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of TheColumnists.com
"IF YOU CAN'T stand the heat, get out of the Universe."
That tagline was created
to ballyhoo "Supernova," a new $70 million
science-fiction thriller that recently opened to only fair box
office and
mediocre-to-lousy reviews. It wasn't previewed for benefit of
the critics
(always a sign that the studio has lost faith) and it opened
with minimum fanfare. It also was released in mid-January, traditionally
a time to get rid of movies. It's called "dumping,"
as in "dumping the garbage."
"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the Universe." That catchphrase becomes doubly appropriate when applied to what happened behind the scenes. In fact, what went on during the making of this movie could be more exciting than what ended up on the screen, given that "Supernova," bottom line, is a B-movie disguised as a super-sci-fi adventure with an A-budget that ended up a B-movie anyway. It has weakly defined space jockeys aboard a paramedic rescue craft called Nightingale 229--and a muddled plot about a star about to explode and a killer with super strength on board the spaceship, knocking off the doctors and nurses as if he were the slasher killer in "The Surgeon" or "X-Ray."
To its credit, "Supernova" does have ample deep-space hardware visuals, and some imaginative abstractions interpreting what it might be like to hyperjump through time and space. However, given what they can do with computerized state-of-the-art effects these days, excellent graphics are the rule, not the exception. One studio insider went so far as to call the film "Irwin Allen Meets CGI."
And that leads to the question: So if a star in a faraway galaxy exploded in front of the camera, what exploded behind it?
The truth is, the director. First he hyperjumped right out of MGM and soon after supernovaed himself right out of the credits. Walter Hill, who made the film two years ago, asked that his name be removed and replaced with "Thomas Lee," as he did not want MGM to be embarrassed with a credit reading "Alan Smithee," the traditional pseudonym for displeased and/or displaced directors.
It's been reported that Hill took a hike last January because he wanted to do some re-shooting and MGM wouldn't approve the expenditures. They wanted to test the film as it was. Hill didn't want to test the film as it was. Apparently he knew it was a loser if he didn't fix a lot of things he had broken during production.
So that's when Francis Ford Coppola was called in to perform an emergency editing job. Coppola and his cutters went to work on Hill's two-hour-and-then-some version, cutting and chopping and hewing until "Supernova" was a 90-minute quickie. Perhaps some hacking was performed as well.
The inevitable question arises: Did Coppola owe MGM a favor? Or: Did he do this as a favor to Hill, in an effort to save his butt?
After seeing the film,
another question arises: Didn't a busy filmmaker
like Francis have anything better to do with his valuable time?
It's also puzzling why Hill ever got involved with another trapped-in-space movie, which has become a genre unto itself since 1979. Hill is the producer of all four of the "Alien" series movies. The first is now considered a seminal classic of science-fiction horror -- and the definitive depiction of humans trapped aboard a spaceship (or on some far-flung planet in a far-flung solar system) with slavering extra-terrestrials coming after them, breakfast, lunch or dinner in mind. Whatever one could do with trapped space people and aliens had been done in those four movies. And possibly then some.
The very first of this genre was really 1958's "It! The Terror From Beyond Space," but that was a low-budget quickie consigned long ago to the lowbrow B movies of the '50s, and rarely mentioned in the same breath as "Alien." Or you might consider the first of this genre to be "The Voyage of the Space Beagle," an A. E. Van Vogt novel that came so close to "Alien" that a plagiarism lawsuit was filed by Van Vogt in the early 1980s, the outcome of which has never been revealed since it was settled out of court.
Big-budget producers of the Hill variety usually try to take a step forward into unexplored cinema territory, rather than drop back to old stomping grounds. Hill has shown his versatility of themes in a variety of films of varying quality, from cops-and-robbers stuff ("48 Hrs.") to gang violence ("The Warriors") to futuristic-society thrills ("Streets of Fire") to western action ("Geronimo: An American Legend").
The first-draft screenplay for "Supernova," by David Campbell Wilson (whose only previous credit is the 1991 Jeff Speakman martial arts actioner "The Perfect Weapon"), reportedly was rewritten extensively by Hill, so ultimately one must conclude that Hill had every chance to be in control of the project.
Now that all the characterizations and plot cohesiveness have been left on Coppola's cutting-room floor, what's there to review? A fast-paced movie, derivative of more than "Alien."
One is reminded of "Event Horizon" (spaceship crew plagued by their worst nightmares), "Sphere" (alien artifact causes worst fears to come true for underwater rescue team), "Stargate" (space soldiers travel across time and space through a portal), "Virus" (rescue team trapped on Russian research vessel with machinery brought to life by alien intelligence) and "Deep Rising" (terrorists trapped on luxury liner with mutant octopus with killer arms that go everywhere). Even a B movie like "Ravager" (nuclear contaminated spaceman goes berserk on shuttle cargo ship) pops into mind.
Summary: Nightingale 229 floats in space. Stark naked crew members Lou Diamond Phillips and Robin Tunney make love in freefall. Engineer Wilson Cruz talks to a computer named "Sweetie." Captain Robert Forster watches cartoons while writing a thesis on animation violence of the 20th Century. Distress call from a mining colony across the Universe sends ship on a rescue mission. Crew hyperjumps. Captain Forster is killed when his survival chamber malfunctions. (Did most of his scenes end up on Coppola's floor?) Crew takes aboard only survivor (Peter Facinelli) of the mining colony, and an alien artifact he's carrying. Artifact gives one super strength and evil intentions. One by one, Facinelli jettisons crew members into space, forgetting to give them spacesuits, and destroys all the hyperjump survival chambers but one. Now it's up to James Spader, the closest thing to a hero this movie has, to save the ship with the help of nurse Angela Bassett, whose bedside manner is humorless and uptight. She doesn't smile once. Meanwhile, a nearby star is about to go nova and they have only an 11-minute window to hyperjump to safety after the ship is refueled and ready to travel.
"Supernova" was given a second tagline by the MGM promotion department: "It will blow you away."
Like the first tagline, it ain't true.
©2000 by John Stanley
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