Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		1.5

Supernova Blu-ray Movie Review

The black hole.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 5, 2015

How bad do things have to get for even the traditional pseudonymous refuge of directors not wanting their names associated with a film—Alan Smithee—to not be enough of a “mask”? Pretty bad, evidently, for “Smithee” has a rather bleak filmography to begin with, a series of misguided and at times cataclysmic efforts that certainly show rampant signs of the creative process getting seriously off the rails somewhere along the way. Directors as celebrated as David Lynch, Michael Mann and Blake Edwards have opted to use the Smithee pseudonym, but it was Arthur Hiller’s attempts to capitalize on the growing awareness of the Smithee moniker with his 1998 (ostensible) comedy An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn, which evidently finally put the name to rest, ironically because Hiller had supposedly brought too much unwanted attention to it. Whether or not Walter Hill could have used “Alan Smithee” to hide his involvement in Supernova is therefore questionable, but one way or the other Hill wasn’t about to attach his real name to the film, and so Supernova’s directing credit goes to one Thomas Lee.

The great Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), who plays Captain A.J. Marley in Supernova (albeit briefly), is on hand in the enjoyable “making of” featurette included on this Blu-ray, making the common sense point that space travelers really shouldn’t take on any “hitchhikers” (as it were), as things rarely work out well (witness Alien, to cite just one film in this science fiction subgenre). Supernova traffics in some fairly well worn tropes, something that probably tended to add to the perception of the film as a tired rehash of ideas that had been done better in any number of previous films. And yet—there are glimmers of an interesting approach, if not an innovative premise, lurking just beneath the blue tinged surface of this film.

Part of that interest is generated by the ragtag group of astronaut-medics aboard the Nightingale 229, a search and rescue ship where in the words of one of the medical crew “nothing” happens for long stretches of time, suddenly interrupted by some crisis which must be attended to, after which the nothingness simply returns, unabated. Captain Marley whiles away his time watching Tom and Jerry cartoons and writing a pretentious doctoral thesis on the combatants’ skirmishes. IT expert Benjamin (Wilson Cruz) has tweaked the ship’s computer to have a quasi-human side, replete with a seductive female voice. Yerzy (Lou Diamond Phillips) and Danika (Robin Tunney) are engaging in a torrid affair and also hope to conceive a child, something they evidently need permission from the government to do. And chief medical officer Kaela Evers (Angela Bassett) has her hands full trying to deal with newcomer Nick Vanzant (James Spader), a hotshot pilot who has a history of substance abuse with a mind altering drug which Kaela has an almost viscerally negative reaction toward.

But here’s the thing—in some cases, even those brief one line descriptions in the paragraph above offer more actual information than the film does. What appears to have been more or less wholesale slaughter in the name of rewrites and/or massive editing has left all sorts of information on the cutting room floor, and therefore to the viewer’s imagination to fill in. Great little character beats like the whole doctoral thesis angle are dealt with discursively, sometimes with only a second or two of screentime, never to be mentioned again. There seem to be acres of backstory that somehow got jettisoned along the way during the reportedly very acrimonious shooting schedule, where Lou Diamond Phillips avers Walter Hill would spend hours holed up with “studio suits” every morning on panicked rewrites, giving the actors their pages the same day that any given scene was finally committed to celluloid.

That means that even the ostensible main thrust of the plot, which sees the crew of the Nightingale 229 picking up a stranded miner named Karl Larson (Peter Facinelli), only to discover he’s not exactly what they bargained on (of course), is a tangled mess of half attributed motives and inchoate plot points. As is discussed in the making of featurette included on the Blu-ray, there was a scrappy little indie sci-fi film buried beneath the behemoth mess that Supernova became, and there are hints of an intriguing psychological component, one that perhaps was initially tied in to Vanzant’s supposedly dormant drug habit, that are relegated to simply confusing little scenes in this final form.

There are some hilarious throwaway comments in the making of featurette, including a great little admission that the film was built largely around one set and with interchangeable costumes, as well as a ubiquitously blue palette, so that any given scene could be excised and reinserted anywhere in the film, to much the same general effect. It’s obvious that Supernova fell victim to this “cut and paste” method of filmmaking. The most astonishing thing is that the film makes as much sense as it does. Supernova is a mess, no doubt about it—but it frequently has a bit of style to recommend it.

Supernova Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Supernova is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded transfer in 2.36:1. This has the look of having been sourced from a somewhat older master, without quite the levels of clarity and sharpness some might be hoping for, but given an understanding of the virtually nonstop azure palette Supernova exploits, things look reasonably good quite a bit of the time. Detail and fine detail are often mitigated by the sheen of blue that is slathered on about 90% of the film, though that hue does tend to accentuate the grainfield, which is very healthy (some might feel too healthy) looking. The blue also tends to accentuate dirt, with black (and occasionally white) specks showing up with fair regularity. The digital effects, which were to be the film's calling card even in its low budget pre-production days, look okay if not spectacular. Perhaps due to the suffusion of blue and generally soft appearance, there's a slightly digital appearance to the film at times, despite a rather thick layer of grain. The fact that Supernova received a high definition release at all is probably something of a minor miracle, and while not optimal, this presentation is certainly watchable.

Supernova Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Supernova features DTS-HD Master Audio options in both 2.0 and 5.1. The 5.1 mix significantly opens up directionality with regard to elements like the computer's seductive voice as well as the rather enjoyable synth laden score by David C. Williams. Dialogue is cleanly presented most of the time, though there are some sound effects laden sequences where it seems slightly buried in the mix, especially in the surround iteration. Fidelity is fine, though there are occasional anomalies like a brief dropout at around 21:20 (apparent in both the 2.0 and 5.1 mixes).

Supernova Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making of Supernova (1080p; 25:01) is a really well done set of interviews with several of the principals involved documenting the tortuous history of the film. One niggling qualm: the annoying directorial stylistic choice to suddenly zoom in on a subject halfway through any given sentence.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:18)


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 14:40)


• Alternate Ending (1080p; 5:27)

Supernova Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're willing to dig down through the clichés and hoary tropes that reside in Supernova in its final state, there are glimmers of a much more interesting film that peek through every now and again. This seems to be one of those projects that went off the rails fairly early on and then simply cartwheeled into even greater calamity through the shoot and post production, with a coterie of people attaching themselves (or being attached) to the project, further mucking up the works. Hill was a stylish director, and there is style to be had here, albeit in a pretty badly jumbled way. The best thing about this new Scream Factory release is arguably the making of featurette, which offers a rather unvarnished view of just how seriously things can go awry in the wild and wooly world of Hollywood.