
#673 – Supernova (2000)









Supernova (2000)
Film review #672
Director: Thomas Lee
SYNOPSIS: A medical ship answers a distress call from a distant moon, where they find the sole survivor of an outpost and a mysterious artefact. Unsure of its purpose, the man wants to bring it back to civilised space and sell it, but the crew suspect ulterior motives…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Supernova is a 2000 sci-fi film. Set in the twenty-second century, a medical ship intercepts a distress signal from a mining colony, and upon arriving, they find the moon destroyed, and the ship suffers extensive damage. Furthermore, the ship is slowly getting sucked into the gas giant’s gravity, and the ship’s jump drive will only be recharged eleven minutes before that happens, which is the mother of all coincidences. The crew rescue a sole survivor, Karl Larson, who has a mysterious alien artefact, and says he wants to sell it back home to become rich. However, it turns out he is actually possessed by this artefact or something, and he wants to bring the artefact back to civilised space to collapse the matter of the universe and rebirth it…or something like that anyway, it’s fairly vague. Sure enough, Karl starts killing off the crew, and they must find a way to survive and get home. There’s one other film that immediately springs to mind when seeing this one: Event Horizon. Whereas that film was good at what it wanted to do, Supernova is an absolute mess, and has no idea what it wants to do. Now, part of this is is the classic studio interference and clash with the director’s vision: Director Walter Hill wanted a more psychological horror (akin to Event Horizon), the studio wanted something more “hip and sexy.” While the film does have some slick effects, and gets in a few sex scenes, the cost of this interference is that the editing reduces the film to an incomprehensible mess. Any in-depth analysis of the artefact is avoided (to make the film more “hip” I guess?), the story is all over the place, and the characters have no development, as they can disappear for large periods of the film before reappearing). There’s no build up to the tense parts of the film, and the killings just start happening one after another so that nothing really has any impact.
The production history of this film perhaps explains why this film is the way it is: the film’s origins begin in 1990, where H.R. Giger was brought on board to do some art for the film. MGM bought the film and decided to rework the film to be more “mainstream,” leading to creative differences with director Walter Hill quitting the project after they hired him (and him using a pseudonym in the credits, clearly wanting nothing to do with the projects, another director was brought on to do re-shoots, which seems to have made things worse, and in a last-ditch efforts, MGM brought in legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to re-edit the film for release. Given that what actually was released is a jumbled mess that not even Coppola could redeem, it clearly speaks to just how much of a mess this film had devolved into. So yes, the final product is bland, derivative, and devoid of any substance, and with a runtime of ninety minutes, clearly does the bare minimum to make it a feature-length film, and says no more than it has to.
In short, Supernova is a mess of a film that having been through a grinder of re-editing and re-shoots, delivers a final product that has no real vision or depth. The positives are that the effects and design of the ship are nice, and it’s decently acted with a diverse and experienced cast, but other than that it fails to deliver anything of note.
