6 Movies That Would Be Way More Awesome With Superman

2. Born On The 4th Of July

Yeah, this is the one where Tom Cruise is in a wheelchair and rolls around shouting at his mom about his bait and tackle. Oliver Stone's kind of a weird guy. But his melodrama about Vietnam and our abandonment of our veterans hit home in a big way and even netted him a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. And maybe there's not a whole lot that could be done to make this movie better at exactly what it's trying to do, but then again... In the film, Cruise plays Ron Kovic, an actual Vietnam vet who returned home wounded from the war. And before you argue that it would be insensitive to change up details in a biographical film, we'd like to point out that it's not the first time it's been done. Either to enhance the effect of the narrator's state of mind (as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) or to accommodate a more popcorn-friendly version of events (as in 21, about the MIT Blackjack Team). This is usually what the term "loosely based" means and you might be surprised at how many fairly major subtractions and additions happen basically every time a movie is based on supposedly real events. Famous auteur Werner Herzog even does it on purpose in what are ostensibly documentaries in order to express what he sees as an underlying truth which supersedes the details of reality. Anyways, in the movie, Kovic struggles with the gradual detachment of his painful and frequently embarrassing reality from the idealised image that contemporary America had of both its own values and the fighting men that fought for them. So what if that image were made literal in some way? Say, in a figure that can be said to represent "truth, justice and the American way" and can never actually be injured by something as mundane as gunfire? How would someone like Kovic live in a world with a Superman?