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.)