Superman Unmade #6: Superman Lives (Take 6B)

Here there be spoilers

"Tim had a handle on it... understood everything about it. Tim would have created a Superman for the ages. I really feel that."  Dan Gilroy on Superman Lives

"I don't think those people realize how much of your heart and soul you pour into something. I was pretty shell-shocked by the whole situation."  Tim Burton on Superman Lives

"I think, and this is only my opinion, of course, that it wasn't filmed because it was going to be an expensive movie, and they were a little sensitive because they were getting a lot of bad press that they had screwed up the Batman franchise. Because of the corporate environment, all of the decisions are basically fear-based.

'If they'd just allowed us to make the film... I think that we could have done something interesting... They made a choice. I like to be positive, but I really feel that I wasted a year of my life. That's a terrible feeling. You never want to feel that in anything you do."  Tim Burton on Superman Lives

"We didn't have a script we loved, and the budget was too high. When the budget started getting out of control, that's when we decided to pull the plug."  Warner Co-chairman Bob Daly

This is an incremental post, dealing with Dan Gilroy's 2nd draft of Superman Lives. Analysis of the first draft is here.

Who wrote it?

Dan Gilroy.

When was it written?

The draft is dated 20.9.98, seven months after Gilroy's previous.

How long is it?

111 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-30

Act 2a = 31-61

Act 2b = 62-98

Act 3 = 99-111

What's the context?

It's hard to know exactly. Here's what we know: the Superman Lives production office shut in May 1998, with a scheduled mock funeral/party for the crew cancelled at the last minute. You know you've got problems when your cancellation party gets cancelled.

At the time of this draft, Superman Lives was not going to be Tim Burton's next movie. He'd signed to direct Sleepy Hollow for Paramount, with principal photography scheduled for October 1998 (eventually starting in November). If Burton were to direct Superman Lives, the wait would be at least a year, so unless Warners was prepared to wait, it seems likely (though not certain) he was out.

Cage allegedly heard of the May '98 production shutdown second-hand, pleasing him not a jot. It's unclear if he was officially off the film at this point, though in an interview to promote Snake Eyes (released in August 1998) he stated he'd "moved on to other things". (Note: I can't verify the source of this quote, though the interview is definitely in relation to Snake Eyes, so it can't have been too much later than August 1998).

In other interviews from August '98 onwards, Cage seems undecided, stating that the movie could still happen with him if the budget problems were addressed. He also claimed not to have collected his $20 million pay-or-play cheque because "there are only five (actually six) studios in this town and I don't want to create a problem for any of them."  However, elsewhere his agent confirmed that he would be required to make another movie for WB in order to earn the money, so perhaps he wasn't being altruistic after all. Cage's exodus wouldn't be officially confirmed until June 2000, when he announced definitively that he was done.

Despite the hoopla over the shutdown of pre-production, the project staggered on, and this draft supposedly got Cage excited again. Gilroy was originally brought in to trim the budget (guesstimated at anywhere between $140-$190 million), but there was little evidence of that in the February '98 draft. THIS is the draft that does it. With 11 pages trimmed, it's leaner, meaner, and was probably the closest Superman Lives would get to an affordable, streamlined, ready-to-go script. Gilroy says they got as far as camera tests before WB pulled the plug.

What's changed (and works better)?

• The first act back story. Like many origin stories, Superman Lives is mythology-heavy. We've seen this addressed at different points in previous drafts. It has to go somewhere, and rather than dump it en masse in the 2nd/3rd act, slowing things down when they should be accelerating, Gilroy has brought it back to the start. It works better, and it's only 4 pages.

• Brainiac's motivation is streamlined and clear, and it's character- rather than plot-driven. His power needs are no longer an issue. Despite being created first, he is clearly Jor-El's second son, so it's jealousy and spite that power his hatred of Superman. This means there's a smaller story going on under the larger one, which is always a good sign; Brainiac wants to be loved, and that makes him more nuanced than before. He's the polar opposite of Kal-El; he knows who and what he is, what his purpose is, and is egotistical to the point of delusion. He would sooner destroy his toys in a fit of pique than let anyone else play with them. With Superman dead he could take over the planet easily, but that's not the point. He wants to be revered the way Superman was, but can't understand that having power doesn't create adulation; people love Superman not because of his power but how he uses it. Only after Superman's death does he come to realise that he's effectively made his enemy immortal.

• Clark's childhood flashbacks establish a more loving environment. This time five year old Clark lands on his feet when Jonathan kicks the trampoline away, which makes his actions feels less cruel even if they really aren't. There's also a scene where Jonathan and Martha put Clark to bed and we actually feel he's loved by these people, even if they fear for him and encourage him to hide what he is. Clark's realisation that HE was the occupant of the craft is better laid out with a voice over flashback between he and Martha recalling how he was found. Even if she lied to keep him from the truth, there's at least a glimpse of the kind of nurturing home environment which could encourage a living god to dedicate his life to helping people rather than lashing out at humanity's innate cruelty.

• Extraneous scenes and sub-plots are cut. Brainiac possesses Luthor almost as soon as they meet. This excises Luthor's stupid plot to kill him and the bizarre, cameo-heavy nightclub scene. Brainiac's introduction is tightened up considerably. In previous drafts we see him slaughtering aliens in deep space, but now he wakes from sleep when his systems pick up the energy signature of Clark's escape pod. It's left to his arrival on Earth for us to see what his MO is. That saves duplicating information and cuts the Star Wars homage of his previous intro. Brainiac's nameless, under-realised minions have also vanished. Expensive to realise and largely inconsequential, they aren't missed a jot.

• Superman's visions. In the previous draft Superman kept having visions of his own death which were never satisfactorily explained; the concept was so thin it wasn't even a sub-plot. These are gone, though Gilroy still likes the visual of an image reflected in someone's eyes.

• Lois the reporter is much sharper. She starts working the angles of the spacecraft story and trying to figure out who lived in and around the crash site. This makes it far more feasible that she'd eventually trace the land back to Clark's family and put two and two together.

• K, in the guise of a small cube stored in his escape craft, has stayed with Superman throughout his life. This means locations and set building for the Fortress of Solitude are no longer an issue. Instead of the arctic wastes, Superman regenerates inside his own tomb. This allows him to get straight back into the thick of things when he wakes up. K's approximation of Superman's powers is also reduced from previous drafts; there's no flying. The best Superman can do after his resurrection is jump across rooftops. K's restriction of Superman through the suit is also better realised in this draft.

• Structure. The elevator juggling scene now segues almost straight into the showdown with Doomsday, which cuts a lot of extraneous back and forth. It's still hugely complicated and expensive, but the quick transition means less locations. It also means, however, that the two set-pieces sit almost on top of one another, which isn't ideal pacing. Looking at them as two halves of the same sequence just about helps get away with it.

• Morris doesn't simply disappear. With Luthor subsumed much earlier, Morris picks up most of his old role; kowtowing to an alien overlord. Established as a snivelling coward early on, this suits him far better than it did a billionaire entrepreneur/mob-boss.

• No spiders. Peters seems to have finally given up his arachnid obsession, because there's no obvious Thanagarian Snare Beast/Giant Spider. Although Brainiac's true form does seem to vaguely resemble one...

• Show, don't tell; Brainiac keeps Jor-El's bloodied S shield. This is later used as shorthand and works much better than convoluted expository dialogue.

What's changed (and still doesn't work?)

• Luthor as an organised crime boss. Although he masquerades as a legitimate businessman, I don't buy Luthor as a Godfather. Lois' expose of his business deals is a sub-plot that goes nowhere. Lex is never in danger of being arrested and her story is never tied in to the one person we know can turn on him: the tanker driver from the opening sequence. When Superman forces the driver to admit Lex is behind the dumping, there's an opportunity to show how scary Lex is (a suicide doesn't have to be any more horrific than a Piranha eating a guy's hand). Instead the driver folds. After that, Superman tells Luthor that one day he'll have something on him… but that day was today!

• K is a double-edged sword. And this is where an element which works for production causes problems for story. If K has always been at Kal-El's side… why the silence?  It could have helped him solve the mystery of who he is and his place in the universe. Was K really only a contingency in the event of Kal-El's death? Was he never to reveal himself otherwise? That seems a waste of such a powerful AI and the last vestiges of Kryptonian technology.

• Clark's confession. This scene has never really worked since its first appearance in the Strick draft. Here it's retooled so that Clark, thinking Lois will eventually put two and two together, decides to preempt her by revealing his secret. But even if Lois discovers that the land around the Smallville crash site belonged to the Kents, she still has no reason to connect Clark to Superman. Since everyone thinks the Man of Steel is a super-evolved human, the evidence would be circumstantial at best. Clark doesn't need to give up his secret so easily. Had Lois discovered the land belonged to his family, reassessed her idea of Superman and examined the fact that Clark and Superman never appear at the same time (something she's clearly given some thought), the scene's through line could have been HER calling Clark out, strengthening the idea of her as a reporter and legitimising his fear of discovery.

• Lois' niece finally gets a name, Amy, but not until she's being kidnapped at the end of the second act. Her presence is also better thought out; instead of staying with Lois indefinitely, she comes to visit for a few weeks each summer. This causes time line problems though… If Lois and Superman have been seeing each other for a year, it's logical to assume that Clark has been in Metropolis for at least that length of time. If Amy comes to stay each Summer, wouldn't he have met her already? Unfortunately she still feels like a plot device masquerading as a character, an object of pathos for the elevator sequence who sticks around with little to do, drifting in and out of the story arbitrarily.

• Doomsday makes his first appearance as a pair of glowing green eyes, which is weirdly low-key and at odds with the destruction he wreaks later on. He's introduced as a genetic remnant of Krypton's past, and Gilroy tries to tie up the loose ends once he's dead; he still disappears, but a throwaway line indicates that his body has been retrieved.

• Rapeyness. It's not a particularly nice word but it's really quite apt in some circumstances, because there's still something off about the way these scripts approach physical violation, regardless of gender. The scene where Brainiac appropriates Luthor's body is played for laughs, which doesn't feel terribly appropriate. The idea of bodily possession itself isn't exactly kid-friendly, and maybe the humour is meant to deflect that, but it just feels… icky. Later on, there's a scene where a gang chase down an innocent couple, only to be interrupted by the reborn Superman. We've seen before how easy it is to use the threat of rape as a means of generating drama, but this whole scene is off. Implicitly black antagonists; a weedy, disposable boyfriend; Superman's intervention; Superman getting his ass kicked… and the inevitable swing in his favour once K asserts himself. We've read or seen a hundred variations on this, and they generally feel like the prologue to a nerdy, pornographic comic book fantasy. Fortunately, comic book movies seem to have largely moved on from this paradigm.

• Logic still doesn't apply. 

• If K's attitude to Earth is that it should be left behind, and it wants to convince Superman to leave, why approximate his old powers? It's clear that if it wants to, it can make Superman leave; so why not just do it? Why indulge him?

• If Brainiac can detect the energy surge from the Kryptonian escape ship halfway across the galaxy, why hasn't he been able to detect the presumably huge surge which would have accompanied K's resuscitation of Superman?

• Superman wastes a ton of time. Why stay the night with Lois before trying to destroy Lexiac's machine? The sooner he gets to it, the better! He then spends the next day knocking around the Metropolis docks sulking and frightening the homeless.

• Why are none of the militaries who own the ICBMs Lexiac is threatening the Earth with even remotely concerned that their missiles are powering up?

• If deactivation of Brainiac's doomsday machine is as simple as removing its power source, why did nobody try that on Krypton?

• Why does Brainiac's ship still mysteriously fall out of the sky once he dies?

• The third act. At only 12 pages, it feels like this is where most of the cutting has been done. With the climax at LexCorp, there's no exploration of the Skull-Ship and Thanagarian Snare Beast, which cleaves a chunk out. There's still an awful lot going on, but it's all sound and fury, quantity over quality. Reversal after reversal punctuated by dumb ass wisecrackery masks the fact that the finale is not inherently dramatic. All the bits are present, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of what belongs where or how it works, and so extra mechanisms are thrown in for good measure even though they don't improve the function.
• The powers problem. Gilroy better explains that Superman's feelings have a connection with his physiology, but the idea is fundamentally flawed. If the loss of his powers springs from his feelings, he would surely have faced issues all the years he's spent isolated, lonely and unsure of himself. Here's a solution; if Doomsday's Kryptonite stinger had retarded his ability to collect and store yellow sunlight, the K suit could then serve as both armour and a means of collection/amplification. When his system has recovered enough to do this by itself (say, the end of the 2nd act), the suit drops away. The powers problem is solved in a few lines without recourse to techno babble.
• Too much is happening. Two kidnappings in three pages, the revelation and death of K, and the return of Superman's powers are all piled on top of one another. Then, like the cherry on the top of this teetering pile of goo, we get-

• Lois is pregnant. It's not a natural direction for the character; it's a plot device lumped in to strengthen an inherently weak climax. Sure, it's more personal, but when the overarching stake is the safety of the entire world, it doesn't work to draw us back into caring about the characters on a personal level. The benchmark; if we take it out, do the story and characters change? Not a jot. Superman still has to save Lois, he still has to save the world... the baby doesn't mean a thing.

• Save the world or save the girl. The eternally frustrating dilemma, because there is no dilemma. If Superman doesn't save the world there will be no girl. If he saves the girl there'll be no world to live with her in. Drama can come from difficult choices, but it fails here because the choice is simple; save the world.

• Reversals are all well and good, but these, again, mask the fact that there's nothing else of dramatic value happening. Brainiac's robot double is never set up and yet somehow manages to look exactly like Lex, and his sudden display of mind projection abilities have never even been hinted at. We can buy him taking over Luthor's body physically, but if he can do that, why not just repeat the trick on Superman?

Conclusion
After sixteen years, Dan Gilroy has gone on the record about Superman Lives!  There's no earth-shattering revelation, but it's significant because he doesn't ever seem to have spoken about it before.

It's tempting to suggest that the problem with these scripts is structural. Superman's death and resurrection by the middle of the movie leaves him with nowhere to go in the second half. We know he's virtually indestructible, and that if Brainiac could kill him he'd have done it himself rather than employ Doomsday. If the threat of death has been exorcised by page 60, the remainder can only play out as an exercise in inevitability; Superman wins. Sure, there are other ways to generate tension, but the death of a god trumps them all in terms of sheer scale. 

There are also two huge and conflicting considerations with this second draft; story vs production.

While they needn't be mutually exclusive, we see here how a script needs to serve both masters. It's tighter and cheaper than the previous, but there are still some key aspects of the story which haven't improved, and have arguably suffered further from the emphasis on getting this thing on its feet and ready to shoot. Though it's a marked improvement on previous efforts, there's nothing organic here. It remains a slapped-together monster trying to reconcile the major beats of all the previous drafts; it's just wearing better make-up and a decent haircut. 

Having gone through five writers and ten drafts by this point, notes had taken their toll on everything but the fundamentals; those elements which remained unchanged because of the money already spent on production design. Did anyone stop to think that they might actually have become inadequate foundations on which to build an evolving story? 

Perhaps somebody finally did, and that's why WB decided not to push ahead.

This draft really, formally, marks the end of Burton's time on the movie, and serves as a breaking point of sorts. From here, the Man of Steel's odyssey through development hell would take a decidedly different turn. 

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 7 
Why does Superman think that blowing up the (admittedly free-falling) skull-ship directly over Metropolis is a safe thing to do? It plays like a riff on the ID4 ending but is, let's face it, spectacularly stupid and dangerous. 

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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.)

Superman Unmade #6: Superman Lives (Take 6A)

Here there be spoilers.

"We know we’re getting close, but we’re not there yet. The creative process is imprecise at best, but over the last two or three months we’ve accelerated in a good way. But we had hoped to accelerate that way six months ago.”  Lorenzo di Bonaventura on Superman Lives

Who wrote it?

Dan Gilroy. Yes, that Dan Gilroy. Brother of Tony, and back then best known for Freejack, but since credited on Real Steel, The Bourne Legacy and the upcoming Nightcrawler.

When was it written?

The script is dated 24.2.98, seven months after Wesley Strick's only apparent draft.

How long is it?

122 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-31

Act 2a = 32-66

Act 2b = 67-102

Act 3 = 102-122

What's the context?

With Wes Strick's July '97 draft promoting unbridled rage at high levels within Warners, and the budget nudging unacceptable, it was jettisoned in October of that year, and pre-production pushed back to Spring 1998. Studios don't spend upwards of $30 million on a project for nothing, and there comes a point when it's better business to keep spending in order to get the movie made rather than writing the whole thing off. So in came Gilroy, screenwriter number five of the Jon Peters era, for his first crack at the big blue boy scout.  Some have claimed Akiva Goldsman and Ron Bass were successively brought in to rewrite Strick, but if they were, these drafts have never leaked, and frankly it's hard to see where two more drafts would fit in the evolution of the story. Gilroy's first draft is different, but it's not that different. Don't rule that story out, but until these drafts are seen in the wild, take it with a pinch of salt.

Why didn't it happen?

The exact sequence of events around this time is unclear. Several reasons for the failure to move forward have been floated in the years since, most acknowledging (or assuming) sheer corporate terror at the spiralling production costs, exacerbated by several big-budget flops, and the vicious critical and fan backlash from Batman & Robin. Superman Lives does not sound like a happy ship. Burton was allegedly miserable under the stewardship of Jon Peters, who involved toy companies to an excessive degree in crafting the look and feel of the film.  

With a summer '98 opening out of the question, efforts were still being made to get the movie back on its feet whilst simultaneously streamlining the budget. Enter Gilroy. Burton was still attached at the time of this draft, and apparently scouted matching locations (Pittsburgh's Glass Castle for LexCorp and the City-County Building for The Daily Planet) as late as March 1998.

In April 1998, Lorenzo di Bonaventura told Variety that production had been delayed again. He separately confided to the L.A. Times that the script "wasn't good enough".

On May 1st 1998, the Superman Lives production office quietly closed.  

Burton would push on for a while before signing to direct Sleepy Hollow, scheduled for an Autumn '98 shoot, effectively delaying his participation by at least a year. That decision more or less called time on his involvement with the project.

The script

Now reverted to "Superman Lives", it's not inititally clear why Warners thought Gilroy was the right guy to rein in the Kryptonian freight train. He had only two credits to his name; Freejack and Chasers, neither of which was a hit. He never seems to have spoken about his time on the project, but once again it's obvious that this is a writer trying to find a story in the air pockets between the preoccupations of the major players.

If Warners' idea was to get the budget down, nobody told Gilroy. The elevator-juggling scene alone would have been mind-bogglingly expensive, and there's no reduction in the number or nature of the set-pieces.

This scanned draft is littered with (often barely legible) hand-written comments by an unknown author. A few influential candidates spring to mind: Cage, Burton, Peters, Semel, and Di Bonaventura. Given that the scan comes from Warners' legal deposition against the heirs of Siegel and Schuster, it seems unlikely the notes were written by Cage, Burton, or Peters, who surely would have kept their own copies. Ultimately, we'll probably never know who the phantom scribbler was, but he/she provides some telling insight into the mind of a senior creative on the project.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

He wants to discover who and what he is, and belong somewhere. Lonely, alienated and unable to fit in, he (along with the rest of the world) believes he's simply a freak human with extraordinary abilities; an evolutionary leap which might portend what the human race will one day evolve into. A Man of Tomorrow... 

What happens next?

Stop me if you've heard this one...

LexCorp discovers the trail of an alien spacecraft and tracks its impact to Smallville, Kansas, making Clark wonder if he may have been the passenger. Meanwhile Brainiac, an energy-consuming artificial intelligence from outer space, comes to Earth seeking revenge on the Man of Steel. Teaming up with Lex Luthor, the pair conspire to unleash the creature Doomsday, who kills Superman in a titanic underground battle.

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?

Yes. Revived by the Kryptonian AI known as K, which has lain dormant since his arrival on Earth, Superman utilises K's abilities to mimic his old powers and confront his twin nemeses, who have merged into a single villain calling itself "Lexiac" and plans to plunge the planet into nuclear holocaust. In doing so he discovers who he is and where he's from, and decides his purpose is not to keep Krypton alive but to make the best of life on Earth.

What works?

• Clark isn't a weirdo.  He's a rule-abiding boy scout who drives at the speed limit. Straight as an arrow, but also unhappy and alone.  He's in denial about his true nature, but has long suspected he isn't from Earth and doesn't belong here. His hidden man-cave (it's better if you just go with it) is a window onto his neurosis. In many ways we're back to the angst of the Poirier draft which Kevin Smith so disdained.

• Lois is spunky, spiky and likeable. Gilroy tells us all he needs to about her in one scene, where Luthor's goons let the hapless Jimmy, teeming with potential security breaches, into a press conference rather than delay any longer and allow Lois in too. 

• Lois AND Superman/Clark - The relationship that makes everything tick, according to Smith. Lois and Superman are sort of together, but she's upset that he's evasive and won't share more with her. (Interestingly, this was one of the aspects explored in the animated movie Superman: Doomsday, which for my money is the best adaptation of the death story). Superman reasons that he has nothing to share because he doesn't know who he is, conveniently bracketing Clark off. The important thing is that it's not dramatically inert (unlike Smith's draft) because his journey is about discovering who he is. The scene in which he reveals his secret identity to Lois remains far too close to Strick's, but Gilroy reverses the dynamic by making Clark the one to walk away, which at least keeps it interesting.  Clark then quits the Planet in an effort to go find himself.  When he's side-tracked by Doomsday's appearance at the last minute, his and Lois' goodbye has a real poignancy to it because there's subtext; both of them know he isn't going down there as a reporter.  Lois' eulogy is actually heartfelt and moving, and when she discovers his secret room, she truly understands his loneliness and identity quest for the first time; that it's only after he's gone adds to the pathos.

• Doomsday isn't the mindless hulk of earlier iterations but a "horrendous" nightmare of a creature with a Kryptonite stinger.  The description of him is almost deliberately vague, either to heighten the tension or because Peters hadn't decided on which design would sell the most toys yet.  Regardless, he's a mostly hidden menace; fast, strong and cunning, hiding in the blackness of the sewers. 

• The visuals - There's some really striking stuff here:
  
  • The moment a frustrated Clark blasts away at such speed that he burns his street-clothes off never feels as ridiculous as Strick's version of the same idea. 
  • Clark sat on a rooftop "throne" is also a powerful image, if a little on the nose. 
  • The Fortress of Solitude now has a sense of scale, even majesty. 
  • Superman's post-Doomsday climb up through mud and water, which slowly reveals the true extent of his wounds.
  • Clark's comatose flashback to his first meeting with Lois ends with him realising he's in a memory as the layers of the encounter crumble away around him (the Robocop remake also used this visual device to good effect).

What doesn't?

• Superman. Okay, Clark's not a weirdo, but that doesn't mean all's well.  All indications are that both his parents are dead, but in flashbacks we meet a prototype of Man Of Steel's Jonathan Kent; a harsh but loving father who's determined to stop his son showing off lest he be feared, alienated and ultimately picked over. Telling him to be afraid of himself as well as others leaves us wondering what motivates Clark to become the man he is. According to these flashbacks he's assailed on all sides by the cruelty of other kids, and his father keeps reminding him of our infinite capacity for it, and how it can never permit him to be who he is. So how does Clark become the saviour of a race he's been raised with no faith in? It's true that this is what makes his ascent so noble and dramatic, but we're shown none of the growth into that.  For all its faults, at least Man Of Steel tried to show us the journey.
  

• Superman reborn. We start with a Superman who has somehow found his purpose (if not his place) in the world despite its treatment of him. But when he heads back out for the first time after his death, newly equipped by K, it feels like it's happening because it has to, not because this is who he is. He makes no attempt to persuade K that humanity is worth saving, even though it's through this that we examine his heroism and his character. Smith took it too far, and the second half of his drafts became simplistic meditations on the nature of heroism, but this one doesn't do enough.  There are shadows of unexplored thematic beats as Superman confesses that he would rather die than live like this; it's harder to stick to principles when you're unable to enforce them. Yet even with reduced powers, the reborn Superman becomes almost casually brutal; he flips a car full of thugs far enough to seriously injure them, pins a goon's neck to the wall using his new S-blade, and pulls Brainiac's head clean off. By that point the tone of his character, even his voice, feels all over the place as the script tries to grunge him up. I'd buy him as pissed off, even traumatised, (Strick's attempt at a tri-furcated Clark/Superman/Kal-El could have worked in another context) but that's never really established outside of his initial anger and frustration at the loss of his powers. If there'd been a throughline of Clark finally having had enough of the world's brutality, of his frustration at having died for this race of idiots, his attitude change might have worked.

• The villains

• Luthor works best when he's ruthless, murderous and incredibly smart. Here, once again he's a buffoon, played mostly for laughs. How does someone this dumb become a billionaire? Would the smartest man in the world go anywhere near his own nuclear power plant as it seems about to melt down? Wouldn't he triple insulate himself against being caught waste-dumping? When he meets Brainiac the shock of encountering an alien life form is minimal; his instantaneous reaction is to wonder how he can spin it. As the anonymous scribbler writes: this reaction is "too abrupt". The scribbler also wants to know "why?" and I can't say there's any kind of answer.

• Brainiac starts with a goal (revenge) a mystery (revenge on who?) and an M.O. (he sucks energy).  He's merciless, malicious and he plays with his food. But as soon as he arrives on Earth he becomes energy-hungry to the exclusion of all else; so what is his primary motivation? The nightclub party is a perfect illustration; instead of simply trying to kill Brainiac, Lex invites him to a party populated by gangsters and a series of increasingly odd cameos, topped off by Elton John. At this point, Brainiac has already set Doomsday in motion, so he has nothing to gain from attending. Our phantom scribbler feels the same, writing "Brainiac's agenda is to kill Superman, nothing else."  I'll buy him as a Kryptonian Skynet which grew too big for its boots, but his abilities are once again ill-defined, seeming to grow out of what the plot requires. At the start he's able to drain people and technology of their energy, but then he graduates to physically possessing Luthor, and proceeds on to mind control.  If he can control minds, why not enslave Luthor on his arrival?  There's little context for his relationship with K, and even as late as the showdown in the alley, we never really know why he hates Superman and has travelled all this way to kill him. As the phantom scribbler notes: "We don't tell the audience enough why these two hate each other."  It's only later that we find out Brainiac was supplanted in Jor-El's affections by Kal-El, that this set off the chain of events which led to Krypton's destruction, but by this point the revelation is not only too late to be effective, it's almost completely lost amidst everything else that's happening.

• Their plan. A key weakness in the vast majority of dual-villain superhero movies.  There's almost never any need for them to work together, and when they contrive to, the resulting plot is usually inept.  Having split Brainiac's focus between killing Superman and gorging on energy, the script struggles to reconcile the two; how exactly does Superman's death speed up Brainiac's syphoning? How does the energy drain precipitate global nuclear meltdown? Yes, it equips the second half of the story with a ticking time bomb, but why would Brainiac need Lex's body to accomplish his goal?  Somebody clearly liked the idea of "Lexiac", and at least this time he's better defined as looking exactly like Luthor with Brainiac bubbling away underneath, but Lexiac would make more sense if Brainiac were to possess Luthor as soon as they meet, skipping the ridiculous meet-cute. As it is, we wonder why Brainiac goes through all this nonsense when he's able to drain the world's nuclear energy and has something in his menagerie that can kill Superman; he doesn't need Luthor at all.

• K - K actually seems like he could be an alien intelligence, even if he is described as looking like a toy. There's a genuine sense of Krypton about him at first; it's hard not to read his lines in Brando's voice. There's also a much better sense of cause and effect to his awakening; when LexCorp scientists unearth Clark's ship, K is activated half a world away. Unfortunately, a solid set-up is wasted as K once again becomes a slave to theme and plot. He changes his mind on a whim, one minute insisting on safeguarding Kal-El and the next offering to replicate his powers. Later he refuses to allow Superman to engage Lexiac only to then encourage him to pull his finger out, despite the fact that almost nothing has changed about Kal-El's situation in the interim. He isn't able to offer a single useful suggestion on how to stop Brainiac draining the world's nuclear energy, and he gives up the ghost for no apparent reason. This is an advanced AI which has crossed galaxies, lain dormant for decades, resuscitated Superman and been able to duplicate his powers; the pay-off is pathetic battery life for which there's little to no setup; his death just happens because the plot and theme call for Kal-El to push on alone.

• Lois' niece isn't awful in principle, but she doesn't even have a name because she's not a character; she's a plot contrivance who comes and goes from the story arbitrarily.  The most interesting thing about her is how she changes the context of Lois' character, making her look irresponsible at best, downright negligent at worst.  She puts her niece to work at The Planet (which is funny until you begin to wonder if the kid is supposed to be at school), and then goes on to abandon her at the LexCorp kids day, abandon her at the hospital (without even calling her mother), drag her to the scene of the Doomsday battle (with an apparent stop-off for balloons), and cart her around a riot-scarred Metropolis at night. It's difficult to imagine the kind of tough times her real mother could endure that would possibly be more dangerous.

• Disappearing characters - While we're on the subject, let's look at some more AWOLs.  Doomsday (or his body, we're never sure) washes away without a trace after the throw-down with Superman. Morris, Luthor's PR guy and the first act's comic relief, similarly vanishes without trace. The irony is that nobody notices.  Even after Superman's death, nobody notices Clark has vanished. Sure, there's been a super death, power outages and general chaos, but not one of his friends wonders about him until he shows up alive and well at the end of the second act, whereupon they all profess to have been worried sick about him.

• Page 111 might be the single worst page in the entire script, and possibly in any of the unmade scripts so far.  Three revelations which fundamentally change the entire story are crammed in here: 

1. Superman hasn't lost his powers after all; it was all in his head.  Which is, frankly, bullshit.  At least Poirier's drafts tried to examine the notion that his powers could be manifested through a spiritual/mental discipline, even if it all felt far too Star Wars.  Here, the notion that Superman's powers disappear because of some kind of mental block is never set up and never explained, which means it makes no sense.
2. K contains the essence of Superman's parents.  There's nothing inherently outrageous about this; the Donner Superman's crystals contain representations of Jor-El and Lara ( a trick repeated in Man of Steel).  But why reveal this only at the end?  Well, because...
3. K is dying.  And it's like Superman's parents dying all over again, see?  HEAVY THEMATIC SLEDGEHAMMER.  But wouldn't that death have aroused even more empathy if he'd known that K was a representation of his parents earlier?  Wouldn't it have had even more weight if there'd been any kind of set-up for K's eventual expiry?  Even Strick's draft tried to essay K's death as a noble sacrifice, whereas here, he just... conks out.

• There's an argument that instances 1 and 2 are intended to be twists, but true twists change the context of a story whilst maintaining the structure. Apply just revelation #1 and the whole falls apart: if Superman's powers never vanished, he could have fixed everything immediately after waking up; so why did K lie to him?  Because otherwise there'd be no second half of the story. But that second half is now built on nothing; it's very underpinning has just been dynamited. One of these revelations could work; a throw-away line about the effects of Kryptonite poisoning would have solved 95% of the problems with revelation #1. Two is a push, but could still fly if you set them both up properly. Three is insulting overkill.

• Pilfering.  By this point the Superman scripts weren't just borrowing from other sources, they were borrowing from themselves borrowing from other sources. The X-Files was still huge and there's a whiff of Mulder about Clark's quest for knowledge about E.T.s. Star Wars had just been re-released and there's still way too much Darth Vader in Brainiac's introduction. The climax recalls Independence Day, with K's tiny craft swallowed by the huge Skull Ship. There's even echoes of Alien in Superman's encounter with the Thanagarian Snare Beast in the innards of the labyrinthine ship. It's like someone had a checklist of science fictions' greatest (or most recent) hits and was determined to tick them all off.

• Logic is still an alien concept, and that means questions abound. Why is Superman having premonitions of his own death? How does S still stand for Science? What exactly is Jimmy supposed to be "playing" on stage when he hides in the band? How does a super-computer alter a planet's axis, and why would that mean collision with a comet? How does a hull-breach completely destabilise the Skull-ship to the point it loses power? How does Lois' love enable Superman to resist Brainiac's draining beam? How is it easier for Superman to weld the survivors into a metal column rather than simply stabilise the ship around him?

Conclusion

By this point, Superman scripts had become the definition of the Hollywood development process. Reading them is exhausting; writing them must have been ten times worse.

There's things to like about Gilroy's first attempt. For the first half it really does look like he's onto something, but even on a first read, the story starts to come off the rails at the mid-point. By the third act, it's forgotten what rails are. 

The problem is the structural constraints; every beat, nod, and cool little thing added through the drafts from Poirier onwards. It's hard to believe a new writer wouldn't have started from scratch, which implies that these things had to be kept because somebody liked them. Pre-production art continued to be churned out between the Strick and Gilroy drafts, indicating that a number of key aspects of the story were set in stone. When a writer has to hit marks established by three predecessors which don't necessarily form a cogent whole, the script becomes a monster, accruing story matter like some kind of creative black hole. In many ways it's like Brainiac himself, constantly adding to itself by feeding off other sources, but never more than a pale, autonomous imitation of life.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 5

Once again, much of the Doomsday brawl takes place in the sewers, but Superman makes no real effort to move the battle somewhere less built-up. Again, he's absolved of any responsibility for Lexiac's ultimate destruction. But a couple of key things have changed; early on he's happy letting tanker trucks smash into walls without a care, and the reborn Superman starts dishing out a little extra vicious. That he only pulls the head off a Brainiac decoy is a cheat; he didn't know it wasn't the real thing. 

(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.)

Superman Unmade #5: "Superman" (Take 5)

Here there be spoilers.

"I had no idea how Tim reacted... but at our first meeting he made it clear that he wanted to jettison the Smith draft.”  Wes Strick on Superman Lives

Side note: check out Jake Rossen's excellent Superman Vs. Hollywood.  It's now 6 years old and as a result of the leaks has become a little outdated in the accuracy of its information about some of the Superman Lives-era scripts (there's no Toyman in Strick's draft), but it's a page-turning account of the tales behind Hollywood's attempts to bring The Man of Steel to the big (and small) screen from his inception all the way to Superman Returns. Maybe it's time for an updated edition, post-MOS?

Who wrote it?

Wesley Strick, credited on Arachnaphobia, Cape Fear, Wolf, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (the remake) amongst others. He's also widely acknowledged to have contributed uncredited work on Batman Returns, Face/Off and Mission Impossible II.

When was it written?

The script is dated 7.7.97 and is labelled "First Draft".

How long is it?

117 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-38

Act 2a = 39-60

Act 2b = 61-90

Act 3 = 91-117

What's the context?

Burton came on to direct Smith's "Superman Lives" script in April/May of 1997, and immediately decided to go in a different direction, despite unease from Peters and Warner execs. He apparently tapped first Akiva Goldsman, then David Koepp to pen the new draft, but struck out with both before turning to Strick, who had done an uncredited production rewrite on Batman Returns. Visiting Burton's apartment to spitball ideas, Strick turned in his draft in about 2 months. It's not known if this is the only draft he completed, but it's the only one which has come to light so far. Leaked to the internet in January 2013, it's titled simply "Superman".

Why didn't it happen?

Between April 1997 and October 1998, the tortured development process on the new Superman movie actually ramped up into pre-production, and all the concept art and production design on the net seems to be largely from this period. This was a "Go", with Burton and Cage both signing pay-or-play deals (despite a late-breaking stand-off with Paramount over Cage's availability). Behind the scenes, however, Strick's script was causing consternation; Warner exec Terry Semel apparently "reacted violently" to it, and Nic Cage was uncomfortable with moves away from core parts of the mythology, telling Cinescape "I think they should stay true to the Superman costume" (ironically, they mostly do; Superman begins and ends in his classic get-up). Strick has said that he and Burton continued to work on the script until they "ran out of time" and Dan Gilroy was brought in to replace him, ostensibly to bring the cost down as Warner began to fret about the spiralling budget.

According to artist Sylvain Despretz, the production design team never even saw the Strick script. “We got the Kevin Smith script, but we were told not to read it, because they knew he wasn’t going to stay on the movie. So we used Kevin Smith’s script as a guide to the sets we might be doing, and we waited and waited for the new script to come in, but it never did.”

The script

Once again, I've tried to focus on the script and filter out the convoluted but entertaining mythology that's grown up around the pre-production...

But the stories are relevant. What happened in boardrooms, agencies and Burton's apartment had all but shaped Strick's Superman before he'd even put fingers to keyboard. From Jon Peters' giant mechanical spider obsession and Warners' pandering to merchandisers, via Burton's thematic preoccupations (all major considerations in a sea of restrictive elements) Strick's script had an almost impossible job; please everyone.  

It's fairly safe to say it pleased no one. It's a first draft, and as Hemmingway said, the first draft of everything is shit.  If there are further Strick drafts floating around, they haven't surfaced yet but it's entirely possible there's another, better one out there. Given that it took 16 years for this to emerge, don't rule it out.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

He wants to belong. Lonely, alienated and unable to fit in, he (along with the rest of the world) believes he's simply a freak human with extraordinary abilities; an evolutionary leap which might portend what the human race will one day evolve into. A Man of Tomorrow...

What happens next?

LexCorp discovers the trail of an alien spacecraft and tracks its impacts to the Arctic circle and Smallville, Kansas, making Clark wonder if he may have been the passenger. Meanwhile, scouring the galaxy for a renewable energy source, the Kryptonian A.I. Brainiac (created by Superman's father, Jor-El) comes to Earth. Hatching a plan with Luthor to destroy the Man of Steel, Brainiac hopes to flush out the more advanced A.I. assigned to accompany and protect Superman. Upgrading a LexCorp satellite with his own technology, Brainiac creates the Shadowcaster, blocking out the sun and cutting Superman off from his energy source. Weakened and unable to recharge, Superman is killed by the creature Brainiac sends to confront him; Doomsday.

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?

Yes. Resurrected by the second generation Kryptonian A.I. (created by his father) known as K, Superman deals with his mortality, using K's abilities to mimic his old powers and confront his twin nemeses, who have merged into a single villain calling itself "Lexiac". In the climax aboard Lexiac's orbiting skull-ship, he must decide between joining his Kryptonian "brother" or protecting Lois, the only person who makes his earthly life bearable. Given that one of those options involves being sucked into a three-way psycho-physical congress with Brainiac and Luthor, you can see why he chooses Earth.

What works?

• Clark as a lonely, alienated individual - To a point. Clark is nicely drawn as an outsider; what Cage called a "beautiful freak". His sense of loneliness is tangible. The flashbacks to his childhood provide some context as to how and why he feels this way, and has done his entire life. He doesn't know what he is and there's no joy in him at all; he's introspective and lonely, with no family or friends. He's in love with a woman who pays him no heed, whilst his other identity is celebrated. It's almost full circle back to the prototypical geek fantasy cooked up by Siegel and Shuster.
• The Eradicator - Scaled back significantly from Smith's take, he's now known as simply as "K" (which probably saves a whole page over the course of the script) and is initially visualised as a glowing orb.  Burton thought it too "tinkerbell", but as he's no longer the autistic android half of an intergalactic buddy movie, this means...
• Superman is the focus of the story. Which should be the point of a Superman movie.
• Exposition and flashbacks - There's some ingenuity to the sequences designed to lift heavy back story. K shows rather than tells Superman what happened to Krypton (much as the Kryptonian ship A.I. does in Man of Steel). Strick also structures the Kryptonian flashbacks so we don't see exactly the same thing twice; redacting Jor-El's message to Kal the first time, we hear what he says in the reprise, which at least keeps it interesting.
• Civil unrest. After Superman's death, Metropolis goes to hell.  We haven't seen this since the Poirier drafts, and it heightens the sense that Superman is all that stands between humanity and chaos, at least in this city.
• Kal-El. The idea of Superman's alien persona as the third aspect of his tri-furcated personality is an interesting one. If there's one director you can rely on to further complicate a character with identity issues, it's probably Burton. Kal-El is Superman at his most alien, all his learnt humanity burned off. He's cold, harsh and distant - like The Eradicator of the "Reign of The Supermen" storyline. He's essentially been Robocopped, inside a suit of armour, emotionally unreachable, with little or no memory of what he was, acting on instructions and unable to intuit. Dramatically, it's an effective idea. Having always thought himself human only to discover he's anything but, the question becomes whether his connection to another person can transcend genetics and bring him back. That's pretty epic; he has to recover not just his powers but his personality.
• Superman as just a super man.  It's a nice nod to one of the earliest aspects of the character and a different approach from what's gone before.
• No Kryptonite.  Yes, I'm scraping the barrel. Yes, it's entirely necessary to do so.

What doesn't work?

• Clark as a lonely, alienated individual. Up to a point, the Burton-ised Clark works... But then a line is crossed. Because this Clark isn't just a lonely, alienated and misunderstood individual; he's... well, weird. He keeps a photo of his dead parents above his bed. Imagine getting the super-lovin' on beneath those two. He's so in love with Lois that he keeps a photo of her in his dresser drawer... which he takes with him on his trip to Smallville. That's not just alienated; that's obsessive and creepy. There's no glimpse of a normality, or even a history of normality, that would enable a young Clark Kent to go out into the world and make something positive of himself. His life is bifurcated, but we don't really get a sense of that because... 
• Superman doesn't show up until page 30. In a story about dichotomy, we haven't seen the other side of his existence; up to this point, all we have is Clark. As a consequence, we never get a proper sense of Superman and Lois' relationship, because their first interaction is after the roller coaster set-piece, from where they go straight into him telling her his secret... in the middle of a crowded restaurant, in the middle of the day, by taking off his glasses and shaking his hair loose like a sexy librarian in a bad porno. Regardless of the laughable aesthetic, the scene doesn't work because we've never seen how she treats Superman differently to Clark, so there's no alternative context. She goes from utterly disdaining Clark to talking about having babies with him.
• Superman's internal conflict is resolved at the halfway point. The key difference to the Smith drafts is Superman's central conflict; belonging somewhere. But come the climax, Superman has already made his choice. His resurrection, although made physiologically possible by K, only works when K tells him to fight for what he loves; Lois. Returning from the grave is his moment of truth; choosing to live for something on this planet. The script tries to extend the conflict by having him adopt the cold Kal-El personality, but it's unclear if this is a deliberate choice (the "scam" referred to in the final act?) or a genuine side-effect of his death. The choice presented in the climax, to be one third of a weird alien hybrid or to save Lois, choose Earth, and try to fit in, is a no-brainer because his internal dilemma is already resolved.
• Lois. She's introduced here as a woman whose beauty is matched only by her ambition. Not just, courageous, intense, driven, dedicated… simply ambitious and beautiful. We have to wonder why she isn't on TV, or a politician, just two of the million better jobs to be ambitious in. She confronts three looters, and you might argue that this is typical, brave-to-the-point-of-stupid Lois...  But we don't allow her that because mostly she's an idiot, running off to snag an exclusive with Luthor at the worst possible time and effectively putting herself in harm's way. Yet again, the villains' endgame is to kidnap her, and once she's in that scenario she transcends stupid and unlikeable to just plain annoying. Which leads me to the fact that...
• Everyone is stupid.  The inability of anyone to put two and two together is breathtaking.
• • Lex announces that he's found traces of an alien spacecraft and stokes panic about the potential passenger. Yet neither the billionaire genius nor anyone else considers this might have something to do with the single inhabitant of the planet who can bend steel, fly, shoot heat from his eyes, and is generally impervious to harm. Clark is the only one who makes the connection, and only because the ship is revealed to have broken up over Smallville.
  • Having left his body in an ice-cavern just two weeks earlier, Lois fails to recognise the armoured man lurking in the shadows, fighting crime, flying, wearing an S on his chest...  I'll buy her doubting that it's actually him, but she doesn't even seem to know who he's supposed to be. Similarly, Lex demands to know "who this new super-nemesis is". In a world where Superman is the only meta-human, and his tomb is empty...
  • Having earlier figured out that Superman derives his power from the sun, Lexiac's solution to his resurrection is to... shoot him with a concentrated beam of solar energy. That's like gambling you could smother Popeye in spinach before he managed to get a bite. It doesn't even take into account that Superman is wearing K, the perpetual energy source Brainiac craves. Why risk destroying the very thing he's after? I'll tell you why, because...
• Plot dictates character… and characters start to look stupid when they do what the plot demands, because they have to get us from point A to point B.
• • Would Lois place herself in Luthor's grasp by dashing off for an exclusive just as the reborn Superman begins to make himself known? Of course not, but Lois has to be seized by Lexiac or there's no endgame.
  • Would Clark really allow himself to be seen trudging through the Arctic in nothing but a suit? Of course not, but Lois has to know what Clark means when he tells her with his dying breath to take him "home."  Astonishingly, Lois refers back to the scene later, saying that Clark said he was going home… but nowhere in the scene does Clark mention home.
  • K's death occurs not as a natural extension of his character, but because he's a deus ex machina who must be disposed of. His sacrifice is never adequately set up and so feels like a random decision; there are a hundred ways to destroy a satellite and it's never established that this was the only viable one. It's a beat which is never earned, and undermines the bitter sweetness of Clark losing the last of Krypton just as he finds it. Smith's script failed in a similar approach to the destruction of The Eradicator, but it was the character's internal logic which didn't hold up; the structure was sound enough. K's character has no such structure.
• The plot. It's dumb, and as it dictates the characters, so are they. Having mocked Smith for using the "Mr. Burns ploy" in his script, Strick sticks with the same plan, albeit with details tweaked here and there. The structure of the story is largely the same, as is the intertwining of Superman's origins with K and Brainiac. As we noted earlier, it's likely that Strick was hemmed in by the sheer amount of time and money already spent on development, demanding adherence to certain parameters; if the art department was working from Smith's script, he couldn't veer too far off without making that work worthless. And yet this version is actually dumber, because the Shadowcaster only darkens part of the American mid-west; it doesn't even extend to Chicago, where Jimmy's mother reports that it's sunny and warm. All Superman has to do is stray out of the shadow zone to regain his powers. I'll buy the fact that Clark doesn't know his gifts are derived from sunlight, but as his sickness coincides with the eclipse, it wouldn't hurt to apply a little common sense. That never happens, though, because of...
• Failures of logic and an inability to define and adhere to its own rules.
• • Brainiac "needs refined energy" but is travelling the galaxy in a big-ass skull-ship crewed by dozens of mutants. How did he get to our system? He's on Earth's doorstep but hasn't been able to detect that we use nuclear power; it takes North America coming into view before he sees it. Nobody sees him coming, nor parked in orbit, nor zipping down in his shuttle to tear open Superman's tomb.
  • Superman flies into orbit to get a good look at the Shadowcaster and somehow doesn't manage to spot the skull-ship, yet he can later pick out both from the surface.
  • Superman agrees to trade K for the Shadowcaster.  Why would Lexiac trade something which, when destroyed, would see Superman's powers restored? And if K is able to duplicate those powers, why does Superman not simply destroy the Shadowcaster rather than barter for it? "Because they have Lois!" you say. But Superman is trying to convince Lexiac that he doesn't care about Lois, and if this were true he has nothing to lose by destroying the Shadowcaster. Not destroying it using the K-suit gives the game away, and thus his bluff doesn't make any sense. And why set the swap for the stroke of midnight when Metropolis is permanently dark?
  • Once Superman is back, his powers restored, K says another shot from the sun gun would kill him. If it didn't kill him when he was powerless, why should it now?
  • After his restoration, his old suit simply appears on him, cape and all.  It wasn't sitting under the "new" suit, so where did it come from?  It's as illogical as Poirier's magic glasses.
  • Superman's cape, which has in no way been established as special (other than appearing spontaneously as part of his new ensemble) is used to block the sun gun's barrel and destroy it. It survives said blast intact. If his "new" old costume is going to be Kryptonian technology, or even part of K, that's fine... but it's never established as the case.
  • K has a perpetual battery; it's the macguffin on which half the film is built. So how exactly does one completely discharge a perpetual battery in order to destroy a Shadowcaster?
  • The "S" stands for Science. Because apparently, Krypton shares our alphabet.
• The villains are awful. Both are scenery chewing, moustache-twirling caricatures. Has anyone ever demanded we hear Luthor telling someone to "chill" like a late '90s L.A. hipster? Brainiac's dialogue is so arch it's painful; it's the kind of material a performer like Jim Carrey could make work because he's so over the top, but that doesn't mean he should have to.
• Pop-culture references. They don't just date a script, they ensure the writer looks embarrassingly out of touch.  Lex impersonates Don King; badly.  Lex riffs on Rocky; badly.  Doomsday bites Superman's ears in a draft dated 10 days after the infamous Tyson/Holyfield fight. All this is enough to make your eyes roll so hard they never come back, but then there's the holy grail; something to rival Poirier's "THRASHING ALTERNATIVE MUSIC". Strick describes Kal-El, lurking in the shadows of the burning city, as looking like a "A hip-hop Phantom of the Opera".  That this ends up not being the dumbest line in the script says a lot. How about "Fade back to my crib?" Eurgh. Let's not.
• Thematic sledgehammers. "Maybe a non-human can be as human as you or I. If we treat him that way."  Theme is fine, arguably necessary, but best when skillfully woven into a story instead of crammed down our throats.  Come the climax, theme is simply permitted to outweigh logic, and we have a nonsensical playing out of an inner conflict which has already been resolved. If Superman's great strength couldn't keep him out of Lexiac's grasp, how does Lois manage to do so? Because it fits the theme. Was the whole thing taking place on some kind of metaphysical level? Who cares? THEME. What are Brainiac's psychic powers and where did they come from? THE THEMEVILLE BRANCH OF THEMES 'R US, UNITED STATES OF THEMERICA. Why does Superman's resistance to Lexiac's psychic field cause Lexiac's self-destruction? THEMETHEMETHEME CAN'T HEAR YOU. Well, okay... but unless theme and action are married logically, this is the kind of disconnected outcome you're going to end up with.
• Confusing action. Much of the climax takes place aboard the Shadowcaster, but there's never an adequate description of the geography.  The slugline is INT./EXT., but how can the mutants be firing at Superman from inside without breaching their own hull? We're never told. How can Superman be talking if he's in the vacuum of space? We're never told. Whilst the very idea of Lexiac has drawn derision, it's a potentially workable idea if executed properly. Trouble is, we're never given a proper visualisation to hang a hat on. Having read the script three times, I still have no real idea what he's supposed to look like. Maybe they were still designing the toy.
• It's not really for kids. Strick said that “What excited Tim was that, in contrast to the two Batman films... Superman was going to be a superhero adventure set primarily in daylight; in sunlight, even." But that's a bait and switch, because more than half the script takes place during an eclipse. Regardless, night or day isn't necessarily an indicator of tone. Warners seems to have no problem with dark movies. They definitely have no problem with movies designed to sell toys.  But when those are the same movies? It's no wonder they went apeshit, recalling the huge parental backlash over Batman Returns. The toy and merchandising opportunities they were so desperate for are duly delivered, but in the company of some pretty dark stuff which arguably isn't fit for the kids the film is targeting. A row of scientists skewered like so much kebab; Brainiac dangling naked corpses by the feet; naked Superman wondering around the Fortress of Solitude; the weirdly eroticised merger of Lex and Braniac, and a pretty overt threat of rape in the final act. Sure, it's not Lemkin draft-dark, but what is?

Conclusion

Trying to figure out what didn't work here was a huge task because there's just too much. When there's so many problems you start to sub-classify, you know you're in trouble.

"Superman" quite possibly represents the nadir of Hollywood's approach to comic book properties in the 1990s. The verisimilitude* Donner and Mankiewicz strove for on the first one and a half Superman films had long been thrown to the dogs. Although it would be re-adopted in the following wave (beginning with Blade), at this point Superman was a victim of precisely the opposite approach, assuming the audience's acceptance of the fantastical premise allowed carte blanch for any old nonsense on top, regardless of character and story.  The attitude seemed to be "It's a comic book movie, what do you expect?"

The unmade Superman scripts to this point are entirely indicative of that mindset. Whilst it isn't quite mired in the ludicrous campiness of Batman and Robin, it's unquestionably all about style over substance, treating the characters with something bordering on contempt while it focuses on whizz-bang, toy options and spasms of gross-out humour.  Had this draft made it to the screen in the wake of Batman & Robin, it could have put comic book movies down for good.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man Of Steel is a 10):  4

Again, much of the Doomsday brawl takes place in the sewers, and again, there's no real effort to move the battle somewhere less built-up.  Superman is cunningly absolved of any responsibility for Lexiac's destruction by the utterly unscientific psychic forcefield; he essentially ensures its destruction by his inaction. Sure, it's guilt-free, but it's also dramatically inert.

(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.)

*Ironically, EW seemed to think all four Reeve films were "campy". What would they have made of this?