Skip the movie. Get the DVD anyway.
The online film critic, James Berardinelli, identified three factors that are a sure sign of trouble for a studio release:
1. It is released in January, AFTER the holiday movie season.
2. It is not pre-screened for critics. 3. The director lost control of the project, and asked to have his name removed from the credits. (This used to result in the official pseudonym "Alan Smithee". The new pseudonym is "Thomas Lee").
Supernova was marked by all three disaster conditions. This project was started, but not finished, by Walter Hill. Incidentally, rumor has it that some of the additional footage and at least some of the final edit was assembled by none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Another director, not a big name this time, (Jack Sholder of Wishmaster 2) also worked on the film.
It is a space epic more or less directly derivative of "Alien". A small space crew answers a mysterious distress call, and ends up taking aboard a mysterious artifact which turns out to be irreconcilable with human life. Actually, they went it one better. This artifact is incompatible with the universe.
This film is really for genre addicts only. There is nothing original or deep about it. I feel confident you'll know exactly what's coming in every scene. In its current 90 minute cut, it's too short for interesting character development, it has several plot holes, and it has a sappy happy ending.
It also features a very odd impersonation of Tom Cruise, as performed by Peter Facinelli, who mimics Cruise's smile, his voice, and his mannerisms. Facinelli is taller, and not as handsome, but the overall effect is remarkable. It is almost as if it were calculated.
This movie bombed big time with both critics, and filmgoers. It garnered 90% negative reviews, and the positive reviews weren't all that enthusiastic. Despite wide release, it grossed only 14 million dollars on a 60 million dollar budget.
Strangely, I found the DVD worthwhile. Oh, the movie is completely predictable, but it isn't as bad as people said it was. I suppose critics were predisposed to hate it because they were shut out of a pre-screening, and because they were aware of the director troubles in the production. Who's going to write a good review of a movie obviously dumped by the studio and three directors?
Don't get me wrong, it isn't a good movie, but it had some decent visuals, more or less capable characterizations, and was mercifully short, so I was able to watch most of it without the FF.
But the film itself is not the reason to rent the DVD. In my opinion, there is a good reason to rent it.
There are more than a dozen deleted scenes, all fully scored, and these allow to to see how the original movie was a completely different movie - with a philosophical overlay and a deeply distressing ending. (The entire universe is doomed, and the evil guy is not destroyed by being ejected from the ship.) Moreover, there were other sub-plots, an explicit autopsy was performed on a character who was cut from the final version, another live person was found on the contaminated colony, the computer voices were different, two computers were later consolidated into one, etc. From these deleted scenes you can see the movie that might have been and compare it to what resulted.
I won't tell you that the other movie was better, but it was different, probably much longer, and I found it interesting to speculate as to why they changed what they did.
The online film critic, James Berardinelli, identified three factors that are a sure sign of trouble for a studio release:
1. It is released in January, AFTER the holiday movie season.
2. It is not pre-screened for critics. 3. The director lost control of the project, and asked to have his name removed from the credits. (This used to result in the official pseudonym "Alan Smithee". The new pseudonym is "Thomas Lee").
Supernova was marked by all three disaster conditions. This project was started, but not finished, by Walter Hill. Incidentally, rumor has it that some of the additional footage and at least some of the final edit was assembled by none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Another director, not a big name this time, (Jack Sholder of Wishmaster 2) also worked on the film.
It is a space epic more or less directly derivative of "Alien". A small space crew answers a mysterious distress call, and ends up taking aboard a mysterious artifact which turns out to be irreconcilable with human life. Actually, they went it one better. This artifact is incompatible with the universe.
This film is really for genre addicts only. There is nothing original or deep about it. I feel confident you'll know exactly what's coming in every scene. In its current 90 minute cut, it's too short for interesting character development, it has several plot holes, and it has a sappy happy ending.
It also features a very odd impersonation of Tom Cruise, as performed by Peter Facinelli, who mimics Cruise's smile, his voice, and his mannerisms. Facinelli is taller, and not as handsome, but the overall effect is remarkable. It is almost as if it were calculated.
This movie bombed big time with both critics, and filmgoers. It garnered 90% negative reviews, and the positive reviews weren't all that enthusiastic. Despite wide release, it grossed only 14 million dollars on a 60 million dollar budget.
Strangely, I found the DVD worthwhile. Oh, the movie is completely predictable, but it isn't as bad as people said it was. I suppose critics were predisposed to hate it because they were shut out of a pre-screening, and because they were aware of the director troubles in the production. Who's going to write a good review of a movie obviously dumped by the studio and three directors?
Don't get me wrong, it isn't a good movie, but it had some decent visuals, more or less capable characterizations, and was mercifully short, so I was able to watch most of it without the FF.
But the film itself is not the reason to rent the DVD. In my opinion, there is a good reason to rent it.
There are more than a dozen deleted scenes, all fully scored, and these allow to to see how the original movie was a completely different movie - with a philosophical overlay and a deeply distressing ending. (The entire universe is doomed, and the evil guy is not destroyed by being ejected from the ship.) Moreover, there were other sub-plots, an explicit autopsy was performed on a character who was cut from the final version, another live person was found on the contaminated colony, the computer voices were different, two computers were later consolidated into one, etc. From these deleted scenes you can see the movie that might have been and compare it to what resulted.
I won't tell you that the other movie was better, but it was different, probably much longer, and I found it interesting to speculate as to why they changed what they did.