Year: 2015
Director: Jon Schnepp

“Film studios claim they thrive on original ideas, ones that blow people’s minds but in fact, it scares them.” That’s possibly the closest the contributors to this amateur but fascinating documentary gets to answering its title’s question. In the mid 1990s, with the film series as extinct as the Kryptonian was in the main source comic book series ‘Doomsday \ The Death Of Superman’ Warner Brothers, pockets full of those Tim Burton Batman billions wanted to revive him.

As with all legends there is more than one author and nearly all of them appear to pick at the bones of what may well have been the most unique take on a superhero we’ve ever seen. Kevin Smith freely admits his script was pure fan fiction, he never believed it would get made but couldn’t resist. Tim Burton, layer of the golden Bat-egg, enters the picture and brings his own wild imagination to the Superman lore. Plus he has a man for the lead role – wayward talent, Nicholas Cage, which if the internet had been as big back then would have caused it to break. Yet when you see Cage in The Costume, his wild shoulder length hair and even more as Clark Kent as overgrown hipster boy-child you start to see what this could be.

Visual artists, costume designers and writers all flesh out the story with Tim Burton’s suitably gothic take through his own illustrations. Although the aforementioned comic book series was the basis of the three different scripts a whole slew of new additions to the Superman legend makes you conclude this was no mere reboot but would probably have been incomprehensible. A creature called “K” who travels with Jor-El from Krypton, trains him and regenerates him after the battle with Doomsday. Brainiac in a skull shaped menagerie of alien monsters he wants to unleash onto Earth. Then we have the meddling of Babs Streisand’s former hair stylist and bouffanted producer, Jon Peters who wanted Superman attacked by gangs of ninjas, vicious polar bears and a giant spider. Using his own children as a focus group and physically attacking crew members he comes across as an absolute arse but you can’t help loving the loon. To be fair, he is not the only person involved in the project who have a very slender grip on the Superman story but perhaps not being weighed down with canon would have been a good thing.

Ultimately it was the financial failure of the Batman series under the stinktastic direction of Joel Schumacher amongst other hero led films that did for ‘Superman Lives’ – ironically a series begun by Tim Burton. Burton is clearly still a little sore that he didn’t get a crack at the other caped crusader but he admits that this is what happens in the film industry. Peters managed to get a giant spider in the next film he produced, Wild Wild West and seemingly has no regrets.

You come away from the film a little sad that an on-form Tim Burton n a pre “where’s the cheque” career slide Nicholas Cage didn’t see the project through to fruition as it would have been a brilliant, baffling, visual feast would have irked the purists. Supes hasn’t been done justice since Dick Donner’s original 1 7 1\2 films and you hope that one day they are brave. Hiring hacks like Zack Snyder isn’t gonna cut it.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

feature length “making of” DVD extras, Lost in La Mancha or Jodorovsky’s Dune