1990s SF film
Supernova, 1999, USA DIRECTED BY THOMAS LEE
This is another film in the prolific career of 'Alan Smithee': director 'Thomas Lee' is pseudonymous for Walter Hill, who abandoned the director's credit before Supernova's completion. Francis Ford Coppola then edited it into its final form, after which it was shelved for another year before being released without press previews in 2000. It's a slick enough film in appearance though the plot is straight out of the 1950s, involving the discovery of a nine-dimensional alien artifact and the resulting mayhem when it's brought aboard an interstellar medical ship. The main weak link is the superhuman bad guy who joins the crew, played by Peter Facinelli, who simply can't carry his central yet clichéd role with much conviction at all. James Spader is too low key and serious, Angela Bassett is charmless and functional in a role just about anyone else could have played. It's only the cheap dialogue that sometimes goes into total bollocks overdrive, the rest just follows meekly in the footsteps of It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Walter Hill said he had envisioned a film that was much darker in tone, but all we got was something visually pretty with a very predictable plot that could have taken up just fifteen minutes of a much more ambitious and cosmological vision. The alternate ending is better and more ambiguous, but otherwise this is the kind of disappointing result that comes from too much design-by-committee rather than a picture of one person's vision.