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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(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.) 

Thoughts on Protagonism

In the previous posts about unmade Superman projects, I didn't wrestle with the notion of protagonism enough, or correctly.  I've been thinking about it since immediately after they went up.

I concentrated too much on my faulty understanding of what a protagonist does (i.e. their function in the story) and ignored what they are (i.e. the story as a means of exploring them).  That's not a good way to think when you're trying to develop character-driven stories.  It's mechanistic.  I'm not even sure it's an easy mistake to make, as it's rather a fundamental misunderstanding.

The word Protagonist comes from the Greek Protos, meaning "first in importance" and Agonistes, meaning "actor".

Who is first in importance in this story?

Whose story is this?

The protagonist is the character in whose story (whether that involves a dramatic arc or not) we need to be invested.  It doesn't necessarily follow that this character has to be the one behind the inciting incident (hence my mistake in attributing Brainiac, Morpheus and Delia as the protagonists).  

But it DOES follow that their inner/outer turmoil in dealing with the inciting incident and how it changes their world should drive the story forward.

Reframed in the correct context, Superman is clearly the protagonist of both the scripts we've looked at.  The villains are the antagonists.  The inciting incident is, well, incidental (at least to this argument).

I'm not going to go back and change the posts, as it's a learning experience and I've got to cop to my mistakes.  I will put a link to this post in though, for posterity, so you'll all know I've changed my ways. ;0)

Superman Unmade #2: Superman Reborn (Take 2)

Here there be spoilers.

“The good thing about Superman is that he wants to do the right thing. There’s something about Superman that’s great in terms of his attitude of stepping into the breach, come what may.”

Confronted by aliens who manifest physical projections of his darkest fears, Superman is killed in battle.  Transcending his body, he is reborn as Lois Lane’s son and raised in the sewers by a rag-tag band of mutants and freaks.  As Metropolis is torn apart by fear and chaos, the reborn and rapidly maturing Boy of Steel must find a way to emerge from hiding and preserve his father’s legacy.

Who wrote it?

Jonathan Lemkin, credited writer on Lethal Weapon 4, The Devil’s Advocate, Shooter and Red Planet.

When was it written?

This draft is dated 24.3.95.

How long is it?

58 pages (scanned from hard-copy).

What's the broad structure?

Act 1: pages 1-25

Act 2a: pages 26-58

What's the context?

With Superman back in Warners’ hands after buying out the Salkinds, the studio put Jon Peters to work on the franchise, confident his experience herding Tim Burton’s Batman to the screen would pay off for them again.  Peters hired Jonathan Lemkin to write the first draft.  

Lemkin goes on the record in David Hughes’s The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made

“I think, based on the action of Lethal Weapon 4, some of the more supernatural elements of Devil’s Advocate and the fantasy elements of Demolition Man, everyone felt comfortable with going forward with me as the writer of Superman Reborn”.

There’s a curious cyclicity to the whole business.  Movies take a long time to make.  Scripts can be in development for years before even pre-production starts.  Curiously, Lethal Weapon 4, which Lemkin cites as one of the reasons he got the Superman job, wasn’t released until more than 3 years after this was written.  It was also, famously, rushed into production with no finalised script, allegedly because Warner Bros. had a Krypton-sized hole in their 1998 release schedule caused by the implosion of… Superman Lives, which Superman Reborn had evolved into.

Why didn't it happen?

Lemkin cites the similarities in theme and tone to Batman Forever as the reason Warners decided not to press ahead with his script.  Peters hired Gregory Poirier for a page one rewrite.

The Script

To call this script bat-shit crazy does bat-shit crazy a disservice.

Let's not kid ourselves; similarities between this and Batman Forever are not the reason it didn’t get made.  Yes, they touch on some of the some themes, but the underlying reasons it never went further are much, much more obvious.  Lemkin says that his only briefs were to write a great film, and to reinvent Superman for the MTV generation.

 

Lord knows what Jon Peters thought of the MTV generation.

Lemkin was also, allegedly, bound by the commercial realities of Hollywood film-making.  In this case, the deals which can be made with toy companies to off-set the huge production and marketing costs inherent in blockbuster film-making.

“This is a huge corporate asset, and if you look at the marketing that can come from this, it’s phenomenal. So they’re being very careful with what we do.”

Apparently there’s a word for the suitability of a film to be turned into toys.  Toyetic.

Superman Reborn is not toyetic.

It is not a script for a family movie.  In fact it opens with the legend: “No one is here to save you anymore”.  Can you see that plastered all over little Johnny’s Christmas morning prezzies?  The notion of toy companies merchandising a film which involves the death of the entire principle cast in the first 20 minutes, murder, rape, orgies and general chaos as society collapses in on itself is… a stretch, to say the least.  It’s not impossible that it was those companies who nixed this, having first look rights under their merchandising deal.

So who's our protagonist?

Once again, it’s not Superman, but two transient alien energy beings able to assume human form: Morpheus and Delia.  Their origin is never explained.  I haven’t been able to find a trace of them in the Superman mythos so it seems they were Lemkin’s original creations.  Without their arrival, smashing to earth inside a meteorite, the story doesn’t happen.
*For updated thoughts on protagonism, see my new post*

What does our protagonist want at the start of the story? 

They’re tricksters; their aim is not just to conquer but to toy with worlds, to destroy champions, wreck the planet, feed on the fear and chaos they generate, and move on.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

Once again, he’s doing fine.  But much like the previous script, Lois is unhappy, unable to see them ever settling down and having a normal life.  In short, she wants out.

What happens next?

Interrupted mid break-up, Superman goes into battle with a being formed from his darkest fears, the final iteration of which is a giant Kryptonite being.  With the Man of Steel six feet under, Morpheus and Delia set about creating chaos.  But Superman’s spirit has undergone some kind of transference, impregnating Lois with his child, which comes to term in a single week.  She and Jimmy Olsen are killed protecting the baby, who is taken in by Harry Cadamus, a 120 year old geneticist living underground in a hidden community of mutants he helped engineer.  The boy, whom he names Miles McGee, continues ageing rapidly, growing to the age of 11 in a week.  But the older he gets, the quicker his powers develop, and the more curious he becomes about who he is and where he came from…

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

If we ascribe Kal-El’s conflicts to his son, given that he is essentially Superman resurrected…  It’s still tough to say, as there's only half a script.  What we do know is that it's about hope versus fear.  The internal goal is represented externally by Morpheus’ visual readouts, which document the city’s levels of hope versus fear like some kind of emotional stat bar.  Every night, fear wins.  But every morning, people wake with the hope of a new day and better day.  Morpheus is infuriated by this; what does it take to break these people?  It’s a little on the nose, but not ineffective.

So let’s extrapolate, given what we know and where the arcs start.  Given that the film is about hope versus fear, and Superman’s fear is what ultimately destroyed him, I don’t think it’s outrageous to postulate that it’s Miles’ faith in himself that allows him to triumph.  Are we sure he wins?  No.  But given that this script was designed to breathe life into the character on screen and resurrect the franchise, it’s a fairly safe bet.  It’ll be Miles' ability to push through his fear in a way his father couldn’t which will ultimately be Metropolis’ salvation.  It's hinted that he's also able to manifest his own thoughts physically, so this would probably have had a part to play in the final confrontation.

In a similar vein, humanity’s arc, from a society molly-coddled by the presence of a living God upon whom it relies for salvation, could end in a new-found heroism amongst the civilian populace.  It’s hinted at earlier, but I’d expect to see it ratcheted up in the final act as both Superman and Metropolis face their fears, bring down Morpheus and restore hope for the future.

What works?

• It’s a good story, essentially Batman with Superpowers.  Miles’ parents are murdered, and he grows up in a world racked by fear and chaos, a metaphorical darkness, only to emerge from that to avenge them.  The themes are timeless; fear versus hope.  The absence of a father and the appearance of a new father figure are very much in keeping with previous iterations of the character.

• Kryptonite.  Instead of an inert rock, it’s used sparingly, given form and purpose; the Kryptonite monster which manifests itself from Superman’s darkest fears is a proactive use of the classic Superman storytelling crutch.

• As much as certain aspects of the original Superman’s portrayal jar (see “what doesn’t work”, there’s an interesting concept underlying them.  Superman here is, as Morpheus points out, “a hero with a logical appreciation of his own shortcomings.”  We’re starting to move towards a more sophisticated, nuanced psychology of the superhero.  A man with doubts like any other.  In this case “what if something else is stronger?”

• In keeping with this, Superman’s strength makes the monster stronger.  This idea was also explored a little at the end of the 1992 script.  When someone is as strong as Superman, how do you develop drama?  By turning that strength against him.  He can’t outmuscle it, so what does he do?

• The infamous life-force transference.  I never had a problem with it.  If we’re going to suspend our disbelief enough to believe that a baby can travel billions of miles from an alien world, and then do all the stuff he can do… who’s to say how he procreates?  “The son becomes the father, and the father the son.”

• As much as the script dwells on hopelessness, there is a message of hope in there.  “It’s good to be tough, it’s not good to be hard”.

• 20 years before Batman Begins, Lemkin asks; what if the presence of your hero created your villains?  He also asks whether Superman’s presence has actually retarded humanity’s growth.  Doesn’t the presence of a god encourage us not to rely on ourselves, to expect to be saved?  It’s hard to know if he more deeply explored the implications of this in the second half.

• Morpheus is pretty funny, and not altogether detestable because of it.  It’s easy to imagine Jim Carrey pulling the role off in his sleep, but The Riddler was also a manic trickster, and that’s one of the things here that isn’t all that far removed from Batman Forever.

What doesn't work?

• Superman’s strength makes the monster stronger.  I know, we’ve been here in “things that worked”, right?  But having set up this interesting action dynamic, Lemkin squanders it by having him… outmuscle it anyway, pulling its head off and hurling it down the street.  (Man Of Steel haters take note; it could have been much worse.)  Having established an obstacle, Lemkin conveniently does away with it as soon as the monster has done its job, which is to usher out the established cinematic Superman on a gurney.

• That death is a little perfunctory.  It takes only five pages to detail a battle that kills a being as powerful as Superman.  Go big or go home.

• Morpheus wants to rule.  He states that he needs 80,000-100,000 minds enslaved to match Superman’s power… But he and Delia just killed Superman, the most powerful being on the planet by some stretch.  So what’s the end game?  The villains’ motivations aren’t outlined very well.  “To rule” seems a pretty amorphous goal.

• Superman is not the Superman we’re familiar with.  Morpheus describes him as cold-hearted, hopeless and faithless.  It plays up the alien aspect.  This is partially the tack that Goyer and Nolan have hung Man Of Steel on, but that’s a reboot.  Here, Superman is essentially mid-continuity; established in the world, working at The Daily Planet, in a relationship with Lois.  To paint this Superman as lacking faith, hope, and warmth would have been utterly jarring, because Reeve’s Superman is anything but.  Conversely, Morpheus also refers to those dregs of humanity who power him in the same terms.  They can’t both be true.

• The whole “MTV generation” vibe.  It's 1995, and Superman isn't cool anymore.  That means no cheesiness.  Only dark, grungy heroes need apply.  Our new Superman grows up in a sewer.  This emotional aesthetic seems to translate not only into a rumination on despair and hopelessness, but incredible amounts of sex, swearing and violence.  We’ve got more decapitations than Sleepy Hollow, skeletons being pulled out, head-shots, rape, hand-jobs, child-porn palaces, smashing a 9 year old with a pipe… and worst of all, Techno.  It’s almost Dickensian in its grimness, like Lemkin was daring Warners to fire him by writing something so outrageous it would never get past this draft.  Yes, it sets the scene and establishes the stakes, but this is a Superman movie.  It's too much.

• Meta-references.  My biggest issue with the whole thing.  Superman comic books exist in the Superman universe.  That’s useful as a device to inculcate Miles into the lore surrounding his father, but also show how humanity has abandoned its adoration of Superman.  Trouble is, it’s nothing some discarded newspapers and memorabilia couldn’t have done.  Similarly, Cadamus refers to “Ma and Pa Kent” like it’s common knowledge the couple raised him.  It doesn’t work.  It’s confusing and bizarre, the story-telling equivalent of the ’92 script’s wink to camera.

Conclusion

It’s strange that only half of Lemkin's script has ever shown up.  Was there every any more?  If there is a second half, why has it never surfaced?  It stops right in the middle of page 58 with a CUT TO, so it doesn’t look like someone just lopped it off at the end of an arbitrary page.  The script came to light as part of the deposition in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, wherein several unmade Superman scripts were produced to show the company’s continual investment in kick-starting the franchise. 

Given this context it’s hard to believe the second half wouldn’t have been part of the deposition.  Did Lemkin never finish?  If not, why not?  Did the toy companies nix it?  Did the notoriously mercurial Peters change his mind?

As much as it pisses on the movie continuity, there’s no doubt that the first 58 pages of Superman Reborn work as a story; just not necessarily a Superman story.  If you thought the Bates/Jones/Salkind draft read a little Elseworlds, this’ll blow your hair off.  The only thing I can think of to compare it to in that context is Frank Miller’s draft for the aborted Batman: Year One.  The one where Alfred is a black guy called “Little Al” and the Batmobile is a Lincoln Continental.  Superman Reborn looks over that script’s remolding of the basic story and sneers at it for not going far enough.  It’s so different I couldn’t imagine it ever getting made, but perhaps it’s very value lies in its reimagining of the basics.

Like the previous draft, Superman Reborn pre-supposes the existence of galactic cultures outside of Krypton and Earth, not to mention the existence of earthly mutants and the underground world they live in.  In that, it too feels more like the comics than the previous movies.  But it too has the same issue of jarring with those movies.  Regardless of age and accidents, the original cast could conceivably have started this story (the script mentions that Jimmy has now aged and has a family), but it’s hard to imagine them intending to invite Christopher Reeve back for what amounts to a 15 minute cameo before offing him.  By the same token, which actor would settle for being the new Superman all of 15 minutes before handing the mantle over to a series of kids and someone who passes as 21?  It’s not a hard reboot, so it’s tough to imagine anyone else in these roles.  It’s a hand-off movie, but it's so tonally inconsistent with the previous films that the only continuity would be the actors.  Once again, it falls between stools.

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

3 – A fair amount of property damage which Superman does nothing to try and prevent by removing the dream creature from Metropolis.  Having said that, he’s a little busy getting his arse kicked.  Property damage isn't the first thing on his mind, frankly.  It's hard to say where it all goes from there...

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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you happen to be the creator or originator of any materials you feel have been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)

Superman Unmade #1: Superman Reborn (AKA Superman: The New Movie)

Here there be spoilers.

Estranged from Lois Lane over his inability to commit, Superman is defeated by the alien body-shifting AI known as Brainiac.  Rescued by the shrunken Kryptonian city of Kandor, and rendered powerless by its red sun, he must convince its inhabitants to help him defeat Brainiac before he destroys Metropolis and, erm, has his way with Lois...

Who wrote it?
Story by Ilya Salkind, Mark Jones & Cary Bates, Screenplay by Mark Jones & Cary Bates.

When was it written?
This draft is dated 23.8.92 - it's marked Third draft, which suggests Ilya Salkind misremembers when he states that the writers developed two drafts together.

How long is it?
119 (scanned from hard copy) pages; there's obvious disparity between text size on some of the pages, indicating, perhaps, that it was scanned from different hard copy sources and/or at different times.

What's the broad structure?
1-29: Act 1
30-58: Act 2A
59-87: Act 2B
88-119: Act 3

What's the context?
On the big screen, Superman was dormant after the lacklustre, under-budgeted Superman IV: The Quest For Peace.  Meanwhile, the TV show Superboy (later known as The Adventures of Superboy) ran in syndication from 1988-1992, and was produced by the Salkinds, the Father/Son team behind the first three Superman movies (before they leased the rights to The Cannon Group for Superman IV).  With the rights back in hand, Ilya developed the story for Superman Reborn with Mark Jones and Cary Bates, who had served as writers and story consultants on The Adventures of Superboy and had hitherto extensive experience of the Man Of Steel (Bates writing and drawing the comic books from the mid-60s to mid-80s).  Salkind, "creatively estranged" from his father and sharing credit in name only on the TV show, met Christopher Reeve to discuss the possibility of him reprising the role. Cary Bates has claimed pre-production had begun on the film.

Why didn't it happen?
By all accounts, Warner had started to warm to comic book-driven movies (after the success of Burton's Batmans) and realised that letting the rights to Superman out of their hands had been a mistake.  As owners of the characters, they were losing out on a fair chunk of money, and they resolved to exploit the properties themselves.  Declining to approve the final script, they instead pushed ahead with their own plans for the character, chief of which at the time was Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

The Script
It's often been said that Superman is essentially a god.  As a god, there's not much that can threaten him and thus there's an inherent lack of drama in Superman stories.
I call bullshit on this one.  Stories have been told about gods since the dawn of time.  We call it religion.  Even if you consider Superman a lesser (or demi) god in the Greek and Roman traditions; there's not exactly a shortage of interesting, time-honoured stories around those characters.  Hell, they helped form the basis of modern drama and comedy.  Superman stories are directly descended from that pantheon, those thousands of years of god and demi-god stories.  Those stories work.  They work for a reason.

What is story?  It's character.
What is drama?  It's about what a character wants, and what prevents them from getting it.  If what stymies them is another character (or more than one), all the better.  If part of what helps stymie them is their own faults...  Then you've got gold.  And the potential for a transformative arc.

Demi-gods usually have a fatal flaw on which to hang an interesting tale.  Sometimes this is physical (Achilles' heel); sometimes it's metaphysical or characteristic (Achilles' wrath).  Sometimes it's both. (See, erm... Achilles).

Can you tell I dig Achilles?  It's because he's not just physically flawed but emotionally so.  Had he been an all-round great guy with just one dodgy heel, you only have half an interesting character.

There's very little drama in perfection.

But Superman is not perfect.  Sure, he can do an enormous amount of stuff, but he can't be in two places at once.  One of the key aspects of "perfection" is its relativity, how subjective it is.  You don't have to be bad to be imperfect; all it takes is not meeting someone else's expectations.
Superman Reborn explores a little of that.  To a point.

Because he can't commit to her over and above his calling as a hero, Lois Lane decides to leave Metropolis, and Superman, behind.  She takes a job at the L.A. Times and is on her way to the airport when Metropolis is attacked by Brainiac, an alien AI created to learn all there is to know.  Downloading his consciousness into a clone of a dead cop, Brainiac defeats Superman and abducts Lois, taken with the rush of sensation brought on by his new human form.

So who's our protagonist?
Crucially, it's NOT Superman.  It's Brainiac who sets events in motion.  Watching Earth transmissions.  Eager to absorb knowledge.  Curious about the planet.  Without his actions, the story doesn't happen.

Shouldn't the protagonist of a Superman film be... Superman?
*for updated thoughts on protagonism, see my new post*

What does our protagonist want at the start of the story?  He wants to learn by conquering civilisations, absorbing their knowledge, and shrinking their greatest cities, which he keeps in an enormous chamber aboard his enormous, Gothic, interstellar space ark.  The inhabitants of each city are allowed to go about their business, but Brainiac is essentially their new god.  It's "Under The Dome" wrought tiny.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?
Absolutely nothing.  He's doing just peachy, thank you very much, and as a result he's completely reactive.  It's everybody else who wants something.  Lois wants commitment.  Brainiac wants knowledge. Kosmo (Brainiac's slave/assistant) wants to destroy him and be free.
It's not until Lois leaves that Superman has anything to do.  Once the relationship problems kick off, it's revealed he wants to be with Lois but is holding himself back.. He can't abandon his calling as saviour.  And he still doesn't trust her enough to reveal his secret identity.  Unfortunately for Lois, she doesn't make it out of the city in time to escape the huge bubble in which Brainiac encases it.

What happens next?
Defeated by Brainiac's technological might, Superman is presumed dead.  He's actually been rescued at the last second by the Kryptonian city Kandor, one of thousands of Brainiac's shrunken metropolises.  Kal-El is offered the chance to live the life of a normal Kryptonian under an artificial red sun.  No powers, no shoulder-heavy responsibilities... and no Lois.

Does he resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
Yes, and no.  He does elect to return to the "real" world, but this is never really presented as an internal choice for him, more an overcoming of external obstacles.  Knowing that he almost lost Lois, he does at least reveal his secret identity to her at the end, and asks her to marry him, but how this resolves the conflict between his humanity and his god-hood is beyond me, because... it doesn't.  The change is superficial at best; Lois now knows he's Superman.  It won't divest him of his responsibility to the world.

In many ways this is the more interesting ending than having him simply pick one or the other.  His conflict remains unresolved, his flaw as a character still in play whilst he manages to change (a bit), in choosing to trust Lois with his secret identity.

But...

The notion that she would choose to be with him despite all this feels off.  Absolutely nothing has changed for her since she decided to leave, except that she now knows Superman is Clark.  And they're getting married.  His calling hasn't changed, his mission has changed, and the fact that he can't be in two places at once hasn't changed.  And they're getting married.  

The ending sells Lois short.

Did I mention they're getting married?

What works?

• No Kryptonite.  The classic Superman crutch is missing.
• Brainiac, to start with at least.  Picture Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still.  Cold, calculated, cruel.  Skynet in a robot body.  The opening pages establish just what kind of enemy he is.
• There's a ticking time bomb element: if Superman fails, Metropolis will suffocate.
• Kosmo.  An interesting character with a cloudy morality.  Not only is he partially responsible for creating Brainiac, he's unable to make the sacrifices necessary to stop him, and so deviously pins his hope on an outside champion.  He is a good person, he's simply comfortable, and by extension a collaborator.
• There are some visually dynamic things going on.  A city expanding inside a warship and destroying it could have worked beautifully on-screen.  It also would have cost a bomb.
• Superman is stripped of his powers for most of the second act, which gives things a little bite.
• The protagonist/antagonist duality.  Each is a reflection of all that is missing in the other.  Only, in this case, Superman is the antagonist.  Superman suppresses his emotions, but he's struggling; he's too human, even though he's not human at all.  This means he's torn between his life as a hero and that of a man; a potential lover, husband and father.  By contrast, Brainiac's only function is to learn.   He simply deletes the emotions he finds useless.  Remorse, guilt, love; all are done away with.  Tellingly, he keeps hold of anger.  But this becomes more and more difficult for him in his new human form.
• Superman's duality is explored a little in the first act; Lois wants an ordinary man, someone with his feet on the ground.  Mr. "Right Now".  She starts to see Clark as potentially interesting just as she's about to leave, having largely dismissed him as a romantic option throughout their relationship.

What doesn't?

• The previous films hadn't in any way established that there's a galaxy of cultures out there.  There was Krypton and Earth, and one of those was destroyed long ago.  The threats had all been either man- or Kryptonian-made, even if there were elements of fantasy.  Though the comic book universe teems with alien life, it may have been jarring to suddenly open out onto this intergalactic scope.
• This never feels like the Superman of the movies.  There's a sarcastic edge to some of his dialogue that you can't imagine coming from Christopher Reeve.  His Superman was a paragon of virtue, untouched by cynicism, sarcasm and despair.  That doesn't mean he was perfect, just that he was almost unfailingly polite.  Here, he's also oddly self-referential, talking about how saving people is a habit he never learned how to break.  That doesn't feel like Reeve's Superman.  If this feels like anything, it's the Superman of the comic books, but it also seems to be the first step on the road to the more introspective, post-modern, 21st Century Kal-El we've ended up with on film.
• There's never really a sense that Superman is tempted by the life Kandor offers; there's no real choice for him to make, and the dramatic impact of the script is dulled because of it.  Why wouldn't this new life among his own people tempt him?  But from the minute he gets to Kandor, he's trying to escape and return to his old life; we know he's a good guy, and he wants to do the right thing.  Hell, he's a hero, but to be tempted by such an offer would have made him that much more interesting.  Instead he's merely presented with a fait accomplis; all is hopeless, there's no way he can return.  His inner resolve is never really tested, merely his physical limits.  There are things outside his control preventing his return, which is much less interesting than the notion of him not really wanting to go back.  At the end, he asserts his belonging on Earth, but as he was never seriously tempted to stay in Kandor, this offers no resolution because there was nothing to resolve.
• At the point where he essentially becomes a cyborg, Brainiac goes from a monstrous enemy to a moustache-twirling villain, leering and lustful.  His dialogue descends into silliness.  It doesn't exactly become Batman and Robin in there, but it skirts Batman Forever.  From being a scary, monolithic mecha-God, he becomes a petty tyrant with a permanent hard-on.
• Kandor.  It's a nice idea.  Executed properly it could definitely have worked, but again, the last act sells the idea short.  This Kal-El fella shows up, besmirches their God, gets several elders killed, their science temple destroyed, and they raise a statue to him?!  They'd likely be pissed as all hell.  The idea of finding another world for them to live on, possibly with a yellow sun, makes me think of a million hacked off, super-powered Kryptonians scouring the universe for the son of a bitch who ruined their safe, shrunken little enclave.  Sequel!
• I hate the word "suddenly".  It's a syntactical crutch that was drilled out of me before the age of ten.  First draft?  Go for your life.  Anything moving towards production should not even have a trace of it.  This has a lot.  The time it takes to read the word "suddenly" absolutely kills any suddenness.
• Look, I know you wouldn't rename The Joker, or The Mandarin, or Magneto... but the fact remains; Brainiac is a really, really stupid name.
• The last act.  In which the writers essay what became the bane of unmade Superman movies for the next decade: Superman vs Giant Robot.  Maybe it was fresh back then; it certainly hadn't been done on film before, but we've become so familiar with the idea that it's become passe.  John Carter had the same problem levelled at it; everything that came since had ripped it off so much that its originality in that very material was no defence against boredom.
• Breaking the fourth wall.  No no no.

Conclusion

It's tough to imagine Chris Reeve when reading Superman Reborn.  Once the script heads into its second act, it's like reading a cinematic Elseworlds.  Had it been made it's possible Reeve would have surprised us with new dimensions of his iconic role.  This isn't a criticism of him as an actor, but a comment on the material.  It's definitely a departure from the Man Of Steel we'd seen in the films to this point.  Reading this, the comic book version of the character, not Reeve's courtly white knight, plays out in the mind.

After four films, two of which were pretty lacklustre in both execution and box-office, it's easy to see why Warner decided not to push ahead with this.  Consider that it essentially carries on the established film series without ever really pushing it forward.  There's no sense that the final scenes resolve Superman's dilemma in a way that would meaningfully indicate the end of the Reeve movie continuity.  Neither does it start afresh with a brand new take.  It's almost caught between two stools, coming at least five years (more once you count production) after the ill-received Quest For Peace.  Factor in the huge budget it would have taken to realise the miniature effects and alien sets, and it's little wonder Warner decided to roadblock it and reboot.

Superman Reborn remains a fascinating mix of interesting ideas and unrealised potential, ultimately undone by some of the sillier parts of its execution, and the poor timing of its development.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man of Steel is a 10): 3.
Technically, an entire planet is destroyed. However, it's somebody else's, not to mention that it's already scraped clean of life by Brainiac.  This is offset by Superman using The Daily Planet globe as a bowling ball, which, had Zack Snyder filmed it, would have combusted the internets.

(All sources for my assertions have been linked to except the script: if you happen to be the creator or originator of any materials you feel have been misappropriated, PM me on twitter @radiantabyss and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)