SUPERNOVA
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  I don't know what it is about January, but it certainly has become of late the dumping ground for "troubled production" genre flicks.  Last year had Virus, which started production in, oh, 1996 or so, and it was lousy.  The year before, the loveable gem Deep Rising, which sat around for two years before finding a distributor.  This year, it's Supernova, and despite a good cast and a much-admired director (Walter Hill), it's a lot more like Virus than Deep Rising.  Behold: the first really bad movie of the new millennium.

Dispensing with opening credits - and, for that matter, an opening title, which we never get to see until the movie's over - Supernova jumps right in with the crew of a deep-space rescue/medivac ship, the Nightingale.  This opening confused the hell out of me - its chief medical officer (Angela Basset) is treating a recovered junkie (James Spader), they cross words, and we see numerous people going about what amuses them in deep space.  Sex, ping pong, floating around in zero-gee, whatever floats these guys' boats.  Why this is confusing, well, hang on.

Then they get a distress call from a VERY far away, abandoned mining operation, from somebody identifying himself as Basset's former lover (also a junkie, by the way).  So they get ready for "D-Jump", a warp-speed maneuver which involves everybody getting naked.  (you get to see Robin Tunney's very nice breasts, if you don't blink) (and listen for Wilson Cruz's hilarious story of a D-Jump gone bad)  Anyways, this particular D-Jump goes bad indeed, and the captain (Robert Forster) is killed, and I have no idea what happens to zero-gee guy or the ping-pong guys, and now we find out that Spader is Basset's superior officer.  (until this point, I was under the impression that he'd been rescued from another mission, but then he starts talking about "our" mission and all that)

The guy they pick up doesn't appear to be Basset's former lover - he's way too young and looks a lot like Chris O'Donnell (who I thought he was until the closing credits - it was with some disappointment that I came to the conclusion that O'Donnell's boyish good looks, the only thing which has kept his career afloat, might still be with him).  He claims to be the guy's son (small world - uh, galaxy), and he has some weird bone structure and a pink egg-lookin' thing in his luggage, which might be worth a lot of money to the right people, because it, like, exists in nine (yes, nine) dimensions.

What happens from then on does make a modicum of sense, but I'm tellin' you, when Francis Ford Coppola stepped in to make a coherent cut of the film after Hill walked off the project, he didn't do a very good job. (or so goes one story of the film's history.  I don't really care what the real story is when the final product is crap.)  (credited to one Thomas Lee no less, who is apparently the Alan Smithee of the new century)  If you think the beginning sounds bad, wait'll you see the ending, which manages to work in a pregnancy and a possible "new level of existence for humankind" (the computer's words, not mine).  There's this one montage of mining footage which serves no apparent purpose, and anybody who can explain to me just how one character gets his paws on that shuttlecraft, hey, lemme know.  And just why that egg thing makes people younger and stronger HMM HAVE YOU FIGURED OUT WHO OUR GUEST REALLY IS YET?!?!? isn't even hinted at.

Simply put, the plot is nonsense.  I dunno; with some hammer-and-tongs tinkering, this might've made a pretty good Star Trek episode (and probably did; hell if I can keep track of 'em all), but on the big screen, I found myself bored, and chuckling in the wrong places.  Besides, if you can't guess who's going to survive this movie (you can start by ticking away the people who are absolutely going to die), you're...I guess you're its target audience!

The performances are mostly good, particularly that of Spader, for all the good it does them in this dopey movie.  Basset looks a little embarrassed by it all, but squeezes out her lines with as much dignity as she can muster.  Lou Diamond Philips (remember him?) is here too, though for about half of his screen time he's just staring forward like a slackjawed idiot while his face is contorted by the pink haze around that egg thing.  But it's nice to see Cruz getting away from TV for a bit - remember that horrible show My So-Called Life? (nothing makes a bad show an even worse experience like every critic in North America saying it's brilliant)  He played (surprise) the gay guy, who, at the time, I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be a lesbian or a gay man, so androgynous was his manner, clothing, and even name.

The effects are all good, not like they show us anything we haven't seen before (though I liked the presumably CGI-rendered peeks around the exterior of the landing base on Titan) (no, not THAT Titan, confused yet?).

No movie this poorly put together is worth your money, let alone your time.  No, it isn't drop-dead awful, but bad is bad, and the supernova referred to in the title doesn't have anything to do with anything, although we're blessedly spared a countdown to the star's explosion at the climax of the film.  Walter, Walter, Walter, first Last Man Standing, now this?  Yeah, he walked off the project, but I can't imagine anything very compelling being made out of these ingredients.

To be honest, even the trailer for upcoming Scientology propaganda flick Battlefield Earth (uh-oh, the Psychlos are coming!  Gimme a break...) was in the end more interesting than the whole of Supernova.  (Pitch Black looks like fun too, and Mission To Mars looks like one of the very few SF movies of the past 20 years to rip off 2001 more than it does Star Wars or Alien, so hey, I'm there!)  I'm actually rather surprised that it's still in first-run theaters.  Stay away; go see, uh, Magnolia, or something, or walk your dog, or call your mom, she hasn't heard from you in weeks.

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