The 2000s Movie Project Review: 'Supernova'

I am beginning a new project that involves looking back at the moves of this relatively young century. The 2000 Movie Project is part of a book I hope to write in the future looking close at the way movies reflect the time in which we now exist and the way culture shapes the world and the world shapes the culture. It’s going to be an eclectic compilation for sure, especially judging by my first entry, Walter Hill’s massive sci-fl flop Supernova.

Released on January 14th of 2000, Supernova is a legendarily troubled project. Director Walter Hill famously attempted to take his name off of the movie after the film bombed in test screenings and horror movie director Jack Sholder was brought in to supervise a recut of the movie. That version also failed with test audiences and legendary Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola came on board as a favor to MGM to supervise one final cut of the movie.

That film was released a full two years after Walter Hill walked away from the movie so you can see, dear reader, this was one seriously troubled project. Walter Hill’s version has never been seen in full but a few of the deleted scenes have been included on DVD and Blu Ray versions of the movie but his vision of the movie is mostly missing from the world. Despite taking his name off the movie, Hill did praise the work of James Spader, even in the final cut.

Supernova stars James Spader as Nick Van Zant, a military man in some future time who has been sent to work in an emergency medical vehicle in space. Robert Forster plays the captain, Markley who we meet, oddly, as he is working on a dissertation on violence through the lens of Tom & Jerry cartoons. His voiceover indicates that Tom & Jerry had been banned hundreds of years earlier. This plays no role in the rest of this movie.

Angela Bassett plays Dr Kaela Evers, the leader of the medical staff of the ship. She supervises Yerzy (Lou Diamond Phillips) and Danika (Robin Tunney). The group is still adjusting to the arrival of newcomer Van Zant when they receive a call from halfway around the galaxy, a former mining planet believed to have been uninhabited. Traveling to the mining colony will require a dimensional jump which, for some reason requires everyone on the ship to strip nude.

The plot of Supernova kicks in when the ship arrives at the mining colony and is met by an escaping ship. On board is Karl (Peter Fascinelli), and he claims to be the only survivor of a disaster on the mining planet. Karl is not the man who sent the distress signal that brought our heroes to this place. However, there is something strangely familiar about Karl to Dr Evers, something she can’t quite put her finger on.

The key to Karl’s identity is related to a bizarre, roiling, glowing orb of infinite powers. The orb is a bomb, a device causing telekinesis, the fountain of youth, and anything that the movie needs along with Karl’s main source of motivation for his ultimate evil. This is one of the more obvious and deeply contrived MacGuffins I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time. Call it deus ex orbis if you will. The orb stands in for an actual narrative, something beyond the general horniness that marks what remains of Supernova.

The one oddly consistent aspect of Supernova from Hill’s purported version of the movie, a hard R-rated horror movie, through Sholder and Coppola’s takes on the movie, is the horniness. This is one horndog movie. It takes mere moments for Supernova to get to the first of several sweaty space love making sessions and when the crew aren’t at the mercy of the orb or Peter Fascinelli’s obnoxious villain performance, they engaged in some form of nakedness.

Space travel requires the crew to strip nude for reasons that the movie never bothers to explain. As the crew loads into their pods for dimension jumping, Robert Forster’s captain makes a point of telling the young couple on board that dimension jumping technology can improve their sex life. Why? Who the hell knows. Reshoots on Supernova invented reasons for Spader and Bassett’s characters to hook up but because the film was desperately over budget and out of time, Spader and Bassett were allegedly CGI’ed over the already filmed and seen sex scene involving Lou Diamond Phillips and Robin Tunney.

None of this sweaty desperation did anything to rescue this sci-fi turkey in the end. Supernova is as misbegotten in its final ,Coppola , edit as it likely was under the direction of Walter Hill. Is it possible that Hill’s more edgy take on the material made more sense or at least added a little horror kink to the movie to give it some flavor? We will never know but I have a hard time finding where Supernova would ever have become a memorable or great movie.

Supernova is a vaguely notable relic of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Supernova is a swirling bit of chaotic, failing nonsense, that occasionally succeeds in spite of itself. Walter Hill isn’t wrong about James Spader, he looks like a legit action hero at times in Supernova and he almost rouses the movie out of its obvious failings. Unfortunately, Spader is let down by a laughable edit that renders the movie a joke. The final moments when it is revealed that one of our heroes has been impregnated during the naked dimension jump is a giant unearned, deeply ironic laugh at the expense of Spader, Bassett and the movie.

Supernova is the first step in a very long journey on this project to document the movies of this century, many of which I have already seen and written about. I will be using this space for movies like Supernova, movies where I was either not ready or unable to write about in the moment. Stick with me and maybe we will come away with something valuable to not about this strange, young, movie loving century.