Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

What?!? Didn't Superman II release in 1980? Why are we talking about a 27-year old movie today?

Well, actually there's a new release of Superman II that arrived fairly recently. It's the Richard Donner cut (named so for the director who originally shot most of the movie but who was later replaced). So, as a fan of the Superman series, I felt it my obligation to find out what the original director had in mind.

I have to assume that you saw the version of Superman II that was released to theaters and DVD before this version. If you're a Superman fan you probably liked it (for the most part) and only had a few complaints about the hokey "superpowers" that Superman used against his foes at the fortress of solitude. My favorite hokey power is the "cellophane super-logo" as parodied by the Family Guy:

So The Richard Donner cut left behind that scene and other similar scenes. That's the good news. The really bad news is that Donner really didn't have an ending for the movie (perhaps that's why the studio lost confidence in him). Apparently Donner loved the ending of Superman I -- that was the final answer to Superman II. Yup, at the end of this version, Superman reverses time again, fixing up all the broken stuff in Metropolis, repairing the relationship between him and Lois and returning the now dead Kryptonian trio to the phantom zone.

Unfortunately that's not the worst part. Do you remember that right after Supe relinquishes his powers in the molecular chamber, he then gets beat up by a redneck in a greasy diner? Then at the end of the show he goes back to exact revenge on the redneck? Well, they left that scene in the movie -- after Supe reverses time and undoes all the events of the entire movie. Nice. So, assuming that the reverse-earth-spin time travel mechanism really works, some poor redneck get his butt kicked by an unknown city nerd for no reason at all.

Not good. Not good at all. Some things (even some things that weren't great to start with) are best left alone.