Review of The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015) by Emile H — 13 May 2016

In this decade, superheroes are celebrities thanks the MCU, but back in the 70s the Man of Steel started this subgenre thanks to Richard Donner, but after3 sequels, Superman´s franchise died. But in the 90s, there were some attempts to revive this character in the silver screen but none of them materialized. But what would have happened if those attempts managed to get into production? How would they look? Well those questions are answered in "The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?".

Having Tim Burton in the directing chair, Nicolas Cage as the Last Son of Krypton, writers like Kevin Smith involved in the script development, and producers Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and Jon Peters, you know that the result would have been bizarre to say the least. While a lot of the information is interesting and every person interviewed gives their respective perspective, this documentary is exactly what you would expect from a Kickstarter funded documentary: Extremely amateurish. It doesn't have enough information to justify its running time, the editing is nonsensical and pandering to the lowest common denominator, the director/interviewer lacks understanding of the documentary format (he constantly inserts himself in the footage when he doesn't need to be there, the treats comic book fans as idiots because they disagree with his opinion about the subject matter of the documentary itself and overall lacks professionalism), the transitions of topics are bizarre, as you can go from the production design of "Superman Lives" to Michael Keaton in the 1989´s "Batman" or even to Jon Peters answering the phone, and it tries too hard to be funny as a way to justify its running time but the juvenile humor is just groan inducing to me (but of course humor is subjective so maybe you can it enjoy more than I).

"The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?" is a decent documentary that fulfills its purpose of being educational but its amateurish nature makes it boring when compare to other documentaries, the perfect example being "Jodorowsky´s Dune". This shows that "Superman Lives" would most likely been a flop for fans (regardless of mine or your opinion about the overall concept and preproduction work shown in here, you can't deny that many of the ideas mentioned are so bizarre that some of them are actually laughable).