Sure there was a lot wrong with Super­man Returns. He leaves his adopted planet for half a decade, Luthor is still try­ing to get rich from real estate, and then there’s the son.

Super­man is a pro­tec­tor. He’s there to inspire hope. To show human­ity what they can aspire to. I don’t think he’s been por­trayed that way in any of the movies they’ve put out so far.

But I think reboot­ing the fran­chise is a com­pletely unnec­es­sary step and would prob­a­bly do more dam­age. There’s a lot of sto­ries you can write using what was estab­lished in Super­man Returns. While I don’t claim that what I’ve writ­ten below is the best sto­ry­line ever, I think it does have some merit.

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TRAV’S IDEA FOR A SEQUEL TO SUPERMAN RETURNS

Set two to four years after the last movie. Lex Luthor is still try­ing to get his life together after almost destroy­ing Amer­ica. Nobody except Super­man, Lois, her fiance and her son know what he did. Lex pub­li­cally puts the blame for what hap­pened entirely on Super­man. Lex runs for office on a “Vote No to Super­man ticket”. His charis­matic speeches begin to sway the public.

An alien space­ship finds the kryp­tonite island Super­man launched into space and dis­cov­ers it’s point of ori­gin: Earth. The space­ship crashes in a Metrop­o­lis park and, using TV images, cre­ates a humanoid avatar that looks almost, but not quite like Lex Luthor. It teams up with Lex to turn Earth into a New Kryp­ton. Lex sees it as a way to become absolute ruler. He’s past the need for money now.

Brainaic take up refuge in Lex­Corp tower and twists it into an organic look­ing spire, that con­trasts with the art deco archi­tec­ture of Metropolis.

With the tide of opin­ion against him, Super­man is now just plain old Clark Kent. He per­forms a heroic few saves every now and then, but noth­ing that can be explic­itly traced back to him. He finds he much prefers being Clark Kent anyway.

The Brainiac kid­naps Superman’s son and uses a vial of his blood to cre­ate a way to give the city’s pop­u­la­tion Superman’s pow­ers, but at half strength. Lex likes the idea of ris­ing the pop­u­la­tion up and mak­ing Super­man less spe­cial by doing so.

Those in the pop­u­la­tion that receive pow­ers (some vastly dif­fer­ent to Superman’s) are lov­ing it. While most use their power for good, a large por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion spend their days fly­ing around and test­ing the extent of their abil­i­ties. Some have even turned to crime.

Luthor dis­cov­ers that the Brainiac means to destroy the rest of the planet leav­ing only Metrop­o­lis. Then he’ll shrink the city down and cat­a­logue it with oth­ers he’s captured.

Brainiac con­trols the large army of super­pow­ered peo­ple through nanites he included in the for­mula. This army ral­lies around Brainiac’s tower as Lex broad­casts Brainiac’s inten­tions to the world. The army attacks the tower doing zero dam­age, but accu­mu­lat­ing heavy casu­al­ties to due the super-powered bodyguards.

Super­man realises he’s the only one who can stop this. He files to the tower and takes out a few of the supers but the large group are more than a match for him.

He shrugs them off and flies into the tower itself. There he fights the Brainiac and knocks it out. Super­man finds his son uncon­scious on a bench. He wakes him up and they fly out of the tower. He drops his son on the foot­path and is then knocked down the street by a metal­lic ten­ta­cle. A big­ger, bulkier Brainiac (2.0!) appears out of the tower and begins to fight Super­man. They fight for a long time. As they trade punches and Super­man rea­sons he can cut loose on the Brainiac as it’s a robot, not a liv­ing being. The streets crack open and win­dows shat­ter as they bat­tle across the city. With one last punch Super­man breaks the Brainiac’s head open. The super-powered pop­u­la­tion regain con­trol of their own bod­ies. Super­man hurls the body into space.

At the end of the movie it’s shown that his son lost all his Kryp­ton­ian abil­i­ties due to Brainiac’s exper­i­men­ta­tion. The pop­u­la­tion hasn’t though. And even if Super­man isn’t con­sid­ered unique powers-wise, he’s still going to show those with good in them how a real hero acts.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Collabowrite, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.