MALLINation

"Hope you like my casserole"

Watching the Richard Donner version of Superman II, a film long credited to director Richard Lester who took over partway through filming, is to step into another era of film making. The effects are transparently cheesy in many places and there are logic lapses that are big enough to drive an ocean liner through.

People are able to talk in the airless expanse of space (I don’t give a shit if they are from Krypton, sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum), neither the north pole or the atmosphere seem to chill Lois Lane in the least and English is the universal lingua franca.

But enough nitpicking – this is what comic book movies were like before the invention of angst, and the sprightly romp of a screenplay co-credited to Mario Puzo (!) is often amusing and diverting.

The re-cut seems to move things along a faster clip than the original version, though that may just be memory talking. The biggest, most obvious alterations are at the beginning and ending of the story.

The original film opens with a lot of business involving terrorists at the Eiffel Tower (which led to a great exchange between Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent and Jackie Coogan’s Daily Planet editor Perry White – Kent: “That’s terrible!” White: “That’s why they’re called terrorists!”)

That’s all excised, as is a drawn-out sequence in which Lois Lane throws herself into Niagara Falls to prove that Clark and Superman are one and the same. On the whole Margot Kidder’s Lois comes off better in the re-cut – it’s easier to see what Clark/ Superman find so attractive about her when she’s throwing herself out of windows (the replacement ploy) rather than being waterlogged. It helps that in this version she finally proves her case in a clever way – shooting Clark.

What the movie doesn’t quite explore is how all-fired turned on she is by the guy in the red boots and cape and how hot-to-trot she ain’t by presumed mere mortal Clark. In mid-movie when Superman decides to forego his powers due to his love of Lois, one has to wonder whether the thrill is gone for her. Does she love him or that Superman guy? Reeve brings a decided edge to his Kent portrayal every time the flying guy comes up in conversation with Lois – it’s fertile territory as Tim Burton showed in the decidedly more fetishistic Batman Returns.

Again, though, no angst please. Which makes the new ending rather harder to swallow. In effect it’s a re-run of the footage Donner shot in the first Superman film when he circles the globe fast enough to make time run backwards (all you physicists can grab the nearest sharp object and poke it into your temporal lobe – Lost this isn’t.) In the first film he does so in anger, and it’s a powerful image juxtaposed with thinnish Marlon Brando as Jor-El admonishing him.

The second time around there is simply no set-up, it’s just a conceit to figure out how to reset the clock and have Lois forget who he really is. Only she’s going to ask the same old questions again and those three disco out-fitted, English speaking villains are presumably still hurtling towards Earth.

About those villains.

Terrence Stamp, who looks like he’s guesting from a road show production of Starlight Express plays General Zod, a man who has a prediliction for asking other men to “kneel before Zod.” At times he adds the charming gesture of a hand out, palm flat and moving downwards. What he seems to really need is a good blowjob. But hey, this is a PG film.

"Kneel before...well you know.."