This is that dumb space movie/Alien ripoff with James Spader, Angela Basset, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Robin Tunney, the nicely-racked good witch from The Craft.
A bad film, which I knew going in. I like renting bad movies.
A little background: Supernova was directed by "Thomas Lee." Thomas Lee does not exist. The name was invented because the actual director (Walter Hill, who can now officially be deemed either a has-been or never-was) "distanced" himself from this stinker.
When the man who proudly brought us the execrable "Last Man Standing" distances himself from a project, you know you're in for a fucking treat. Hooookay. Here goes:
Supernova is the biggest, stupidest ripoff of good sci-fi movies I've ever seen. Let us go down the list:
- Hyper-sleep pods, like they had in Alien & Aliens? Yup, we got those. Except in Alien, you hyper-slept in your underwear. In Supernova, you sleep naked. Which brings up...
- "Tits are no big deal." In Aliens, you may remember that the military was co-ed, and that it simply was no longer any big deal to see your Sargeant's tits. Men and women undressed around each other without hesitation. This was further ripped off in Starship Troopers. It is ripped off again here.
One bonus: You get to see Robin Tunney's wonderful boobs. You don't see Angela Basset's rack, though you do get to see what is almost certainly a body-double of her through silhoutte and smoke. (More on Smoke later.)
- Well, the spaceship in Supernova recieves a distress call (yawn) from a derelict ship/mining base (yet again?) and goes to its rescue (ho-hum) only to find a single survivor (checks watch) who has in his possession a Mysterious Alien Artifact. This Mysterious Alien Artifact turns out to be...
...a powerful alien bomb which destroys all matter it encounters and creates, in the previous matter's place, a whole new matrix of matter and new life.
Yeahp. You heard that right. The Mysterious Alien Artifact is the Genesis Device from Star Trek II.
- They don't do much with that ripped-off plot contrivance. So, in the meantime, the Evil Survivor kills off the members of the crew one by one. You see, exposure to the Alien Artifact also makes you younger, stronger, quicker, and more Evil. It creates a "matrix of molecular structures on your bones" the likes of which Angela Basset "has never seen before."
When the Evil Surviovor is first asked about this, he says he's "Always had that." Everyone accepts this explanation, and everyone allows the Evil Mutant to roam the ship freely, so he can sabotage the ship and murder the crew.
- Finally, the ship has a clunky-looking robot dressed up like a World War I pilot, which they call "Flyboy." Sorta like Alien & Aliens had a humanoid android. They don't do anything with "Flyboy," so it's curious why he's in the movie at all, except for the Blatant Ripoff Factor. Well, wrapping up, the Evil Mutant Survivor kills the crew-members VERY quickly. THere is no suspense; there's no time for suspense. There is no stalking through the ship's corridors. The Evil Mutant simply kills three crew members in about three minutes, bang-bang-bang. The scriptwriter didn't see fit, apparently, to write in the well-nigh-obligatory part where the crew figures out what they're up against, then attempts to fight the Evil Menace, only to be picked off one by one.
Nope. The crew is killed, more or less unaware, bang-bang-bang. Except for the two biggest stars, of course.
How do they kill the Evil Mutant? Well, how did they kill the Alien in Alien and Aliens? Pretty much the same motherfucking way.
A note on Smoke: For some reason, the ship in Supernova is designed for minimal visibility. Everything is darkly lit with a liquidy sort of blue light, and there's lots and lots of Random Strobing coming from undefined lights, and there's SMOKE fucking everywhere.
Not smoke from half-destroyed machinery. This ship apparently just pumps out a lot of smoke in its interior in its normal course of functioning. Smoke and steam. Everywhere.
In the twenty-fifth century, apparently, they've lost the technology of pipes and ventiliation. They just let smoke and steam flow freely out of equipment. Combined with blue light and strobe, you can't see a fucking thing, which is probably a good thing, because what you *CAN* see of the ship's interior looks pretty lame and uninspired. It recalled those cheesy partial-sets of the old Batman series. PS: This is not at all like the interiors of the ships/bases in the Alien series.
In the Alien series, visibility was restricted, but for very plausible reasons (for example, in Aliens, they were at a partially-demolished base, so of course not all the lights worked) and what you *could* see of the interiors looked perfectly plausible. It all looked like it *could be* the interior of a space-ship or space-base.
In Supernova, it all looks exactly like a Hollywood set where they didn't have the money to build convincing interiors, so they just shrouded everything in smoke, steam, silly strobing and blue light.
You see a strut here and there. But you see precious few *walls* and ceilings.
Because a strut only costs about a hundred bucks, but a wall would cost more than $2000. Oh, sorry. A few more rip-offs:
- As in Alien, Aliens, etc., the Captain/Highest Ranking Officer dies early so that the Hero/Lower Ranking Officer can take over and steal the show.
- Here, the Captain dies due to a malfunction of the hyper-sleep pods. He ends up looking much like the poor souls who died in the Transporter Malfunction in Star Trek I. Why, precisely, does hyper-sleep involve in gross genetic rearrangement? If faster-than-light travel can rearrange a human's molecules and turn him into a mutated monster straight out of the Thing, how come the steel of the ship isn't affected? Is carbon somehow more succeptible to FTL effects than is steel or titanium?
- James Spader, the Hero, employs clawed robotic arm-extensions to fight the Bad Guy, very similar to the Robotic Loader Ripley used to fight the Queen Alien in Aliens. Except, of course, that robotic arm-extensions are much cheaper than a moving robot-body.
- Spader is identified as a former addict of some futuristic drug ("Haze," they call it). The Futuristic Drug plot device has been used a thousand times before, and it's not getting any fresher.
On Spader: Spader is a decent actor. He's good in Supernova. Most people are good in Supernova.
But the film fucking sucks. Sorry, a clarification:
There are no "hyper-sleep pods" in Supernova. The pods just look like hyper-sleep pods, as seen in Alien(s).
The pods are actually some sort of "genetic stabilizer pods" to protect your body from the genetic rearrangement effect of FTL travel.
Again, no explanation is offered why FTL travel should rearrange human molecules and not the molecules of the ship itself, or the air in the ship, or the water in the tanks, or the food in the refrigerators, etc.
