Smallville And The Rebirth of Superman
By Jonathan Cyfer
As just about all the superhero loving world knows, this coming Season of Smallville will be the last season. Depending on your level of Smallville "fanhood", your response to this news probably ranges from some minor sadness to virtually suicidal depression. The silver lining in the cloud of Kryptonite is that Chris Nolan (The Dark Knight) is at the helm of the Superman reboot film: Superman: The Man of Steel.
So Smallville will end in Spring 2011 and the new Superman film will be released the following year. This begs the question of just how connected the two projects are.
If you've watched the Smallville series and the Christopher Reeve Superman films, you know that a lot of the elements from the films made their way into the Smallville mythos. For instance, crystals seem to play an important role, and the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic continues to ring with the voice of Jor-El. There's still an expectation that, like the Clark in the first Superman (1978) film, the Clark of Smallville will need to spend some training time in the Fortress prior to donning his red and yellow cape and officially entering the world as everybody's favorite hero.
Admittedly, Smallville has borrowed from long decades of comic book lore, introducing members of a fledgling Justice League of America, the futuristic Legion of Super Heroes, and versions of John Jones, the Martian Manhunter, Supergirl, and even a much less lethal incarnation of Doomsday. Over the past nine years, Smallville has become the nexus of just about every element of the Superman legend you could imagine, as well as creating its own, unique canon and characters (whoever heard of Chloe in relation to Superman before the show began?).
Now that Smallville is going the way of the rest of Kansas, as seen from Dorothy's point of view as she goes up, up, and away in a local tornado, how much of the Smallville legacy will be imported into the 2012 Superman film?
If I were King and got to decide, I hope not much. Here's why.
After a decade of Smallville, a tremendous amount of material, details, minutiae, and trivia has built up as part of the show. As fans of Star Trek, Star Wars, and any other long running and popular fantasy saga can attest, the more stuff you have to manage, the harder it is to keep everything consistent. Just look at how difficult it was for Star Trek to keep vulcan mating practices in line. There's a tremendous variation between how this was originally handled in the STTOS episode Amok Time and how it ended up being enacted by T'Pol in Star Trek: Enterprise. Even Captain Archer's prototype starship had technology (a view screen for instance) that, according to the STTOS canon, shouldn't have existed.
If you try to actively plug in some of the details from Smallville into the reboot film, and keep all of the other information internally consistent, you end up putting the film makers in a straight jacket. It's would be a wonder if they could even breathe, let alone come up with an original, unique, and truly creative rendition of the story of the Man of Steel.
The reason Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) worked and worked very well, was because they weren't locked slavishly in to pre-existing canon. Oh sure, there were a lot of familiar elements, but Nolan was free (how free, relative to the dinosaurs actually running the WB studio, we'll never know) to remake Batman in his own image. If Nolan doesn't have that same freedom for the Superman film, it will belly flop with the same, sickening splat as Superman Returns (2006), and nobody wants that, not even the studio (successful films make money…flops do not).
I'm sure there'll be room for a little bit of homage to both Smallville and the previous Superman films and, as in some of those prior films, the occasional cameo appearance will add some spice. Inserting Tom Welling (assuming he won't actually be playing Clark in the movie) into any section of the film for 30 seconds will undoubtedly create an all but orgasmic response in the collective Smallville fan base. Just don't overdo it and especially, don't camp it up.
I know some of you are probably sticking pins in your little Jonathan Cyfer doll right now because I don't support a direct transition between the end of Smallville and the beginning of the Superman film, but just as Smallville started out as its own entity (meteor freaks, Chloe Sullivan, Lex living in a castle near Smallville), the Nolan film must have the same freedom. Smallville was a success because it broke outside the classic Superman mold and became something new and different, while incorporating and adapting the familiar. Superman: The Man of Steel must be liberated from canon in the same way and for the same reasons. Balancing the classic legend with a new and untried vision has its dangers, but if it worked for the Dark Knight, it can work for the Last Son of Krypton.
Visit my blog The Missing Man.
Follow me on twitter.
Please Leave A Comment-
Comments