Director: ‘Thomas Lee’
Starring: James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Lou Diamond Phillips, Robin Tunney, Wilson Cruz, Peter Facinelli

Traditionally, when directors have wished to have their name removed from films, it has been replaced by the pseudonym ‘Alan Smithee’. An Alan Smithee film is an assurance that the person primarily responsible for its creation wants no association with it. Figuring that many people have cottoned on to the Smithee game, the Director’s Guild have created a new pseudonym, making its maiden voyage here on this floating hulk of metal.

‘Thomas Lee’ is in fact a bizarre chimera, a hybrid of Walter e48 Hrs’ Hill and one Francis Ford Coppola, who came on board in post-production to attempt to piece together Hill’s mess. When the man who directed ‘Brewster’s Millions’ doesn’t want his name associated with a movie, the signs are ominous.
It’s deep space in the year something, and a bored medical crew are floating through space, passing the time by wisecracking, playing chess, having sex and walking around in the nude. If nothing further happened, this would be ‘Dark Star’ and all would be wonderful, but fret not. A computer called Sweetie relays an emergency distress call from a distant moon. Rule number one of sci-fi slashers: never answer the emergency distress call. Before you know if, we’ve got ‘Dead Calm’ in space, only not very good.

The ship’s captain (Forster, in a very brief appearance) doesn’t make it through the initial hyperjump, bowing out with his head fused to his intestines. Up steps emysterious’ military pilot Spader to take command and assume the hero mantle, despite his shady drug-addicted past. Landing in the gravitational pull of a near-supernova blue giant, they pick up a survivor from an abandoned space mine. The visitor (Facinelli), replete with evil sneer and several missing members of his own crew, endears himself to the unsuspecting team, claiming to be the son of the former lover of the ship’s doctor Evers (Bassett). On a hunch, Spader has the little scamp’s bags x-rayed, and finds a shiny blue thing, which Sweetie claims is made of enine-dimensional matter’. Apparently, this is bad. In practical terms, this means that Facinelli goes psycho in a superhuman way and most of the crew end up dead, but not after lots of sex and stilted dialogue.

With a spaceship interior seemingly constructed out of old studio equipment from the backlot, and a medical deck in which the most sophisticated device seems to be a bar of fetchingly coloured soap, this is bottom of the barrel sci-fi. Not knowing how to imaginatively project what the future may hold, ‘Lee’ presents a future where we have all inexplicably evolved to using circular playing cards rather than rectangular, and are more casual in our nudity. Apart from that, business as usual.

While the last few years have been an exciting time for sci-fi with such Earth-bound excitement as ‘The Matrix’, deep space has lately proven fallow ground, mainly due to a complete inability to find anything in its infinity that has not been done perfectly by the masterpieces of the genre, such as ‘Alien’ and e2001’. Borrowing heavily from both, but falling over itself due to shocking editing, mostly terrible acting (Bassett manages to keep her dignity, but only just), effects that are reasonable at best and the most ludicrous storyline and denouement you could ever hope for, ‘Supernova’ is a textbook example of everything that’s wrong with production-line cinema.

The fact that Hill (who was heavily involved in the scripting of the ‘Alien’ Trilogy) walked away suggests that he had something else in mind for the film, as suggested by the hints of character development poking through and the missing bits of plot which stick out so obviously that the studio execs must have recut the film with a chainsaw. There must have been something here to convince Coppola to come on board. Whatever it was, it sure isn’t up on screen. Nice warp sequence, though.