Last Son of Krypton, Part 3: SUPERMAN III
FADE IN:
EXT. STREETS OF METROPOLIS — DAY
A BLONDE WOMAN in a polka-dotted dress struts down a flight of stairs onto the street. As she marches down the sidewalk, naturally ignorant of her circa-1980s beauty, ADMIRERS steal glances along the way.
A MAN in a white hat crosses her path but is too distracted by her beauty to see the HUGE METAL POLE in front of him.
SMACK! KLANG!
The man ricochets off the pole and lands directly onto a FLOCK OF TOY PENGUINS.
The incident causes a ROLLER GIRL to roll completely out of control, careening into a HOT DOG STAND then rolls into THREE TELEPHONE BOOTHS, which topple over like dominoes.
By now — as if ordered by Danny DeVito himself! — the toy penguins are on the loose! One in particular — THE MARTYR OF MAYHEM — wonders onto the busy street and LIGHTS HIMSELF ON FIRE with a stray gasoline-fueled road flare.
A SMALL DOG scampers along the sidewalk and scares a SEEING-EYE DOG, which leaves its BLIND MASTER in the dust. The blind master latches onto a piece of road-side equipment, which ultimately leads to a car filling with fire-hydrant water!
WIDE ON: SUPERMAN bursts out of a phone booth! He jumps on top of the water-filled car and pulls the DRIVER to safety to the CHEERS and HURRAYS from USELESS PASSERBYS.
JIMMY OLSEN
Way to go, Superman!
END SCENE.
I tried to keep Superman’s introduction as accurate as possible for you all. I wish I were joking….
If for a split-second you heard the wisps of the Austin Powers theme dance around your ears, you wouldn’t be alone. The intro reminds me of a whimsical comedy of errors much like one found in International Man of Mystery. But I digress…
Welcome to Superman III — the Tyrion Lannister of the Christopher Reeve canon. And I mean that in an “I should have killed you when you were born” way not an “Oh, you’re so witty, conniving, and clever, will you please be my Right Hand?” kind of way.
Before Joel Schumacher put nipples on the batsuit and decided casting Chris O’Donnell as the Boy Wonder was a good idea, Superman III had jumped the shark fifteen years (over Richard) prior. Before Tobey McGuire shattered the fourth wall by doing ’the Peter Parker’ to James Brown’s “People Get on Up and Drive Your Funky Soul” and subsequently hustled Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise into the funky floor, Clark Kent had choked out his alter ego in a battle of will power and car tires.
But before future franchises went off the rails, there was only one super train wreck to cite and snark, Superman III; the sequel to the much-loved Superman: The Movie and its kooky but equally classic second chapter.
Filling in for the token Lex Luthor role is Robert Vaughn’s Ross Webster. Webster is a self-made gazillionaire who just can’t get enough of the green and is naturally preoccupied with how to rob from the poor to fill the bulging pockets of the rich, because everyone should have two custom-built ski resorts on the roofs of their corporate headquarters. I mean, c’mon. You would!
Cut to: Richard Pryor’s Gus “I’m not a bum!” Gorman, a member of the perpetually unemployed, discovers he’s a brilliant hacker and ends up embezzling some sick cash from his new place of employment; coincidentally, the joint is owned by Ross Webster. Webster cares not that Gus stole some eight-million pennies from his company, but instead wants to hire the hacker to take control of the American weather satellite — dubbed “Vulcan” — to monopolize the planet’s coffee crops. You need something to sip on when you’re skiing down all those private slope, right?
Meanwhile, Clark Kent convinces his boss at the Daily Planet that the people of Metropolis would be interested in a bumbling reporter’s high school reunion (they wouldn’t, but we’ll go with it — comparatively, this plot-line is a high point). Back home in Smallville, Clark re-kindles a kinda-sorta fling he had with Lana Lang (Annette O’Toole) when they were in high school and ends up spending more time in the story trying to not-so-obviously win her affection than actually saving anything as the film’s titular hero.
When Superman prevents a Vulcan-powered tornado from destroying a coffee harvest, Webster sets his sights on killing the Man of Steel by having Gus fabricate some kryptonite. Instead of killing the Last Son of Krypton, the poorly-made synthetic only infects Supmerman with a bad case of split-personality disorder until he literally splits in two. The screaming you heard was the screeching of all subtext being eradicated from the movie. It’s also when a semi-bearable film takes a turn for the worst. If there was ever any subtlety to Superman’s on-going struggle with having to choose between the Superman of Earth and the Superman of Krypton — an internal fight that’s well-illustrated in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel — well, it’s gone here. If you thought Emo Peter Parker was bad, keep your distance from Five-o’clock-shadowed, Drunken Kal-El.
Obviously, there was a budget to consider when the film was made in the early ’80s, and ‘evil computer’ hadn’t yet learned to create photo-real CGI out of thin air (and countless man-hours by actual technical wizards), so the limitations of how far to take a battle between the good and bad halves of Superman are apparent and understandable.
Honestly, I’d be curious to see a modern take on the story where computers are sentient (see: Skynet), end up manipulating the weather, and attempt to stop the greatest threat to their success — Superman — by fabricating kryptonite to try to kill the hero, but then everything goes awry (a commentary on the reliance of machines, etc.). That could be a pretty fun excursion for the comic book legend. But with Superman III, instead of keeping their technological limitations in check, the filmmakers opted to add more ‘funny’ to the plot banking on one of the greatest comedians of all-time, Pryor, to bring the pain (unfortunately it was a literal addition to the film), and begged the audience to just go with it. “You’ll like the new, light-hearted Superman movie once you see it. We promise.”
Here’s the problem — Any screenwriter or filmmaker who physically pens on an sheet of paper or parchment “… and then Superman straightens out the Leaning Tower of Pisa” is an asshole intent on denigrating nostalgia to a series of pratfalls. It’s the equivalent of Snidely Whiplash dastardly twisting his mustache in abject glee. “That’ll get ‘em!” No, it won’t get them, Snidely; it’ll just piss off the Leaning Tower of Pisa merchant, because he’ll have to make Straight Tower of Pisa statues in order to stay in business.
Perhaps this action by the sinister side of the Man of Steel is once again an attempt to underline that the true villains of the film are those that spit on the blue- and pink-collar workers from on high using their computer-minions to do the loogie-hocking for them. If that’s the case, then consider this my sincere apology to the filmmakers, because then they’re operating on a level of genius and satire that I can only imagine; however, I highly doubt anyone was thinking that abstractly when the scene is directly proceeded by Superman blowing off a crisis to chill with the chick from high school he still wants to bang.
“I’m just so mad! So mad! So mad I could straighten out a tilting monument before I make super-emo-love to the dumbest sidekick ever*!
Well, until Willie Scott comes along in The Temple of Doom.”
Decisions like that aren’t just missteps; they’re slaps to fans’ faces. It proves to them that the filmmakers just want their money and not their loyalty. Thirty years ago it was harder to hide your shameless money-grabbing behind the ‘whiz’ and ‘bang’ of special effects that contemporaries cling onto so dearly. At least with those, audiences tend to justify their spent cash on overpriced tickets with an “Eh, at least the effects were, yeah?”
And if splitting Superman in half wasn’t bad enough for an unimportant tangent of a plot device, try reading the literal abandonment of nuisance and subtlety as the moral of the story is echoed by Infatuated Country Kid aka Ricky from Smallville. Let me set the scene for you: Superman is all depressed that he’s not saving anyone anymore and becoming a menace — one he swore he’d protect the earth against! So after a bought of light-drinking and eye-beaming of the quaint Metropolis bar, Superman slumps out of the place to the jeers of more useless passerbys. That’s when he hears it. The ear-splitting cries of a terrible child acting playing a disappointed kid from Smallville:
“Superman, you’re just in a slump! You’ll be great again! You can do it Superman! Superman, you can hear me, can’t you?! Superman, you’re just in a slump! You’ll be great again! You can do it! Superman, you can hear me, can’t you? Superman, you’re just in a slump…” (Repeated ad nauseam until Superman literally falls out of the sky. Who needs kryptonite, huh?)
Simply put, Superman III is an embarrassment of an entry to Christopher Reeve’s career. It’s the film that put comedy and its potential money-earning ahead of its audience and the loyal fans, and the series suffered for it. Don’t believe me? Watch it. I dare you.
“Sorry, to be the one to tell you this, Ricky, but… he won’t. Superman won’t be great again. Not for another thirty years.”
*The ‘dumbest sidekick ever’ would be none other than Lorelei Ambrosia, because Ian Fleming took all the good femme fatale names.
[Written under the pseudonym Tim B. Poser for TDZdaily.com]
