Great thread. The answer is there is no easy answer. Because of the awful production problems, the fact that II was mostly done and then abandoned to finish I, the fact that Lester reshot many Donner scenes to get credit and obviously was unsuited to the material and thus nothing matches, and hat he Salkinds didn’t care about matching anything finally means that this is never going to be fully fixable.
The DC is preferable for reinstating many Donner scenes that should have never have been lost plus the original story intents. But it is hampered by insisting on Donner bits only because the Lester cut is technically what would have been issued in 1980 and was finished of the time. So any cut must be a compromise between the two despit et the fact that elite eventual Lester cut is much lesser than the intent of the Donner cut.
The effects in the DC are quite bad at times and the new sound mix while decent is nothing like the original TC audio. The BD reissue has it lossless ly encoded so a hybrid track is now possible. The TC 5.1 is sourced from the 70mm audio and sounds great.
The biggest draw of the DC is reinstating the missile freeing the villains and losing all of the lesser directed Lester moments in addition to adding back all the lost material. It makes the whole thing fit in with the original film much better and then we don’t have all the silly bits, scenes that fall flat, cheesy depowering sequence, scenes where the photography style doesn’t match Donner at all and of course THAT DAMN INCONCEIVABLY STUPID FLYING SHIELD TRAP EMBLEM! It goes without saying that the DC resolves one of the all time great plot blunders in history: just how does Superman regain his powers?
The TC has the benefit of the action sequences in Paris and the small town. The fact that the DC loses the latter entirely is plain stupid and it should be reinstated. The loss of the former hurts in that the DC thus loses an action beat and story sequence in the opening third.
The one positive of the TC IMO is the moving of the bed scene. In the DC we see the lovers in bed before Superman renounces his powers. Despite having an achingly beautiful shot of Lois observing Kal-el speaking to Jor-el of his devotion to her whilst only dressed in the torso of his costume, the TC fits the operatic and classic mythology structure of the script by moving their lovemaking to just after he depowers himself.
Scratch that make it two positives:
The DC loses perhaps the second most quotable line from the film. The “freedom of the press” line is a drastically poor substitute for “General, would you care to step outside?” That’s like changing “Kneel before Zod” to “Bow to your new leader.”
I’ve thought about trying to mesh the two cuts together into a more cohesive whole for years but the simple truth is there’s no easy way to do it with the materials present. And due to the DC not including the Salkinds hey nixed working with WB ever again or doing any version of the extended tv cuts.
But let’s discuss further. This is always a fascinating topic to me and I love getting to put myself against these kinds of problems.
