Somewhere in Time (1980)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer, Teresa Wright

Have I Seen it Before: I’m sure I had to have. It lies among that long list of movies which seemed perpetually on cable. I would have had to see it over the years, but I may have only seen clips.

Did I Like It: I’m going to double down on that assessment that I must have seen it before, because I found the whole affair—besides the last few minutes; we’ll get to that in a minute—thoroughly predictable. I had to be remembering it, right? Szwarc might be purveyor of films I can’t bring myself to watch all the way through (Jaws 2 (1978)) and films that feel like the studio barely decided to release (Supergirl (1984)), but Richard Matheson really doesn’t have it in him to miss.

The chemistry between Reeve and Seymour sells the movie, but maybe I’m just too inured to the charms of a time travel story to get engaged, especially when traveling across the 4th dimension is presented less a question of improbably physics, and more a question of philosophy, willpower, and the need to clean one’s pockets.

When the film isn’t being predictable, it’s going out of its way to be aggravating. How did Elise (Seymour) put it together that her love (Reeve) was from the future and had to go back there based on the available information. Even Christopher Lloyd and Malcolm McDowell had to level with Mary Steenburgen in order to move things along. There’s also the suddenness of the film’s final moments. It takes great pains to sell us on the romance of the early years of the 20th century, only to rip Richard Collier back to the present and have him miserable amongst some of the most depressing vies of the early 1980s (the film really did have a great casting director when it came to actual, literal garbage). He then dies in such a way that leads me to believe Reeve has to walk before Natalie Portman could run in Star Wars — Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). Then their together in heaven. Hey, movie: Jim Cameron called, and he’s positively one submarine away from trying to sell us on the idea of one vacation ruining you from making another connection with a human being for the rest of your life.

Supergirl (1984)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Hart Bochner, Peter O’Toole

Have I Seen it Before: During a summer day in 1997 I went to an Albertsons, got a dozen pieces of fried chicken, and rented all five of the Super-movies for ten dollars. It was a simpler time. They had good chicken.

Did I Like It: I remembered shockingly little of the film, aside from the fact that Christopher Reeve is resolutely not in it, aside from one photograph. I’d say his wisdom was on track avoiding the movie, but then he went ahead and got involved with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), but that’s a discussion for a different time. His conspicuous, awkward absence from the entirety of the film automatically hamstrings the affair. Even if the other elements of the film had been immaculate, there would be an illegitimacy to the whole thing without he who first made us believe a man could fly.

Honestly, it’s reputation is probably unearned, and sort of like Superman III (1983), the film was reviled in its time, but is the beneficiary of comparisons with the last film in the Reeve-series. 

Sure, it is a little hung up with painting Kara Zor-El (Slater) as a doe-eyed innocent in the mold of a Disney movie, where her cousin would always seem like he was in control of the situation, even, when he was pretending to be Clark Kent. And yet, somehow and inexplicably, there is no transition from arriving on Earth to being Supergirl fully-formed. 

Great (O’Toole) and mostly okay actors (Dunaway) are clearly slumming their way through a script so weighed down by preposterous sci-fi talk that the story, such as it is, even managed to lose me in the early minutes.

There is plenty to complain about in the film. The Salkinds display once again that the more direct control they have over the fate of the super-franchise, the more disappointing things become. But, the movie is a real movie, and the money spent makes its way to the screen. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one of the few super-scores that doesn’t feel the need to slavishly worship at the altar of John Williams. For several sustained moments, I do believe a girl can fly. And if that weren’t enough, I was legitimately craving Popeye’s Chicken after the run time. If that doesn’t make the film at least a partial success, I don’t know what would.