| Superman II (1980) | |
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Rating: 6.8/10 (114,319 votes) Director: Richard Lester Writer: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Mario Puzo Stars: Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder Runtime: 127 min Rated: PG Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi Released: 19 Jun 1981 |
| Plot: Superman agrees to sacrifice his powers to start a relationship with Lois Lane, unaware that three Kryptonian criminals he inadvertently released are conquering Earth. | |
In 1980, only two years after the world believed that a man could fly, we were given a sequel which brought back the villain introduced at the start of that film, General Zod. However, it would be November 2006 before we got the sequel in its most intended version, albeit not exactly as it was conceived but as close as could be made. You see, even though much of the film had already been shot whilst the first film was being made, when it came to the sequel the producers chose to not invite Richard Donner back to finish off the film, due to disagreements on creative decisions, and concerns about the budget (despite the first film being a huge success). Instead they hired Richard Lester, a UK based director who had worked on the two successful Musketeers films. Lester brought with him the same sense of japery that he imbued those films with, and so the tonal shift between Superman and its sequel was striking. Fast forward a couple of decades, and the prominence of the internet meant that fans now all knew about the mysterious footage Donner shot for the film, and a campaign began to pressure Warners to allow Donner to deliver his cut out of whatever footage they could find. Footage was found in a vault, restored, and the director finally got his chance to show what a different film it could have been if he was kept in charge. The result is a stronger sequel to the first film (or final two acts of the story) than Lester’s version was.
The basic plot is the same – Zod and his companions, who we saw in the first film being banished from Krypton, are freed from their confines and come to earth. Instantly claiming it as their own, they hear of a defender know as Superman, and thanks to Lex Luthor they find out he is the son of Jor-El, their jailer who Zod said he would seek vengeance of. Cue a super-smackdown before the big-S saves the day. A sub plot sees Lois find out who Clark really is, and he relinquishes his powers to live a mortal life with here, but sees how by doing so he places the world in jeopardy.
Whilst this basis is still the same as Lester’s film, the delivery of it is much different. Zod and his henchmen are freed by the rogue missile Superman launched into orbit in the first film, meaning no opening scene with a comical peril moment on the Eiffel tower. Lois doesn’t throw herself in a river to force Clark to reveal his true identity, instead she scribbles a hat and glasses on a picture of Superman, and throws herself out of a building to try to force his hand. When she finally forces him to reveal himself, it is by way of firing a gun at him. When he tells her that she would have killed him if he wasn’t Superman, she reveals it was a blank firing pistol, skilfully double bluffing him. Rough cuts and screen-test footage used for some of the extra scenes mean that hairstyles and costume vary slightly during them, but they are easy to see past as the delivery has so much more heart than the re-shot extra scenes Lester delivered.
In the menace stakes too, the Donner cut delivers more impact. Zod’s attacks upon the city of Metropolis are so much more threatening without Lester’s trademark slapstick moments scattered within. We also get to see how the time-reversal sequence would have played out had it been kept to the end of this second film as Donner reinserts it for his definitive cut. Most importantly though, we get the Marlon Brando scenes in the film. All of Brando’s moments were excised by Lester in order to avoid having to pay Brando for his role in the film. This meant that the teachings of his father were instead delivered by his mother, to much less impact. The whole idea was that Jor-El taught his son to be perfect, with Jonathan Kent being the one to teach him to be humble and human. By turning away from his father’s teachings, shunning his legacy, he would be rejecting all that his father ever taught him, basically rejecting all that he was raised to be. These scenes now work so much better, with much more dramatic impact.
The Donner Cut is not perfect. Some moments had never been shot, and so parts of Lester’s film are inserted to keep the pace, and the time-reversal section does open up a good few complications (such as the guy in the diner that Clark goes back at the end to teach a lesson – if time had been reversed as far as it was, then he would never have met him anyway, so effectively Clark is now going into a diner to pick a fight with a total stranger…a bit of a dick move if you ask me!), but it still delivers a much stronger sequel than we were first given.
