Superman Unmade #3: Superman Reborn (Take 3C)

Here there be spoilers.

Less of an incremental post, this time we look at some major revisions in Gregory Poirier's third draft of Superman Reborn. I'll try not to repeat myself; for more background, see analysis of the first and second drafts.

Side note: I've also been reading up on Brainiac, particularly Alan Kistler's profile, which is well worth a read for those interested in the history of the character, given his heavy use in these unproduced screenplays. What's interesting to me is that the Brainiac presented in these drafts is neither the living computer of the pre-Crisis DC universe (and the 1992 script) nor the alien-possessed mentalist of the post-Crisis era. The notion of him upgrading himself is still front and centre, but it's all about biology, not technology.

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?

This draft is dated 22.2.96

How long is it?

120 pages (longer than draft 2 at 119, shorter than draft 1 at 122)

What's the broad structure?

Act 1: 1-26
Act 2A: 27-56
Act 2B: 58-93
Act 3: 94-120

What's the context?

This is the third and final draft Poirier wrote for producer Jon Peters. With two months to revise and rewrite, he changed some things considerably. There's next to no information available about this process, and whether the rewrite was driven by Peters' notes, the studio's, or both.

What's changed (and works better)?

• Brainiac's methodology. From the outset it's now established that rather than picking random individuals (or Princess Leia surrogates) he's deliberately targeting each world's strongest individual from whom to cherry-pick DNA. 
• There's also a much earlier acknowledgement that he needs a Kryptonian specifically, rather than his apparently random desire to head to Earth in the previous two drafts, which left Cadmus to explain his motivations.
• Silver Banshee is retooled as a Brainiac-created sidekick from the outset. This may not please fans of the existing DC Universe character (assuming there are any), but it introduces her quickly and effectively negates the need for an origin story. She's also a far more interesting sidekick than the alien Hestes (present in the first two drafts and now relegated to a cameo). The dynamic between Banshee and Brainiac is simply better; there's hints of a patriarchal/sexual relationship, but also allusions to that relationship becoming abusive, which is a little dark for a Superman movie but is at least aiming for a degree of complexity.
• The dynamic between Superman and Lois is better articulated.  They meet on her balcony three or four times a week and flirt around the furniture; just how serious they are about each other is what Lois wants to know.
• Clark's sloppiness is telling better; Perry chews him out for ignoring the drug lab fire which creates Parasite.
• Cadmus' computer now delivers our exposition, laying out the facts; without Kryptonian DNA, Brainiac will die in 122 hours.  The countdown, for him at least, is established much earlier.
• For the first time, Superman's earth family is acknowledged, with Lois calling Martha to tell her that Clark is missing. You can't exactly feel Martha's agony dripping off the page (Superman Returns' play on the same kind of scene works much better) but it's a move in the right direction.  To be fair, it's a difficult scene to make play; when Martha knows he's dead, how can she convincingly tell Lois she's sure he's fine?  By the same token, saying "I'm sure he's fine" comes off, at least to Lois, like she barely cares at all. There's a tragic dichotomy implicit in the set-up which doesn't quite make it into the scene as written.
• Brainiac is no longer the destroyer of Krypton. It simply isn't needed for emotional depth, and it makes nothing more personal for Superman.  Having him driven off by Jor-El, though, does make the story more personal for Brainiac, though it's not much explored as a motive because its overridden by his genetic needs.
• Lois joining the army insertion team makes a lick more sense; she trades her lipstick-camera photos of the inside of Brainiac's ship for access. It's still not exactly feasible but it's the best effort yet.
• Brainiac actually leaves his ship for the first time in any of these drafts, making him slightly more dynamic in the final act.
• Poirier better develops the real doubt as to whether Superman wants to carry on. He's being pulled in two directions; a normal life in which the world faces imminent destruction because of his unwillingness to act, or a return to his old, hyper-kinetic, lonely existence in a world free of Brainiac's tyranny. In many ways this is classic drama; he can't have it all, so which is the lesser of the two evils? It's trite and conceited but his moment of resolution, when he takes off the suit and flies off under his own power, is the sort of visual dramatisation of an internal struggle that movies can convincingly sell.  It could have been a heck of a crowd pleaser.

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

• Parasite has changed from a lab-janitor to a lawyer. Unfortunately his origin remains ridiculous (he's now the product of a drug-lab fire) and his presence unnecessary.  Even if his origin is tied better to the consequences of Superman's crime-fighting, it's undercut by Kal-El's decision to simply let a mid-town drug lab explode (endangering thousands) rather than blowing the fire out. Not to mention that his super-hearing uncovers a cat amid the flames, but misses a live man. If they'd tied this failure of his hearing to the notion of his powers waning as he loses faith in his calling (an idea which the explanation of Phin-Yar flirts with), it could have had more emotional resonance. Superman would almost have been responsible for Parasite.
• Lois Lane, dynamic reporter, one of the great female comic book characters, is introduced... asleep. Not superhero cinema's finest feminist hour.
• Therapy.  This scene has been shifted around, and despite not changing much, there is one telling inclusion; Clark admits he doesn't feel part of the city.  He feels above it.  Is Poirier trying to explore what it feels like to be a god?  The trouble is it's still played for laughs, which renders the whole thing limp when the gravity of his problem demands more.
• Brainiac changes the statue of liberty to a statue of himself. His power is that enormous. He's a telepath, a telekinetic, and can apparently manipulate reality itself. What's so damned hard about finding one body?
• Parasite presents himself to Brainiac and offers to lead the hunt for the body in exchange for the annihilator.  It's the same movement, but with slightly different starting positions, but I'll say it again; Parasite does not need to be in this movie.
• There's things which are obvious holdovers from the previous drafts and make no sense in the context of this one. The logic behind Carillean orbs has been suspect from the start, but it's now reached a different level. How can Cadmus have recorded Krypton's last moments if all he does is follow Brainiac around, and in this draft Brainiac is no longer responsible for the planet's destruction? It's a cheap narrative trick for flashing back to Krypton in a bid to impart emotional significance. Poirier tries to explain it later on with a throwaway line that makes things worse, not better.
• Brainiac offers to take the Kryptonian DNA he needs and leave Superman human, promising he'll stop the countdown. He argues that the alternative will result in all their deaths. The trouble is it's nonsensical. Superman knows he can't trust Brainiac to keep his word. His other choice is to try to stop him, and the worst case scenario out of that is that he fails, whereupon the same fate befalls them all anyway. It's not a dilemma when the worst case scenario is the same no matter which path you choose, and one path has no up-side.

Conclusion
The theme of Superman Reborn is that you can't escape who you are, even in death. However, exploring this means it's more like Batman Forever than Lemkin's draft, which was supposedly abandoned for those very reasons. (You can read about why I think that's a crock here.)

While this draft improves upon the first two in a number of significant ways, there are still huge failures of logic and too much reliance on ideas seemingly cribbed from other movies and self-help philosophies. It's a 90s Superhero movie, laden down by old, lazy assumptions about spectacle trumping character. With ideas thrown at the wall in a bid to see what sticks, its blanks are begging to be painted in with Hollywood's increasingly sophisticated CGI paintbrush.

Knowing what we know of Jon Peters, it's incredibly difficult not to see his hand at work in many of the ideas, but this is just interpretation, based on others' recollections of him before and after this period. Neither Jonathan Lemkin nor Gregory Poirier has ever given much voice to their experiences working on these scripts, through either lack of desire or opportunity.  The quotes attributed to them seem to have come, mostly, from those articles attributed by David Hughes in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. As a result, they've been held implicitly responsible for the many faults, and we're none the wiser as to the compromises forced upon them by studio and producer notes. It's a common situation with assignment screenplays; the work rarely reflects a single writer's intentions because there are too many fingerprints on it, but it's the writer's name which ends up on a script (and sometimes a movie) which people hate. It's that disdain which endures.

Fortunately, this draft marks a watershed for the on-life-support franchise. The "dark" period of Superman on film, with deals done and scripts written in (relative) anonymity would come to a brief end when Warners hired the fearlessly verbose Kevin Smith to start again, from scratch.

Even if he didn't tell tales out of school at the time, Smith would become a master of the art in the not-too-distant future. He, along with the Internet (and the evolution of fan culture it set in motion) would begin to throw some light on the scuttling clusterfuck of Superman's development hell.

Superman Reborn was about to be reborn... as Superman Lives.

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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 #3: Superman Reborn (Take 3B)

Here there be spoilers.

This is more an incremental post, dealing with relatively minor revisions in the second (known) draft of Gregory Poirier's Superman Reborn. I'll try not to repeat myself, analysis of the first draft is here.

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?

This draft is dated 20.12.95, eight days after the last.

How long is it?

119 pages (down from 122 for the first)

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?

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.) 

Superman Unmade #3: Superman Reborn (Take 3A)

Here there be spoilers.

"If there are any movies we kept looking to over and over again in relationship to this, it's Star Wars and The Lion King." - Jonathan Lemkin on his draft of Superman Reborn.

First things first, I implore you to check out Film Crit Hulk's incredibly detailed story autopsy on Man of Steel.  He talks a lot of sense, and whether you agree with him or not, it's a worthwhile read for anyone interested in story mechanics, and specifically the story mechanics of Superman.  It's a long read, and the all-caps doesn't help, but hey, that's Hulk.

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?

This draft is dated 12.12.95

How long is it?

122 pages

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-27
Act 2a = 28-57
Act 2b = 58-98
Act 3 = 99-122

What's the context?

Having tossed aside Jonathan Lemkin's take (allegedly for its thematic similarities to Batman Forever) Warner kept faith with Jon Peters to oversee the project.  He hired his Rosewood screenwriter Gregory Poirier, a 1990 Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist, to pen the new draft.  Poirier seems to have written at least three drafts which have surfaced.

Why didn't it happen?

One man brought Superman Reborn down.  Kevin Smith, writer/director of Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, was at Warners for meetings with top brass over potential rewrite projects.  Asked to assess the Poirier script (which draft isn't clear), Smith told them he hated it, calling it "The Batman TV show version of a Superman movie."  (2:08 on the video).

Eventually sat down with Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, head of production at Warner, Smith was handed the keys and told to go off in a new direction.

The Script

It's really tough to know where to start with Poirier's Superman Reborn, the last script to bear that title before the long-gestating project became Superman Lives.
Reading all three drafts illuminates plenty about the art, purpose and practicalities of rewriting to accommodate producer and studio notes.  The second draft is dated just 8 days after this one, while the third and final (that we know of) is dated three months later, and clearly reflects the extra time allowed to polish and refine it.  Ultimately, I decided that to maintain the structure of these pieces it would be better to address them all as different scripts.

So who's our protagonist?

Superman, silly. ;o)

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

He wants to belong.
This, once again, is a Superman for the '90s.  An alien, feeling outcast and ostracised on Earth, and flirting with therapy.  He doesn't feel this is his home, but knows he has nowhere else to go.  In keeping with the previous drafts, there's a huge hole in his relationship with Lois, but here it appears to be less formally defined.  They are clearly in love, but they're not "together" per se.

What happens next?

The alien tyrant Brainiac arrives, looking for Kryptonian DNA to stabilise his genetic structure.  Roaming the galaxy absorbing the DNA of other races, and destroying their worlds in the process, Brainiac's physical condition is slowly deterioriating as his genetic accumulations refuse to gel.

Brainiac unleashes Doomsday, an unstoppable monster with Kryptonite for blood, who kills the Man of Steel.  But Doomsday forgets to bring back the body, and it subsequently goes missing, so Brainiac turns to two Earthly accomplices, Silver Banshee and Parasite, for help.  Enveloping Metropolis in an energy field to prevent removal of the body, Brainiac demands its delivery within 48 hours, or he will destroy the city with his annihilator.

Somewhere deep under water, another alien, called Cadmus, has the body on a slab, and is busy putting his own plans for it into action when Superman unexpectedly wakes up...

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

When Superman awakens, his powers have vanished.  Learning from Cadmus that his abilities actually derive from a Kryptonian martial discipline known as Phin-Yar (though this is never really explained), Superman is forced to confront the notion that they have disappeared because, essentially, he doesn't want them anymore.  Faced with the prospect of a normal life, he still feels duty-bound to save the city, and begins breaking Brainiac's hold by using a mechanical suit which replicates all his old powers.  But as the suit begins to fail, and the countdown to Metropolis' destruction ticks away, he is forced to confront his feelings of isolation and loneliness, and accept that Metropolis is where he belongs.  In turn, he discovers that the city appreciates him after all, and slowly regains his powers just in time for a final showdown with Brainiac.

What works?

• Clark as alien, and alienated.  He's reaching a point in his life where, as a normal human male, he's expected to be thinking about settling down, having kids, and setting up the second act of his life.  Instead he's running around dealing with everyone else's problems, and his career is at risk as his distraction manifests itself.  He generally feels like he doesn't belong.  This is a far stronger position for the character than either of the last two scripts because he wants something, even if he's not sure what that is.  Kevin Smith has gone on the record with his annoyance at this; "Superman’s angst is not that he doesn’t want to be Superman. If he has any (angst), it’s that he can’t do it all; he can’t do enough and save everyone... Batman is about angst; Superman is about hope. It's not enough to make him want to quit being Superman; it's enough to make the guy stay up at night so he's out doing shit constantly.”  Ultimately, this comes down to whether one's view of the character is immutable, which I sense Smith's is.  I certainly don't feel there's anything wrong in exploring his sense of alienation if it means getting to the hope in the end.  That's his arc.
• Cadmus is not a bad character, he's just completely derivative.  He's been chasing Brainiac for hundreds of years so this is personal for him.  He's Obi-Wan Kenobi crossed with Han Solo.  Old and wise, but street-smart, cynical and not interested in taking anyone else's shit.  He is, however, so derivative that there's really only one way his story can end.
• Lois and Clark; there's a bitter-sweet angle to their relationship.  This is a friendship that could once have been something more, but whose time seems to have passed.  Once again, Clark's potential as "Mr Right Now" is highlighted in stark contrast to the pedestal-dwelling Superman.
• Poirier actually tries to give us what I wanted from the Bates/Jones draft; a tough protagonist's decision in the 2nd act.  Clark is torn between abandoning his life as Superman, and ensuring the safety of Metropolis.  If the suit works well enough, he could walk away when Brainiac is defeated and live a normal life.  Ultimately, he remembers who he is and why he does what he does.  Once he realises that, we suspect he would carry on even if he had to use the suit for the rest of his life.  It's the decision, the intention and the will that help make him Superman, not just the powers.  It's this that treads the same ground as Batman Forever, far more so than Lemkin's draft.  Will the hero choose to forsake his alter-ego for the sake of a normal life?
• A ticking time bomb.  48 hours to bring Brainiac Superman's body, or Metropolis is razed.  That's a decent, driving incentive for Acts 2 and 3.  The watch countdown motif is dumb but effective.  Why Brainiac suddenly downgrades from planet-popping to mere city-razing is another question entirely.
• The Super-suit.  Just.  It feels like it was designed to sell toys, but crucially, the suit serves a useful narrative function; with it, a powerless Superman can still be Superman.  It's not perfect, but it gives him a means to continue being useful during Act 2, and helps drive his arc by enabling him to consider how he can save the world AND think about walking away from it.  It also works because it doesn't work; it replicates his powers but can wig out at any point, which at least makes it dramatically interesting.
• Superman gets to see his own funeral.  Carillean technology allows Cadmus to record the final days of a planet for holographic playback, and so Superman can witness his own burial, see the outpouring of grief, and starts to realise that perhaps he is appreciated here after all.  As motivations go, it's pretty on the nose, but effective.
• Kryptonite.  Again, it's given more to do than the usual "hang around and make like a green rock".  Yes, the idea of Doomsday having Kryptonite blood is dumb, but it's actually one of the least offensive dumb ideas here.

What doesn't work?

• Poirier's draft takes Jonathan Lemkin's assertion that Superman is like Batman crossed with Star Wars and runs with it.  Very, very far.  The first scenes are of a princess being kidnapped and forced to watch her planet destroyed by a super-weapon.
• Far, far too many antagonists.  Once again we have the curse of the comic book movie; a hilariously illogical alliance of villains.  Reborn almost simultaneously sounds the same notes as Batman & Robin:
• The Brute, crudely adapted from an era-defining villain - Bane/Doomsday.  Grown in a lab with Kryptonite for blood to do one thing; kill Superman.  However, he is later seen off by Lois jamming a knife under his fingernail, and is ultimately killed by… falling rubble.  Doomsday was never exactly a rounded character, but he's little more than a device here, and once he's served that purpose there's nothing for him to do.  He makes Schumacher's version of Bane look almost reverential.
• The Femme Fatale - Poison Ivy/Silver Banshee. Silver Banshee (a Scotswoman who says "me" instead of "my") has a retinue of male models who laze around her apartment 90% naked, steal diamonds for her, and are routinely dispatched post-coitus by the effects of her magical voice-box. If that sounds like something you'd want to see, I can only assume you are Joel Schumacher.
• The Accidental Supervillain - Mr. Freeze/Parasite.  Who knew a lab fire could turn a guy purple and enable him to harvest the life-force from anyone he touches?  Parasite also serves as the comic relief; except there's little comedy and next to no relief.  There may well be a place for him in a Superman movie one day, but there are roughly a dozen better antagonists to get through first.

• The Batman cameo.  The Dark Knight pops up at Superman's funeral to say a few words.  Five, to be exact.  He then vanishes, ignoring the force-field surrounding the city, and apparently dismissing this most inter-galactic of crimes.  We can only assume that Metropolite problems aren't in his job description.  The point is, if you're going to have Batman pop up, have him do something useful.  Will he splinter the focus of the story?  Of course he will. So why is he here?
• Superman as Rocky Balboa.  We already established that Cadmus is basically Obi-Wan Solo, but come the second act, he's become Mickey Goldmill and Mr. Miyagi too.  For Superman, act 2 is basically motivational psychology and training montages.  Speaking of which…
• Phin-Yar.  The Kryptonian martial discipline is a means of dramatising Superman's struggle to unite his heart, body and mind.  It's the external goal of getting his powers back twinned with the internal goal of accepting himself and his place in the universe, but it's hard to argue with Kevin Smith's assertion that this displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Superman mythos.  It's part The Force, part self-help, part Sun Tzu.  At one point Cadmus tells him to "think about why you lost your powers.  What are you supposed to learn from it?" and my eyes rolled so far back in my head I almost lost them for good.
• RET-CON ALERT!  It turns out that Brainiac destroyed Krypton.  Because landing in Metropolis Central Park, unleashing Doomsday to kill Superman and threatening to destroy his adopted city clearly hasn't made things personal enough.  Not only that, but through Cadmus' Carillean technology, Superman gets to witness the moment his parents packed him off in the life-pod as Krypton came crashing down around them.  There are just so many holes in this version of events that to pick at them would be the very definition of fish in a barrel.
• Jimmy Olsen plays a fairly prominent role, but in this continuity he's moved into TV, and it's done nothing for him.  Frankly, he comes across as a bit of a douche.
• The "MTV Generation" again.  At one point Jimmy and Lois spill out of a chase into a basement rave, described as "MTV's Grind inhabited by sexy zombies".  Yes, SEXY Zombies.  Presumably they try to mate with you before/after/whilst eating your brains.  Poirier at least seems to be playing it for satire, hence the entirely straight-faced line "Blend in, we'll be okay."  
• Lois "listens to THRASHING ALTERNATIVE music like Green Day or Alanis Morrisette."  That sentence pretty much satirises itself.
• Superman's magic glasses.  Not only do they appear and disappear at will, they make the wearer look 50% frumpier.  Lois puts them on, and is shocked when she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she's seeing another woman.  This is actually a great idea for a revelatory scene, but... MAGIC GLASSES.  There's no explanation of how they work.  There's no deeper thinking.  They just are.
• A ticking time bomb.  We already covered this in things that work, but come the third act, it ceases to work at all.  By page 109, Brainiac knows Superman is alive, and his location.  In fact, Brainiac has everything he wants on board his ship.  Why doesn't he destroy Metropolis at this point?  Take off, obliterate the planet from orbit.  Job done.  Needless to say, he doesn't.
• Superman kills.  I don't have a problem with him using necessary force if there's no other way.  If that means he has to kill, so be it.  Others will argue that it's Superman's very resistance to killing that makes him interesting.  But here, he never explores options other than killing to win.  I wasn't at all upset by him breaking General Zod's neck because it was clear that Zod could be neither captured nor pacified; the same goes for the Zod in Superman II.  There's no such groundwork laid here, so it feels like killing for the sake of it.  There are four antagonists, and he brings not a single one in alive.

Conclusion
We're waaaaay outside the Chris Reeve era here, but this is no reboot.  We're mid-continuity, with established characters and paradigms of a franchise in need of complete recasting.  Now, we tend to think of every change in principle cast as being a cue to reboot.  But back in 1995, Bond had changed (often), Batman had changed, and nobody started again... the films simply carried on.  Why not Superman?

In 2013, it's easy to wonder why these unmade scripts kept falling in between stools, but at this point the reboot hadn't even been invented yet.  There weren't so many sequels back then that the notion of starting from scratch was even viable.  Now, almost twenty years later, even successful franchises are due a reset.  Consider Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy; it's because of the success of his vision that Batman is going to end up rebooted.  Nobody is going to want to play in Nolan's universe, in his timeline, with new actors.  The result will be another reset, and likely another origin story.

It's not at all hard to see why all involved thought Poirier's Superman Reborn needed more work, at the very least.  It's a mish-mash of basically sound narrative technique with some truly horrible ideas.  It fails on too many levels, skirting Batman & Robin awfulness whilst never, thankfully, descending into the seventh level of camp that film occupies.  It's big, it's bloated, it would have cost a bomb, and with a multitude of narrative and logical disconnects at play, it doesn't actually make much sense.

That said, it'll be interesting to examine what, exactly, Poirier changed in the next draft.  What problems had he, Peters and Warner Bros. identified and how did they go about dealing with them?  In Hollywood, it's very easy to throw writers from the train and get someone else in; Poirier at least got three shots at hitting whatever target Peters and Warners were pointing him at.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man of Steel is a 10): 5  Comparatively little preventable destruction (even though he doesn't ever try to divert Doomsday away from populated areas), but Superman is directly responsible for at least two deaths, and there are two more he could, perhaps should, have prevented.

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