He's also written comic book runs for Batman, Green Arrow, Daredevil, and Spider-Man.
When was it written?
This draft is dated 31.1.97
How long is it?
127 pages
What's the broad structure?
Act 1 = 1-31
Act 2a = 32-61
Act 2b = 62-105
Act 3 = 105-127
What's the context?
Smith hated Gregory Poirier's
Superman Reborn and wasn't afraid to tell Warner Bros; they called his bluff and gave him the job. He tells a very funny story about how he got the gig in
An Evening With Kevin Smith. It doesn't paint the then Warners' executives as particularly bright, more a herd following the latest grand idea. Obliged to meet with producer Jon Peters, Smith's opinion of him and his ideas is even lower. Much of the remaining context can be found in David Hughes'
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Edward Gross'
Mania piece.
Why didn't it happen?
Smith's crack at the Man of Steel went through two (official) drafts, which snagged Nic Cage as Superman and Tim Burton, fresh off the chastening experience of Mars Attacks! to direct. (Robert Rodriguez
declined despite liking the script). Once on board, Burton pulled a 180 and demanded a page one rewrite from his own collaborator, Wes Strick. Smith's scripts ended up in the Warner vault, which by now must have resembled something out of The Prestige, with seven different drafts floating in quiet death.
The Script
Assessing Superman Lives is tough. For the first time we know, going in, more about the process and the mores of those behind it than we do about the script itself. Kevin Smith is a celebrity in his own right, and has taken ample opportunity to describe the odd development he went through on the movie. I've largely chosen to ignore that and focus on the script, rather than recycling 16 year old gossip; as fascinating and fun as it is, there's plenty serving it up better than me. Having said that, knowing what we know of Warners' apparent herd mentality and Jon Peters' eccentricities, it won't be hard to draw conclusions about why things ended up the way they did.
What does Superman want at the start of the story?
The only thing he really wants is to be with Lois, permanently. They're an item, and she knows his secret identity. Lois, for her part, doesn't believe that's possible because he belongs to the world. "You're not a man, Clark. You're a god."
What happens next?
Summoned to Earth by Lex Luthor's plea for help against Superman, Brainiac and his robotic minion L-Ron hatch a plan with the industrialist to destroy the Man of Steel. Upgrading a LexCorp satellite with his own technology, Brainiac creates the Shadowcaster, a device designed to block out the sun and cut Superman off from his energy source. Weakened and unable to recharge, Kal-El is killed in battle by the creature Brainiac sends to Earth to confront him; Doomsday.
Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
Yes. And no. There really isn't a cohesive conflict. Superman wants to have a normal life with Lois whilst continuing to be Superman. Lois doesn't believe this is possible. But Smith never shows us Superman struggling with this dichotomy. Once he's revived by the Kryptonian AI known as The Eradicator, there's little that Superman can do to resolve this because he's focused on stopping Brainiac. The resolution comes down to Lois realising she loves him too much to let him go. Most of the second half of the film is devoted to Superman's relationship with The Eradicator, as he tries to educate it in the morality of heroism, but this isn't the conflict which has been set up. It's a script of two halves, but both of them deal with different conflicts/themes and there's almost no connection between the two, so it ends up feeling like two stories, one of which has no real end and the other no beginning.
What works?
- This is a true reboot, the first attempt at such in the film continuity. The film opens with the impending destruction of Krypton and the Science Council's refusal to believe that it's happening. By restarting, Smith is able to more organically plug Brainiac into the narrative of the planet's destruction, making it less of an obvious retcon than Poirier's first two drafts.
- Lois knows who Superman is, and we find that out in a really well written scene. Just when you think you know what's happening, and how this dynamic is going to play out as usual, Smith whips the rug out from under you.
- Lois is spunky, go-getting, feisty, smart. All the things she should be. She even takes out two Lextech soldiers all by herself.
- There's no overwhelming roster of secondary characters to bog things down. No Silver Banshee, no Parasite. They may sell more variations of toys than Lex Luthor but he remains the more dramatic, suitable human villain.
- No Kryptonite rocks, no Kryptonite blood.
What doesn't work?
- It's a reboot that doesn't re-establish Superman. We don't see him growing up and learning about himself, presumably because Smith didn't think we needed that information again. So why do we open on Krypton? Because he needs to back-establish Brainiac and The Eradicator. But does he really need to go that far back? It's less of an obvious Retcon than Poirier's first two drafts (particularly where Brainiac and his role in the destruction of Krypton is concerned), but it's also arguably a waste of 10 pages, and it structurally alters the whole script.
- Batman, again. Though at least Smith understands that The Dark Knight probably wouldn't leave Gotham and drop in on Superman's funeral to say all of five words. Instead he has Batman splice into the TV broadcast to deliver his message (similar to Batman Returns). It's probably the least invasive version of this particular cameo; that it still doesn't work speaks volumes about how little Batman is needed here. And there's sooo much Batman. Corto Maltese (referenced in The Dark Knight Returns and Batman '89), Deadshot (a Batman villain), Superman's new black duds, constant nods... Smith eventually had to tell Peters that "Everything can't be Batman on this picture". And that's from a Batman super-fan.
- Lex Luthor is back for the first time since 1987's Quest For Peace, but Smith can't seem to get a handle on him. He veers wildly between sinister, suave and ruthless, and an exaggerated caricature who's played for laughs. Becoming more of a second-fiddle stooge as the script progresses, it gets to the point where he's little more than the Superman II version; a blowhard coward who hides behind allies with superior firepower. This is not the greatest criminal mind of our, or anybody else's, age.
- There's no coherent theme because the conflicts are mismatched. Smith's initial premise: Superman is a god, and that means his relationship with Lois is on borrowed time. He can't resolve this; he's Superman whether he likes it or not. We never see him doubt that this is right, and it takes 33 pages to get to it. Once he comes back, The Eradicator wants to relocate him to another planet in order to preserve his life. Superman refuses, whereupon they debate the morality of his heroism. He's made no difficult choice, and the two halves don't really match up. The thematic dilemma of the second half (why do I do what I do, and why should I carry on?) would fit perfectly into Poirier's setup (I feel isolated and alone on this planet), but it doesn't really fit into Smith's. We think he may emphasise Superman's alien aspect when he introduces Krypton as a sterile world isolated behind defence shields, but it's never really pursued. He also briefly toys with the notion that Superman is actually impeding humanity's growth as a species, but again, it's never further explored. He contends that Superman isn't about angst, he's about hope, but blind hope is not inherently dramatic, and as a result his Superman is, well... boring. There are flashes of an intrinsic understanding of the character, but he's not doing anything joined up with it yet. Ultimately, it doesn't feel like a movie about Superman, just a movie with Superman in it. He doesn't grow, or change, and we understand no more about him at the end than we did at the start. The only character who does that is...
- The Eradicator. This is a story about him, about what it means to become self-aware. The trouble is, it's not a good story. He's little more than a substitute for Cadmus in Poirier's drafts; expositor, ally, ethical counterpoint. He brings Superman back from the dead because he was programmed to. That's plot, not character. By the end of the script he begins to understand what Superman is arguing for, but he comes to that realisation rather suddenly, because the script demands it, and because there is no victory without sacrifice, a sacrifice that cannot be Superman's. The Eradicator never feels like he's growing; he's Aspergers guy one minute and a selfless hero the next. He feels like a device masquerading as a character, which is simultaneously his function within the narrative. Maybe Smith is meta-commenting?
- Lois is so spunky and go-getting that she doesn't seem all that upset by the death of the man she loves. She simply keeps ploughing on through as if nothing's happened. Yes, Smith gives her something at the end of the 2nd act, when she almost breaks down in Clark's apartment, but it feels like too little, too late. By this point she's merrily carried on with little apparent regard for the loss she's suffered, and so this just feels like it's there because it has to be. There's a similar problem to that of Luthor with the tone of her character; would the Lois who takes out two soldiers and breaks into Superman's tomb honestly stay away from the Doomsday battle when Clark tells her to? They don't seem like the same Lois Lane. If it's supposed to be character growth... it doesn't work, because she bounces back and forth.
- Kevin Smith is a lot of things, but he's not - A) an action writer, or B) a subtle one. You can argue that he at least has a voice, but it's such a unique one that the characters all feel as if they're barking his words. He infamously delivered an 80 page outline for the movie to Warners, most of which was dialogue, and it's easy to see why. His prose is clunky, and he tells the tale like a breathless kid, constantly falling back on "suddenly" and "then". Characters stop what they're doing to have thematic discussions that drop so hard they may as well be accompanied by needle scratches, exposition stands out like a sore thumb, and much of the dialogue is painfully on the nose.
- Huge gaps in logic abound.
- Why, if Krypton is a sterile atmosphere behind a defence shield, and seemingly distrustful of other races, would they place their faith in an off-world computer system rather than one built by their greatest scientific mind?
- Brainiac has no clearly defined goal. Does he want The Eradicator for its technology or its power source? He estimates a huge leap in his intelligence if he assimilates The Eradicator, but how does he intend to power it if he's draining the Earth's core of energy in order to maintain even his current systems? If he wants its power source, it must surely outstrip the power supply of Earth's core; why, then, does it take The Eradicator FOUR DAYS to charge up once it's come online?
- If The Eradicator can become a ship, and fly into space, can't they avoid the Shadowcaster's impingement by simply flying to the other side of it to charge Superman up? People take the shortest route to salvation; to eschew that is silly.
- Why does Lois decide that she needs to know "once and for all" whether Superman is alive, when she's been given no indication otherwise? She suddenly decides to break into his tomb for no apparent reason.
- Loss of powers. I'm not a huge fan of Poirier's drafts, but his rationale behind the loss of Superman's powers is simply more dramatic than Smith's. It may not have been very Superman (certainly Phin-Yar felt like new-age mumbo jumbo), but it was a dramatised exposition of an internal struggle, whereas Smith's scenario is simply a technical problem; how can he smash the Shadowcaster?
- Jimmy is no longer a douche, which is great. But simply because he's "wired" and shares photos with other photographers over the internet, Jimmy is, in that classic Hollywood fashion, pretty much a hacker god, able to splice into the city's television channels with just a laptop and camcorder, (who needs a billionaire's tech, eh Batman?) not to mention capable of breaching a major corporate mainframe to expose Lex's faked alien "invasion". It's the classic, short-hand Hollywood version of anything to do with computers.
Conclusion
This is Smith's earliest dated draft, so perhaps we shouldn't judge it too harshly. Nevertheless, the list of things that don't work is surprisingly long. Maybe we shouldn't be shocked; Smith was never a blockbuster writer, rather an indie film-maker crafting small, character-driven comedies. The problem, as we established previously, is that we knew more about the context and the writer than we did about the script. Even though many know and accept his limitations, Smith's still a fan favourite; he owns a comic book store, he's written runs on several popular titles, he's steeped in comic book mythology. He's a geek. You could argue that he "gets" Superman better than any of the writers discarded thus far. He'd effectively done his own PR so well that the script had become legendary; it was the great "lost" Superman film.
The problem is that it's as bad as what came before; just in different ways. Whereas Poirier and Lemkin eschewed canon in order to dramatically punch things up, Smith embraces the history but milks no serious drama out of it (perhaps
because of his reverence?) It's all very well arguing that Superman is about hope, but he's best used when writers figure out how to wring drama out of his
particular struggles. As Smith has noted, "
how do you write for Jesus?" There just isn't much here. He's dead? Okay, that's solved easily because The Eradicator makes it easy. After that, what does he have to deal with on an internal level? He's absolutely sure of himself, of his heroism, and leaving is never an option. He has plenty to deal with on an external level, but it's entirely technical, with no deeper emotional connection. If any character changes, it's The Eradicator (even if it does feel forced), but he's not supposed to be the focus of the script.
Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man of Steel is a 10):
4
Smith gets something of a pass here. While he makes pains to point out that Superman tries to protect innocent bystanders from Doomsday, he does it through L-Ron remarking on this; we never see it. Superman never tries to guide the fight out of the city in order to minimise casualties, but it's almost a moot point, because we never get the sense of a titanic battle where bystanders are even going to even be an issue. To top it all, he kills twice. He has to kill Doomsday, because, like Zod, the beast can't be reasoned with; it's simply too dangerous. With Brainiac, it's unclear whether he does it to right the problem with the Earth's core or simply because he feels he must. Though he isn't as callous about it as in Poirier's drafts, once again we have Superman as killer.
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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you happen to be the creator or originator of any materials you feel have been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)
