Review: Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
Superman II has long been held up by many as the best of the series, no doubt because it finally gave viewers the chance to see Superman in actual combat instead of the stunts and shenanigans he spent the first movie performing. Outside of the combat and the masterful performance of Terence Stamp as General Zod, however, there are notable flaws in the movie as originally presented: camp humor frequently is played up to the detriment of characters and stupid new superpowers1 are created as needed by the plot. Richard Donner's always hated the way the movie turned out after he was fired from the proceedings and Warner Brothers decided to let him get the chance to make it his way. Donner's excised all of replacement Richard Lester's contributions and created a slightly more serious movie that's leaner while managing to provide fans with long, loving glimpses of what might have been had he had the chance to actually finish the job he started at the time. Gone is the opening sequence featuring Lois Lane doing spectacularly stupid things to get closer to terrorists threatening the Eiffel Tower, replaced with a montage that recaps the first film and directly links Superman's diversion of a missle to the release of the three Phantom Zone criminals. Now, the first glimpse of Lois and Clark takes place at the Daily Planet, where a sequence right out of the Silver Age occurs: Lois draws a suit, glasses, and hat on a photograph on Superman, makes the Clark Kent Connection, and promptly jumps out of a window to prove he's Superman2. Whether this is less appalling than riding the underside of an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower in order to chat with crazed people with guns is up to you, but I certainly found it more entertaining. While I'm ambivalent about the need for this particular change, there's also the inclusion of Marlon Brando's Jor-El, taking Lara's place in the script and filling the movie with more of the father/son relationship that Donner3 feels is essential to the mythology. How the Floating Head Of Jor-El can answer questions and interact with Superman is something that could do with a bit of explanation, but Kryptonian technology as presented in the movies has always smacked a bit of magic.
Less successful is the use of Lois/Clark-honeymoon-expose footage from a (very good) screen test, replacing the horrible, horrible bit where Superman (as Clark) catches a case of The Stupid And Clumsy and falls into a fireplace. While this new scene is certainly more sensible in how it handles Superman's big reveal to Lois, it has dialogue from an earlier draft of the script that comes close to making no sense at all in the context of the movie as a whole. There's also the matter of the denoument. Viewers lose the idiocy of "repair-o-vision" being used on the Washington Monument, but it's replaced with a rerun of the first film's ending, complete with footage of things going backwards, a dramatically unsatisfying choice. Perhaps most surprisingly, Donner has chosen to include Clark Kent's return to the diner where he was beaten by the trucker, making Superman look supremely petty in a way I've never liked. I understand the need to tie up that one cinematic loose end (it's at this diner Superman discovers the existence of Zod and Pals), but I wonder if there couldn't have been a way to edit it where Superman's not just wailing on some local asshole for the sake of closure.
In getting a chance to remove all of Lester's contributions to the followup to his original Superman movie, Richard Donner may have created the perfect Silver Age superhero movie, complete with strange logic and an overused resolution named "Time Travel." Its value ranks higher on the "curiousity" scale than as a piece to be judged on its own merits. The changes are a bit too glaring on occasion, and the movie never quite finds the balance it seems Donner wanted to achieve.
1Superman threw his symbol! I still think that's about the stupidest thing ever done with the character, and I've read a lot of Silver Age Superman books and own the first appearance of Terra-Man.
2You can view videos of this (and some of the other changes) here.
3And now, Singer.
