Saturday 12 March 2011

Superman III

I also watched again Superman III in HD. This was the last film made by Christopher Reeve before his horse riding accident. Robert Vaughan is unconvincing as the ambitious bad guy who lives in a roof top penthouse complete with a mini Ski run and real all round the year snow. His girl friend is the voluptuous Pamela Stephenson before she switched careers and trained to become a clinical psychologist. It is difficult to digest that the film was made three decades ago and released in 1983. All I remembered is that this was the film where the baddies discovered that Superman’s weakness is kryptonite.

Richard Pyror plays a comical computer genius who breaks into a major computer system to re-orientate space based laser beams to create adverse weather condition in Columbia to destroy the coffee crop so American will be forced to buy coffee manufactured by Vaughan, Before this Pryor arranges for hole in the wall machines to spew out bank notes and for individuals to be mailed bank statements revealing that their accounts have increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Vaughan sets out to destroy Superman because he intervenes stops the weather and dries out the coffee beans. Vaughan then commissions Pryor to duplicate Kryptonite and kill Superman and in return he promises build a giant computer with its own defence system. Clark has returned to Smallville and attends the birthday party of a young divorce, Pyror brings the Kryptonite as a present. He has worked out the ingredients except for a small percentage of unknown material which he replaces. The effects is that Superman is not killed and his personality is changed so that he ceases to be a good gut helping others and looks to his own interests. Eventually he recovers after doing battle with himself in the form of Clark Kent being the good guy and Superman the bad, Clark kills the bad personality and returns invigorated and after Vaughan and his group who have left their whereabouts for him to find.

While he manages to evades rockets launched in groups and larger flying bomb type rocket he is eventually caught up in a beam as the computer is able to work weaknesses and manufacture the required energy in the form of a laser beam, However Pryor has second thought and disabled the computer. The computer 2001 style refuses to close and uses energy from the national grid to begin a life of its own. Superman works out how disable using acid and kill the computer. However he is nearly caught into the machine which has already turn Vaughan’s sister into a Cyborg. Vaughan has been using the new computer to bring all the oil tankers afloat to a spot in the North Atlantic and then closed all the oil producing fields, pipelines and filling stations so he can take control and fix the price. Superman has holed the only Tanker which ignored the directive resulting in the oil spilling. After his recovery he puts the oil back and repairs the ship. He also makes the Tower of Pisa lean again after making it straight in a moment of wickedness. Lois Lane is absent for this film on an assignment and returns to find that Superman’s childhood sweetheart from Smallville has been given a job on the Daily Planet.

I will quickly forget this film which was the least successful of the three. It cost just under $40 million and made just under $60 million

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