Jul. 4th, 2006

thehefner: (Oops! Broken Actor!)
Happy birthday to the awesome and mighty [livejournal.com profile] tazira! As your present, I promise to finally give you that late night phone call. Once Bloo gets down here, anyway.

So on my last entry, [livejournal.com profile] interdisciple issues me a challenge: Design your own Superman [movie]. Character sketches with actors you'd choose and why, along with a basic plotline. Go! Very well, you rogue, I'll play your game.

I think they were right to not restart the whole story, origin and all. One way or another, we pretty much have a perfect origin between the Donner SUPERMAN and SMALLVILLE, flaws and all. I'm not up to creating a whole plot right now, but I'll tell you what would be involved in my perfect Superman movie.

- Corporate businessman Lex Luthor, the criminal who has finally stopped boasting about his genius and actually started using it to secure his fortune and power.

- Actually addressing the question, "Why The World Doesn't Need Superman." Lex, for all his hatred of Superman, has been shown to believe that Superman actually holds humanity back by doing everything for them so they don't have to fight or do anything to advance themselves. To Lex, Superman represents the death of human ambition. But besides all that, it's a question that really should have been addressed, as well as the rebuttal of why the world actually just might need a savior.

- Brainiac. An evil supercomputer, either in humanoid form or as a malevolent HAL 9000 program. This would, of course, have to result in the Brainiac-Luthor team of old, the two merging into one just like in Justice League. Maybe Brainiac could be what lured Superman away from Earth for five years, tempting him with knowledge about his home planet. That would be a far more satisfying explanation than, "I thought maybe Krypton was still there... whoops, no it's not. Well, I'm back, what'd I miss?"

- A Jimmy Olsen misadventure.

- Bringing back "The American Way" to mean what it used to. I was sad to hear them drop "... and the American Way" from the movie, but I certainly understand why. Many think that Superman is a global character, protecting all of earth, and for so much of the world (and to many of us here in the states too) the American Way has come to mean greed, corruption, rampant capitalism, imperialism, etc... in short, all the things that Lex Luthor stands for. But that's not what the American Way of Superman is, as CHUD.com so eloquently put it recently.

- And hey, how about a little more fun in the movie, too? Some good classic Silver Age fun here and there? Grant Morrison is creating some of the best Superman comics I've ever read with his monthy ALL-STAR SUPERMAN book with his elegant, fun, powerful and pure stories.

- The Kents. Either Pa Kent should still be alive ala the current comics, or both the Kents should be dead, ala the classic Superman comics. Either way, they ground him to his human upbringing.

- As for the cast: regardless of how mistreated the character was, Kevin Spacey was the perfect choice for Lex. Either that, or shaving Clancy Brown. For Clark and Lois, you can either do older, age-appropriate actors (Parker Posey as Lois and an unknown for Superman, I think that's still a great idea) or if you want younger, then hell, go with SMALLVILLE's Erica Durance and stick with Brandon Routh or another unknown.

- The costume. Brighter reds and a bigger S shield. What he had in the movie worked just fine, but still, it just wasn't quite right.

I say again, I really enjoyed SUPERMAN RETURNS and very much look forward to the sequel. But if the above stuff had been in there, you might have had the greatest superhero movie ever. For me, anyway. Grumpy and nitpicky geek that I am.

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