Done Dirty: Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut [movies]

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)
Superhero/Action; USA
115 minutes

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In this week's batch of Flash Reviews we're spotlighting great shit that was done dirty by the man and you can't talk about epic filmic disses without mentioning the mother of all fuck ups, "Superman II". Long before every other movie to hit the theater was a comic book adaptation of some sort, there was only Richard Donner and his sprawling vision for an epic Superman trilogy. Unfortunately, 3/4ths of the way through filming "Superman II", Donner was booted from the project, the script was rewritten and about half of the scenes reshot by the new, studio-hired director, Richard Lester. You can read the whole sorted drama here, but the long and short of it is that the studio didn't want to give Marlon Brando a cut of the films profits, so they did everything they could to remove him from the project, resulting in a completely different film with a much different tone and a much more cartoony treatment.

For over 20 years, Donner's footage sat in the vaults gathering dust until finally, fan pleadings and Margot Kidder's psychotic ramblings led to the creation of "The Richard Donner Cut". While this isn't the movie Donner envisioned from the start, the studio gave the director access to all his old footage and the freedom to recut it to be as close to his vision as possible. The result is a choppy, but ultimately great superhero story - probably the best superhero movie of all time, save Tim Burton's Batman movies, if you ask me.

There are some downsides - Donner's original ending for "Superman II", Superman flying around the Earth at super fast speed to turn back time, was tacked onto the end of the first film because it was the most impressive special effect they had at the time, so now that the sequel has been re-edited and that ending replaced, both the first and second films have the exact same ending. But to Donner's credit, it works a lot better in "Superman II" than it did in "Superman". There were also a lot of scenes that were never shot, so test footage was used instead, resulting in a few discontinuities within scenes, but overall these are minor problems that you might not even notice if you're not looking for them.

Give this some time if you're into: superhero movies, Superman, retcon, seeing things done the way they should be done.