Brikar

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE
Starring: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Mariel Hemingway
Written by: Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner
Directed by: Sidney J. Furie

...good LORD.

Now, "Superman III" is bad. It firstly suffers from being less of a Superman film, and more of a bad Richard Pryor film that happens to have Superman in it. But "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace" is, without a doubt, the worse picture in just about every respect.

The story, by Christopher Reeve himself, is actually a fairly good one: Superman, prompted by a letter from a small child as the world enters a dangerous nuclear escalation crisis, vows to rid the world of dangerous nuclear weapons. This is the perfect vehicle for a story about the Man of Steel, and just how involved he should be in the politics of our world - should he remain a simple crimefighter/lifesaver-type superhero... or should he truly get involved and change our world for what he thinks is the better, without our permission?

Alas, the SCRIPT by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, is godawfully stupid. It takes this wonderful gem of an idea and craps all over it, filling the entire thing was poorly conceived fight sequences between Superman and Lex Luthor's "Nuclear Man" genetic creation, and further botches that up by making the Nuclear Man himself a mish-mash of stupid ideas that simply don't work. If that weren't bad enough, the climactic battle at the end of the film is built upon a subplot that was removed entirely from the film, so the final product is disjointed and utterly nonsensical. Some of you may recall that Konner and Rosenthal wrote an unusable script for "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" which was trashed by Meyer and Nimoy, who then rewrote the picture themselves. Konner and Rosenthal sued, and somehow won, and are now the credited writers of TUC, even though none of their script is presented on-screen. Watching "Superman IV", I can easily believe this story.

After "Superman III" and "Supergirl", the Salkinds sold the film rights to Superman to Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, the producers of such (ahem) amazing cinematic achievements as "Masters of the Universe" and "American Ninja 2: The Confrontation". Gods, what a mistake. With a paltry budget and a terrible script, "Superman IV" suffers from god-awful special effects. Most of what we got is poorly done, and to make it worse, the same shots are often used several times throughout the picture over and over again. Wires are seen in a couple of scenes holding the actors up, and matte boxes are visible around characters floating around in space.

John Williams declined to score the picture, but recommended his good friend and orchestrator Alexander Courage (whom you may recall composed the theme to the original "Star Trek"). The result is a score that should be much better than it is. Budgetary reasons meant the score was recorded with a smaller, substandard orchestra. The result is a tinny, small-sounding score that just helps the picture feel even worse than it already is without the music.

All that said, I have to give the movie one good credit: Christopher Reeve is still fantastic as Clark Kent and Superman. Even with the rest of the movie falling apart at the seems around him, he manages to give real gravitas and emotion to his performance. The world truly lost a fantastic talent when Christopher Reeve died a couple years ago.

VIDEO
"Superman IV" has been digitally remastered, but still won't wow you with its picture quality. The colors seem a bit faded, nothing really pops, which proves that either A) the original source was poor, or B) not nearly as much effort went into restoring this movie as the others (though, I can easily understand why).

AUDIO
"Superman IV" is presented in Dolby 2.0 Surround. As such, a 5.1 Surround system is wasted, even with the poor quality sound tracks this movie had. There's some panning from left to right, but bass is poor - everything sounds tinny and hissy, likely a result of the low-budget.

SPECIAL FEATURES
First up, the film's theatrical trailer, which does have some promise that "Superman IV" might actually be a half-decent action flick with a good social message. Too bad.

Next, deleted scenes. Christ, if you thought the movie itself was bad, wait till you see the crap they took out! Some of the scenes aren't so bad, but wouldn't have enhanced the movie in any way, such as a short bit of Clark oversleeping at the beginning of the movie, or at the end, saying goodbye to Mariel Hemingway's Lacy Warfield character.

But some of them are absolutely atrocious. A subplot early in the movie has Lex and his annoyingly idiotic nephew Lenny creating a prototype Nuclear Man (an out of shape, pasty white man with a gigantic mullet and a tin-can hanging off his crotch) and sending it after Superman. This entire sequence of scenes was poorly conceived, and even more poorly executed. The effects are bad, and the acting from the proto-Nuclear Man is hilariously lame.

Extensions to the fights between Superman and the final Nuclear Man are just as bad. In one scene, Nuclear Man creates a tornado in Smallville, and Superman saves a small girl who has been caught up in it. The shot of the girl being sucked up by the tornado is very obviously just a stuffed doll in clothes thrown up into the air. Shots of her supposedly spinning around in the tornado itself are hilarious - she sits, entirely disinterested and without expression, and spins around and around until Superman catches her.

In another cut scene, the Nuclear Man pushes a nuclear missile toward a gathering of Russian military officers and somehow activates its launch sequence in the middle of a parade. Superman arrives, blows out the rockets and pushes the missile back onto its truck. The generals just stand there yammering at each other in Russian.

There's nearly half an hour of this crap, all of it embarrassingly stupid. I wonder if it was included just to make sure that the movie itself was presented in the best possible light.

Also included is an audio commentary by screenwriter Mark Rosenthal. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm told it's quite frank, and he admits openly that the movie sucks. Good.

SCORE:
MOVIE: D-
VIDEO: C
AUDIO: C-
FEATURES: B
OVERALL: D

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Bean

I agree with you on almost every point you made, except the story idea. I think the story idea was ridiculous to begin with. Superman deciding to rid the world of nuclear weapons was completley out of character for the Man of Steel. It was akin to him saying "I don't care about your free will, I'm gonna MAKE you see it my way."

The whole thing was derived like so many other movies from that timeframe, from Hollywood personae getting more involved in "Save the whales" or "Save the planet" than their careers. While I think Reeves performance was again excellent as you say, I don't think he should have been allowed to take such an important franchise and rubber stamp it with his own self righteous political views at the time.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Closet Racist

It makes the Tim Burton Batman franchise look good in comparison! After I saw the Lester version of SUPERMAN II I thought they couldn't make a worse sequel...and they made TWO.

One of those Russian generals was played by the same actor as "Lobot" from SW:TESB...

__________________

Brikar

Well, see that's why I think the potential for some powerful storytelling there is that if the idea were done right, we'd have Superman realizing that he can't do that. It would call back to the first film, where Jor-El told him that he was "forbidden to interfere with human history". You'd have a story here where Superman makes a mistake, and then has to make it up to the people. One of the deleted scenes has Superman going to Jeremy's school in person, telling him that it was the most important letter he's ever gotten, but that unfortunately, there's nothing he can do - and the disappointment in all those kids' faces is what causes him to question whether or not he should do it.

But this terrible film just throws all that potential away in favor of the Nuclear Man, who is so poorly conceived and executed that the whole movie falls apart around him.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Bean

I guess my issue is really about Superman being timeless. You can watch, as you have recently, the first two movies, and despite the obvious fashion designs etc... it's a timeless movie. It isn't nailed to one particular year or decade. Now you take Superman 3, and again, despite some of the wardrobe and design, timeless.

Superman IV however, is political. It takes what was one of the biggest issues of it's time and puts it smack into the middle of the story. Even if the movie were any good, I could never watch it and not think to myself how out of date the story is.

Although good point on Superman having the realization that he was wrong to interfere.. that would have played out much better.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Stag

Was this the one with Jon Cryer in it? I went to High School with that dude, we were actually pretty good friends and I remember thinking that his acting career was going to take off after being in a Superman movie. LOL, well he is still acting on a semi-hit series.

BTW, there is a director's cut of this movie directed by Bean, it is called...

"The Quest for Penis"

Brikar

Indeed. Jon Cryer plays Lex's doofus nephew Lenny.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Bean

A horrible replacment for Miss Testmacher (sp?).

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk