Walter Hill
Supernova

Walter Hill - "Supernova" (1998)

The director of this little sci-fi masterpiece is Walter Hill (the one of "The Warriors, 48 Hrs, Streets of Fire", etc.) who, due to major disagreements with the producers, was forced to remove his name from the film.

At the dawn of the 22nd century: the rescue spaceship 'Nightingale 229', whose crew is composed of 6 people, including co-pilot Nick Vanzant (James Spader) and Doctor Kaela Evers (Angela Bassett), while on a routine expedition in deep space, receives a distress signal from a mining camp operating on a very distant star. After a spectacular journey through a gravitational jump, the spaceship rushes to help and finds itself right in the orbit of a giant blue star. The crew members must also deal with Karl Larson (Peter Facinelli), the charismatic and mysterious young man they rescued, who is carrying an alien object in his rescue pod that is as unknown as it is dangerous: a plasmatic substance inside a fluorescent egg that will prove capable of stopping and regenerating human cellular processes if brought into contact with tissues, and at the same time, capable of growing exponentially to the point of blowing up an entire solar system by setting a star ablaze in a supernova. Larson has used this alien alchemical egg and pretends to be Troy, the son of the chief miner who was once a lover of Doctor Kaela, who now cannot recognize him as he has rejuvenated to look like a teenager. The substance is revealed as extremely dangerous by the on-board computer, and captain Vanzant wants to throw it into space. At this point, Troy reveals his real intentions and a superhuman strength with which he takes control of the ship...

Apologetic film, with a mix of genres, grandiose special effects and soundtrack, rich in citations and philosophical intentions beyond the plot, displays its most beautiful insights in the immortality project of the negative hero of the day, Larson, who aspires to a divine omnipotence. The positive hero, Nick, immediately understands the consequences of this disturbance of the cosmic order contained in the alien egg: just observe the power of medicine that keeps alive a gerontocracy born before the war, greedy and poorly enlightened that governs Italy and part of the world, made of berlusclones of people who have been brain-dead for a long time, of androids like Andreotti, as seen in "Il divo", of nanobrunettis, nanomorettis, etc. etc., with a generational gap that is now uncontrollable.

Larson says in the film, in a mystical-pieroangela-paranoid delirium: " I am different now, I am still made of the same things, calcium, iron, zinc, all the elements...the elements created by stars when they die; everything comes from the stars, everything, even us..stars die for us to live, and we die so that stars can be reborn...I am born and die by myself, I am the universe, do you understand it? I am the culmination of the evolutionary process..."