Yesterday, the resident pop culture bashers of Ain't It cool News.com go their grubby mitts on a "copy" of the upcoming Superman "script". Below is the "script" that the Warner Bros. brass said was SOOOOOO good that they threw the Batman vs. Superman film WAAAAAAAAYYYY on the back burner.
Note: I can not confirm nor deny that this is the actual storyline to the film as I am not a Hollywood insider. I am only a man in a silly red sheet.....
The film starts with a news broadcast. The anchor on TV looks frazzled, panicked. He tells everyone to get underground, that the Pyramids have been destroyed, that Paris is burning, that most of South America is gone. He blames it all on Superman. There�s a terrible noise, and we whipcut to outside, to the streets of Gotham City (yes, I said Gotham), where a figure in body armor and a ninja�s cloak walks down the center of the street, using breath that is the �force of a thousand hurricanes� to blow buses and cars away, flattening five square blocks in the process.
There�s a WHOOSH in the distance, and the Kryptonian stops. This is TY-ZOR. He�s the same age as Superman, around 30 years old. As he hears the sound getting closer, he smiles, as if this is exactly what he wants.
BAM!
 Two red boots hit the pavement in the foreground, �like an NBA MVP coming down from a slam dunk.� We move around the figure, up a very familiar costume, red and blue with a billowing cape. We see the �S� shaped icon. We finally see his face. He�s bruised. He�s bloodied. He�s winded. Whoever this Ty-Zor is... he�s kicking Superman�s ass.
They take off, start to chase each other through the sky. Predictably enough, they both are martial arts experts, and they have a high-speed super-powered martial arts fight in mid-air, kicking each other through buildings on a scale that SUPERMAN II could have never managed. At one point, we follow Superman in close-up as he flies backwards through a building, people scattering to get out of his way. It�s big action. It�s well written. Ty-Zor lures Superman into a NASA hangar that�s made largely of lead. Superman walks into the situation blind, not sure what�s going on. Ty-Zor taunts him over a speaker system, drawing him further in.
Superman finds a giant water testing tank and sees something off-camera that makes him stop. He�s terrified. He collapses in pain. He tries to crawl away but can�t. Ty-Zor taunts him again over the hidden speakers.
TY-ZOR
I want to hear you cry, Kal-El. Like your mother cried. Cry for me... Superman! And as blisters erupt all over Superman and he cries out in pain, we SHOCK CUT TO:
they call it Krypton in the script, but it�s instantly recognizable as the Naboo of EPISODE I. Green fields. Forests nearby. Little girl playing. Everything peaceful.
And then the big war machines come rolling in. Again, I�m picturing EPISODE I. Three-legged robot tanks. Mechanical soldiers taking a royal city. A civil war raging suddenly, ruining the peaceful green planet.
JOR-EL is a young man at this point, 39 years old, the leader of the Senate. As the attack gets underway and reports of key military failures roll in, Jor-El orders everyone to leave the War Room and go to their families, so at least they�ll be together at the end.
Jor-El�s got other plans, though. Seems there�s some prophecy, and he and Lara have a rocket shipt they�ve built for just this occasion, and Jor-El is determined that the only way to save their baby is to send him away. His rocket blasts off as the mechanical warriors come bursting in, and Jor-El sends his wife away at the last second with a creature called TAGA, described as a giant turtle with no shell. They take off, Jor-El goes outside to fight, and Jor-El ends up captured, beaten badly, taken before KATA-ZOR and his son TY-ZOR. Kata-Zor tells Jor-El that he knows about The Prophecy and he�s crazy, and he�s gonna track the baby down and kill him, and someone says that the pod could have gone any one of a thousand places, and Kata-Zor screams �THEN SEND A THOUSAND MEN!�

The last shot of this long Krypton prologue is of a thousand probe pods being sent out, away from the red sun of their home, all of them looking for the baby.
�Our MUSIC SWELLS � it�s EPIC � and then...�
Smallville. Martha and Jonathan Kent are eating breakfast. Okay. This is good. After all, you�d have to be genuinely retarded to screw up Smallville stuff by this point. Everything�s played big. For example, they�re not driving when the baby crashes. Instead, the pod lands in their field, heading straight for the house, and they have to run outside to get out of the way, only to see it come to rest an inch from the kitchen window when it finally slows down. They take the baby in. His powers begin to manifest almost immediately. He tosses a couch. He flies. Even what he leaves in his diapers seems super-powered based on Jonathan�s weak-kneed reaction. The Kents are poor, struggling with their bills, but they are determined to provide for this strange orphaned baby, raising him as thei own, teaching him restraint above all else. Control. Basically, they make him so scared of what he can do that he�s afraid to do anything. A wicked landlord (drawn so broadly that he might as well have a mustache to twirl) tries to rape Martha Kent, and the six-year-old boy attacks, beats, and nearly kills the man. The guy freaks out and calls Clark the devil and a monster.
He�s a resolute outsider as he grows up, able to hear what his classmates say about him from miles away. When he�s 14, he finds a silver cannister hidden in his parents� closet (he�s busy using his x-ray vision to see what�s in his Christmas presents). It�s not normal, and it slides open like liquid. Some sort of red substance is inside, neither liquid nor solid, and it suddenly SPRINGS out...
The Superman suit. The one you know.
Full-sized, standing by itself, as if worn by a grown man, cape waving. And when Clark goes to touch it, it rips his clothes off and sucks him into the suit. He�s obviously too small for it, but that doesn�t stop him. He runs out and begins to experiment with it, running and leaping and finally taking off. Flying. In a suit that�s too big for him. And when he lands, it�s head-first, destroying a tractor right in front of Martha and Jonathan, who just came home. This, of course, leads to the talk. Clark learns that he�s not their son naturally. That he�s not even from Earth naturally. And he takes the suit off and runs outside, confused and upset, and he looks up into the sky at the stars, wondering where he came from, and just as we really start to connect with Clark... just as they start to get to the heart of who he is... ... we cut back to Krypton.
More stuff with Taga the turtle creature and Lara, Superman�s decidedly not-dead mom. She�s captured. She�s tortured by Ty-Zor, who is about Clark�s age. He wants to know where Kal-El was sent, and when she won�t tell, she becomes Superman�s finally-dead mom.
And then it�s back to Earth. Clark�s 20. He�s in college. He�s an undeclared major, sort of drifting through school, not sure what he wants to do with his life. He meets LOIS LANE at a party. She�s annoyed, impatient, sorry she came. It�s a loud, obnoxious kegger, and it�s obvious neither one of them belongs there. This is the kind of stuff that Abrams can do in his sleep after FELICITY and the first season of ALIAS. Smart flirting. And even though it�s a total reinvention of how they meet, it�s okay. It�s decent character work. She totally rolls over him, of course. She wants to be a reporter. She wants to work at the DAILY PLANET. There�s a near-altercation where Clark gets pushed around, and it�s Lois who steps in and uses Krav Maga blows to knock the bully out. And just like that, she�s gone, and Clark is smitten.
And then we jump forward in time again, seven years, and we meet the character who is, in my opinion, going to cause the most controversy in the fan community. CIA Special Agent DR. LEX LUTHOR.
He�s in his 50s with closely cropped hair. He�s brought in to Dust City, Arizona where police have cordoned off what appears to be a crash site. For a UFO.
Because that�s what CIA Special Agent Dr. Lex Luthor does. He�s the Director of the Special Operations Division of the CIA. Which basically means that he chases UFO activity and tries to either verify or debunk it. The crash site turns out to be a hoax, though, set up by a couple of local kids. Luthor exposes the hoax, and is about to leave when he gets snapped by a photographer. We cut to a close-up of the DAILY PLANET, where there�s a headline splashed across the front page:
�CIA SPENDS MILLIONS ON LITTLE GREEN MEN.� By Lois Lane.
Seems she paid the kids to set up the hoax. She�s chasing Luthor and his budget, determined to expose his work as ridiculous. Luthor pressures his bosses to let him go public with The Big Secret. In Metropolis, Lois is getting bitched out by her editor, Perry White, for her techniques even as Jimmy Olsen gives Clark Kent a tour of the place. It�s Clark�s first day. And now he�s the age he was in the opening. Jimmy�s a little younger, and is described as �Brooklyn-born and somewhat effeminate.� Perry White makes jokes about Jimmy�s boyfriend later in the scene. It�s one of those bizarre choices that you hope you�re misreading. It�s suggested more than anything, but it is suggestedthat he's gay.WHAT????
Luthor goes public with a discovery that justifies his budget. He shows slides of a crash recovery site from nine years earlier. And this is twenty-nine years after the opening Krypton scenes, so... Luthor�s talking about a crash... came about twenty years after Clark first landed. The slides show a capsule almost exactly like Clark�s. Lex says the capsule is proof that there is an alien visitor hiding somewhere on Earth, and he intends to find him. Clark has a big panic attack, of course, and calls home to talk to his mom and to verify that their capsule is still hidden in the barn, setting up the mystery of the film. Whose capsule is the second one?
Who is the second Kryptonian?
There�s more flirting. There�s no Superman yet. It�s just Clark following Lois around and Lois getting into trouble with her various stories. She gets assigned to a cover the President on Air Force One, a second chance from Perry to prove herself, and as they�re in the air, there is a sudden, unexpected mechanical failure, and the plane begins to fall. Clark hears the incident on the radio.
He rips open that cannister.
And now, for the first time, he�s the right size for the suit. And it climbs up onto him again and he takes off into the sky, flying for the first time since moving to the city.
And at the end of the scene, once the plane is on the ground, as everyone is freaking out over the mere idea of a man who can fly, the President tries to thank Clark, who walks right by him, worried, so he can check on Lois. For some reason, though, she doesn�t recognize him.
No one does.
Lex sees him on TV, though, and he knows full well what it means. It means that the Visitor has finally revealed himself.
And Jonathan Kent hears him on the radio, and for a moment, he�s enormously proud of his son, and as he runs to tell his wife, he pulls a Glen Ford. Face down.
Exit Pa Kent.
Then it�s back to Krypton, for more crap we couldn�t care less about. I cannot stress this enough. Krypton is so powerfully uninteresting in the script that my eyes would glaze over at the mere sight of the word. We find Kata-Zor playing some kind of silly space chess with PREDIUS (a concentration camp prisoner who we don�t learn anything about, but who the script promises will be very important in the next film), and Ty-Zor comes in to tell his dad that they found Kal-El. Because I guess they were watching Earth TV just in case or something. But however they know, they decide to send some war machines to find and kill Kal-El. Ty-Zor begs for the gig.
Superman is so torn up over his father�s death that he vows never to put the suit on again. Luthor�s efforts to get more funding to find Superman result in Luthor�s being fired. He flips out and screams at the Senators who are pulling the plug on his program. He tells them that they�re all going to die. They don�t believe it. They think Superman is a hero. After all, he just saved The President. They�re not about to fund Lex�s effort to track him down and destroy him.
There�s another bizarre choice in here, one of those head-scratchers that just pull you out of the thing. Martha happens to find some metal thingies that she forgot to give Clark earlier. The metal thingies, if you put them together the right way, form the negative space from the �S� symbol from the costume. Turns out, these were given to the Kents before Kal-El ever arrived.
By Jor-El.
During his visit to Earth, when he picked the Kents to be Kal-El�s new parents. For some reason, Martha never put all of this together, but suddenly we get this rush of exposition all at once. Each of the metal thingies means something different. Courage. Sacrifice. Wisdom. Faith. Love. Once she remembers this, she�s suddenly quite sure that he�s supposed to go save the world. From what, we�re not sure. There�s no major threat to speak of. But she decides that�s his mission, and because of the metal thingies and a photo of Jor-El, Clark decides she�s right.
A montage follows, as we see him slowly slip into this new role. He goes to a mountain top in the Andes and just... listens. There�s cries for help from all over the world, and at first, it seems to be too much. But he focuses in on one particular cry. Then another. Then another. And he begins to fly from place to place, fast as he can, never staying for thanks. And for this three or four pages, Abrams brings it all together again.
Lois and Superman fall in love. There�s a nice tribute to Donner�s film in the way she interviews him and then they share a flight over the city at night. Luthor�s plan is revealed: he�s seen a vision of the Visitors coming to find the first Visitor, and he wants to help them take over the Earth in exchange for power. The warship arrives on Earth, landing in Washington D.C. Lois finds out about Luthor�s plan, which involves some sort of material stolen from the Smithsonian called �kryptonite,� and she rushes to warn Superman before his confrontation.
What unfolds for the next twenty pages or so is an enormous, ungodly fight between Superman and the various Kryptonians who have come to Earth to assist Ty-Zor. They battle through Washington, destroying much of it before Ty-Zor and the others retreat to regroup and hook up with Lex. The public turns on Superman and blames him for the bad guys coming to Earth.
Keep in mind that all of this is within days of Superman�s first appearance. The timetable is something ridiculous like a week. They�re working to pack so much into this script that it begins to smell desperate. There�s only so many pages of superbeings throwing each other through buildings that can be considered interesting, and I don�t know how much entertainment value audiences are going to find post 9/11 in watching beloved Washington landmarks be destroyed. Finally, as the Kryptonians and Luthor continue to bait Kal-El by destroying things around the world, the film comes full circle. We�re back to that fight between Ty-Zor and Superman. We go back into that NASA hangar. Only this time, we see what Superman sees. We see what terrifies him and what starts to hurt him.
Lois Lane, submerged in water, drowning, moored to the floor of a water tank next to a giant chunk of Kryptonite. Meaning if Superman goes in to save her, he�s going to die. And if he doesn�t, he�ll watch her die. So... he does what Superman would do.
He goes in.
And he dies.SCHMUCK!
I'm all for the death of Superman to be made, but YOU DON'T KILL OFF THE MAN IN THE FIRST MOVIE!!!!
Evidently not. Peters seems determined to shoehorn in the artificial emotion of a syrupy, lengthy, pointless funeral sequence. Lois gets to cry. Everyone gets to be very solemn.
Jor-El �senses� the death of his son all the way from Krypton, so he slices his own stomach open and goes to Heaven where he explains to Jor-El that he CAN�T die. I halfway expected him to say, �Look, son, this is just the first film in the trilogy. You can�t be dead yet.� His excuse isn�t much better. He explains that The Prophecy says that the Son of Krypton will defeat a great trial on a distant planet before coming home to kick some ass. �And since I know you�re going to come save Krypton, you can�t die on Earth.�
Kal-El can�t really argue with such spotless logic, so he returns to his body and digs himself out of the grave where he was put to rest.
Seriously. Jor-El argues him out of being dead.
By this time, Luthor�s in the White House, and the Kryptonians are celebrating. They don�t know that Superman is back. They don�t suspect a thing as he goes to Lois, learns all about Kryptonite, then secretly organizes the entire United Nations for a plan to put the big hurtin� on Ty-Zor and his boys. And girls. There�s a couple of Ursa wannabes in the group. Once everything�s in place, Superman goes to the White House and calls everyone out for the big final action sequence.
Air combat between five superpowered Kryptonians and fighter jets from 24 nations. Kryptonite missiles. Ass-kickin� on a level we�ve never seen before on film.
And just in case you�re not infuriated yet, let me give you the last big spoiler in this thing. As Randy Newman once sang, �I just want you to hurt... like I do...�
Y�see, after all the Kryptonians are dead, Superman�s getting ready to go back home. He�s gonna go to Krypton because the Prophecy says so. Never mind the fact that he won�t have any superpowers back there. Never mind the fact that we DON�T FREAKING CARE about what happens on Krypton. That�s the set-up for part two, and Superman is in midst of his tearful farewell when Luthor shows up. And that sinking feeling I got earlier came back. I knew it before it even happened. That thing I was so afraid of... Abrams is going to go for it, I thought... and I kept reading, almost peeking at the pages between my fingers... Luthor tells Superman that he has come for him. And not in the way he thinks, either. He begins to rant about what a �goddamn spectacular job� he�s done, rambling like he�s lost his mind.
LUTHOR
The good soldier. The loyal. The dedicated. The tenacious. That�s me. When others would have quit � when others have. I kept up the charade. Following orders that made me sick! To impersonate the very thing I despise most in the universe.
(to Lois, with disdain)
Those like you.
LUTHOR
I was hoping to do this on a slightly larger scale, SUPERMAN... but here we are. And the only way for me to be the good soldier is to tell you the truth. (intense, evil beat)
No, that pod the CIA recovered... it wasn�t yours.
A long insane dramatic beat � and just as we get it:
LUTHOR
IT WAS MINE!
And then Luthor flies. CAn you even see it? Oh boy
And he and Superman have yet another superfight.
Because 30 pages of superfights wasn�t enough.
And because someone, somewhere, for some completely mystifying reason has decided that it would be a good idea to make Lex Luthor a superpowered 50 year old who knows better kung-fu than Superman.
Can this film be even worse than the last two bat films?? Hell, why can't Perry white be a kryptonian who comes to earth because he can't get a publishing job on the Big K?
Lex Luthor. And he�s got superpowers. And he flies.
The end of the film sets up Clark to go home to Krypton. It sets up Lex as a prisoner, ripe to escape for the next movie.
And for all the world, it reads to me like Clark is going home to Krypton to study with Yoda so he can be the king of Krypton or some such nonsense. And as his rocket blasts off from a cornfield and Marth Kent waves at him,
OH MY GOD!!!!! I really hope what I and you have read IS NOT the real synopsis of the film, I really do. I just can't put it into words just how much this script does not respect the source material. It really does not make any sense to send the baby to Earth, NO!! it doesn't!!! You gotta have the planet destroyed, Maybe, a few survivors, ok I would go with that, but not this, I don't even know what the hell to call this...hell with this, I can't think straight right now!
Below is a comment from moviepoopshoot.com
JIHAAD! SUPERMAN UNDER SIEGE! SHOWDOWN AT THE HOEDOWN!

News leaked last week on the AIN'T IT COOL NEWS website: the owners/licensees of the intellectual property to the Superman character has dared to exercise said intellectual property in a manner not agreeable to obsessed middle-aged men of questionable emotional stability. AW YEAH, IT�S ON!
A copy of the screenplay to the new SUPERMAN movie was stolen, and the details of said screenplay were discussed in an enormously negative review on AINT IT COOL by their best writer, Drew McWeeney, a.k.a. �Moriarty.� The public, on hearing the details, reeled in shock!
Yes� somehow, against all odds, SOMEONE IN LOS ANGELES IS PLANNING ON MAKING A SHITTY MOVIE! Oh, my god! Somebody call the cops. A shitty superhero movie? UNHEARD OF!
Yes, they're planning (again) to make SUPERMAN (... again), only shitty this time (again, lest we forget SUPERMAN 4: A QUEST FOR PEACE). It�s directed by Brett Ratner (RUSH HOUR, RUSH HOUR 2), and written by the soon-to-be-deceased J.J. Abrams (TV�s ALIAS, one of 612 writers on ARMAGGEDON� I think he wrote the part when Liv Tyler said �Rub those animal crackers on my girl parts, Affleck, you oil-drillin� hunka� man,� but I�m not sure).
Fans are upset about the changes to the �accepted� Superman mythology: Jimmy Olsen's gay -- real flamingly gay. Superman's mom gets orally raped in explicit hardcore on-screen Dogma 97 Lars Von Trier-style smut sex. Lex Luthor's a fucking super-alien. Superman has a supersuit like from the Greatest American Hero (true fact: any intellectual property maven can tell you this was actually the basis of an important lawsuit -- Superman v. Greatest American Hero, which the Greatest American Hero won). Superman dies, talks to his dad in Heaven, then tries to fuck an angel, at which point Jesus kicks him so hard in the supercrotch that Superman flies back to Earth, whereupon he refuses to have sex with Kirsten Dunst. OH, and Krypton never explodes -- they�re just sick of having Superbaby around, so bouncers throw his ass off the planet.
So hearing all of the above (all of which are essentially true -- Olsen�s gay, Ma Kent gets raped, supersuit, alien Luthor, Superman talks to Dad in Heaven, and Krypton doesn�t, uh, explode), did people react calmly? Did they react maturely? OMERTA! TIME TO UNLEASH UNEARTHLY GEEK VENDETTA!!

Harry Knowles, internet superstar headmaster of AIN�T IT COOL, as far as I can tell, ordered the screenwriter of the Superman movie to be FUCKING ASSASSINATED. If J.J. Abram's car doesn't blow up by the end of the year, GODFATHER-style, I'll be surprised. When do I get to be powerful enough on the Internet to put a hit out on somebody?
Here's a dangerously irresponsible excerpt: "Well, screenwriter JJ Abrams is going to be at an event where he'll be meeting his �fans� and you can go right up to him and ask your question, and let him know how you feel."
Let me translate that to non-geek in case anyone normal's reading this, by accident:
"CRY HAVOC AND UNLEASH THE HOUNDS OF HELL! I DEMAND BLOOD FOR THESE CRIMES! I WILL WEAR HIS SKULL ON MY PENIS IN SUCH A MANNER SO THAT MY HAIRY BALLS WILL REST VISIBLY IN THE EYE SOCKETS! BLOOOOOOOD! SWEET, TASTY BLOOOOOOD!�
I hope I can make it out to that upcoming event -- I've never been in the middle of a Nerd Riot before. I�m just imagining these 80-pound weaklings trying to lift up a garbage can so they can throw it out the window, only they�re not strong enough to lift the garbage can, so they start trying to design their own catapault or a Battlebot that would do it, and then they get into an argument about who was the better Kirk, Captain Kirk or Kirkegaard because they don�t realize they misspelled Kierkegaard� NERD RIOT! NERD RIOT!
Can you imagine what that screenwriter�s life is like now? Armies of deranged nerds wandering the streets with torches and pitchforks. Is he in a bunker yet? I'd be in a bunker. How dare anyone write a bad screenplay in Los Angeles, of all places?!? This city is HOLY!
Personally, I don't give a fuck. I didn't like X-MEN; I only liked the first hour of SPIDER-MAN; I liked the first BATMAN but I was 10 or something-- I thought MC Hammer was the coolest guy ever back then, too. Fact: The best superhero ever on-screen is Rob Lowe in the SPECIALS. I'm more excited about RULES OF ATTRACTION right now than some goddamn HULK movie. My favorite movie this summer was ABOUT A BOY, not SPIDER-MAN. I don�t give a fuck about SUPERMAN or SUPERMAN�S GIRLFRIEND or SUPERMAN�S SUPER-PALM.
Eventually, the AIN�T site was de-fused -- they sent Harry Knowles a hat or something. A second review of the screenplay, after said hat, by Knowles, was, in fact, ENORMOUSLY POSITIVE. Well, now the crazy freakos are yelling that AIN�T has "sold out.� AIN�T IT COOL is like the victim of the OX-BOW INCIDENT they themselves created currently. No one�s asked, but I'd sell all of you out for a pack of Kools, are you fucking kidding me? Only people who worry about "selling out" are teenagers and "indie" fans (i.e. overgrown teenagers).
AIN�T IT COOL�s been heeled, but at this point, is it enough? The wheels of Loserville are turning & churning. Horrible forces have been unleashed -- the repressed sexuality of countless middle-aged virginal comic book fans has found a channel of pure rage, much like the River of Bad Feelings in GHOSTBUSTERS 2, only more semen-tinged.
If anyone is within earshot of screenwriter J.J. Abrams, if you could please pass on the following message to him for me:
"RUN, BITCH! FUCKING RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! IT'S NOT WORTH IT! THERE'S PROBABLY A BOMB ON YOUR TOILET, LIKE IN LETHAL WEAPON 2! THEY�RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA!"
DISCLAIMER: I love Ain�t It Cool; read it for about six years now. I don�t want to suggest this is some Moviepoopshoot-Ain�t-It-Cool rivalry because obviously we do completely different things. I totally give them the benefit of doubt in this case that they didn�t �sell out.� Oh, I used to believe they were suspect, based on some prior �raves,� but I don�t think shifting from FANATIC NERDITY to REASONABLE is �Selling out.� I particularly enjoy Moriarty�s writing on that site, in fact -- consistently interesting.
But look: I like comic books more than 99% of the population, and I could give a shit about some big-budget crap movie. Big-budget movies are fucking crap 99% of the time -- who cares about them but the blind, the stupid, the tasteless, or (as I feel may be the case with Ain�t It Cool) eternal optimists? I just hate being lumped into craziness like this, the guilt by association. I hate that it makes my hobby seem like the last refuge of the mentally ill.
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