Superman

dir: James Gunn

2025

Mostly, what I feel is, is relief.

Not that the film is okay, which it is, but that it wasn’t out and out bad. Heavens know why I would feel protective of this character.

Also I feel relief that Zack Snyder is no longer making movies with Superman in them. Ideally Snyder won’t make any movies full stop, but not making any more with DC’s characters is a good enough substitute for that, one that I can happily live with.

One other thing, at least, is that James Gunn knows how to make something funny, or at least he has a sense of humour, again unlike Snyder. It doesn’t mean every joke lands; it doesn’t always mean I appreciate the perverted directions his leanings sometimes take him, but I generally find his takes pretty funny.

He is incredibly obsessed with threatening characters eyeballs. There is an almost demented amount of eyeball torture for heroes, villains, and everyone in between in this film. Come to think of it, wasn’t there a crucial moment in his Suicide Squad that depended on Harley Quinn saving the day by piercing someone or something’s eye with something sharp?

Eww, that gives me the heebie-jeebies just remembering it. But there’s so much more of it here.

What else don’t we get here: it starts, thankfully, with Superman as Superman already, a superbeing in their world, trying to do good and being resented for it. It’s an okay place to start. We didn’t need to see Krypton again, we don’t need to live through the origin once again, in the same way that we don’t ever need to see anyone’s parents being shot in Crime Alley ever again, with Martha’s pearls spilling into the gutter for the thousandth time.

He already has his gig at the Daily Planet, Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) already knows about him and his dual identities, but eugh, in this version / reality / reboot / redo universe, Jimmy Olsen is somehow a desirable ladies man.

So it’s not all crimson and clover, not all roses and champagne. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) really has the biggest, shiniest, most painful boner for Superman, and not only damns entire countries to misery but warps technology to almost split the universe apart in order to destroy Superman, so much does he envy him. He would rather destroy the world than let Superman be idolised by it.

He has a room full of ethicless lackeys who fulfil his every whim, in a way that’s meant to represent how this version of Luthor isn’t just a titan of industry but a stand-in for the billionaire dead-eyed salamanders like Elmo Husk and his ilk. Watching him spill over coffee mugs filled with pencils, in a high tech environment where there’s no need for mugs or pencils, just to watch his lackeys scramble to clear the mess, was the tech mogul cherry on top (yes it makes the gorge rise in one’s throat).

We’ve never had in any movie a Superman as vulnerable as this. Sure, he can punch things really hard, do the eye beam thing, and fly, but the film’s very opening has a Superman crash down to Earth after taking a severe beating, where bones are broken, and no Kryptonite was involved whatsoever. This Man of Steel is something of a snowflake. I don’t know if that’s to make him more relatable to Gen Zs, but then there aren’t many scenes where he’s lying in bed doomscrolling or taking multiple mental health days off in a row from work because someone said something mean to him and he needs time to process the trauma. So maybe he’s more classic than modern, who knows.

I mean, at least the character of Superman is as cheesy as ever. I think doing it in any other way never really works, because it’s so important for the earnestness and the dorkiness to shine through. He is referred to as the Big Blue Boy Scout for a reason, and like anyone who still believes in decency and kindness in today’s America, he has to come across as outdated and anachronistic.

He is, after all, as always, the stand in for the immigrant experience: an anchor baby sent here by nefarious outsiders to steal American jobs and all the welfare. No, no, that’s not quite right. An alien who came from far away and learned about decency from his adoptive human parents who sees his life’s purpose as saving everyone that he can.

Sure, such a thing could bring a person into conflict with those people that want to commit genocides or steal marginalised people’s land for its rare earth minerals and such, but we’re all meant to be pushing back on those awful people, right? Right?
I mean, if Superman was created by writer Jerry Seigel and artist Joe Shuster in the 1930s, both from Jewish backgrounds whose grandparents had fled pogroms, forced relocations in the Russian Empire (pre-Bolshevik Revolution), you would think some aspect of the hard working immigrant story would appeal to them, and to the many readers of Superman over the last 90 or so years. But on the other end of that one could just as easily make the argument that these comics represent the myth of the perfect immigrant who assimilates as much as they can (or as their appearance allows) into the ‘Murican way of life in order to ‘become’ an American, so guns and buffalo wings for everyone!

It’s a dull argument, and I don’t want to pursue it. It comes up again and again, as in, one pillar of Luthor’s plan to tear down Supes is by ‘revealing’ to the world that his Kryptonian parents wanted him to dominate the planet (Earth) based on a garbled message they left for him in his rocket ship – baby capsule. It’s dumb. And the most simplistic reason why no-one would care is that people’s parents back in the day used to leave all sorts of voice mail messages or answering machine recordings saying all sorts of things – none of us are judged by the dumb stuff our parents might have believed or said (thank Christ, as I loved my dearly departed mother, thankfully I’ll never be called to account for the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic things she said in life).

It is of course used for a simple-minded but effective contrast between what Superman biological parents might have believed versus what his adoptive parents actually believe. Hmm, tough choice.

I wonder which direction the squarest of the square will go? If this flick has a problem, and it probably has a few, it’s that despite its comparatively economical running time, it feels like there’s way too much going on. And even as I liked the contributions of the so-called Justice Gang, being a bowl cut headed Green Lantern, a Hawkgirl and a Mr Terrific, I still feel like maybe they could have waited a film or two before introducing them?

And that’s not even the extent of it, since there are at least two other superheroes crowbarred into the flick. Although obviously the mid section ‘rescue’ of Superman from a dimensional jail would have been harder for Lois to organise without Mr Terrific tagging along.

I have no problem with Mr Terrific as depicted, either the actor, who I generally like in movies (Edi Gathegi), or the character but for the life of me I cannot figure out why he was doing an impression of Robert Downey Junior doing his blackface impression of a Southern African-American in Tropic Thunder. Maybe I’m wrong, but that was a bit hammy/jarring.

He does get probably one of the best action sequences in the whole movie. Of course it’s mostly CGI, but his attack on some military types at a tropical location while protecting Lois really captures the circular / 360 degree pseudo camerawork action that tries to gives a more three dimensional impression of what’s going on, solely for the benefit of the mouthbreathers in the audience.

I think the flick clicks along at a fair pace, and doesn’t let the ambivalence of the main character bog the proceedings down. He’s determined to do as much good as he can for as many people as he can, wherever they might be located, but as his argument with Lois points out, he doesn’t always factor in the overall implications of his actions, noble though they may be. It makes it so much easier for Lex to manipulate him, which he does for of course most of the movie. Along with not being invulnerable, he’s also not always the smartest guy in the room.

Of course it diverges significantly from how Christopher Reeve played his sainted role (for the first two movies, no one’s going to defend the fourth one, of that I am sure), because there probably isn’t a lot of room for the stoic, noble, calm certainty that Reeves brought to the role. There’s no way that he could have given that impassioned speech that way at the end of the film the way David Corenswet does here. In some ways it was quite shocking to hear him wavering between frustration and sounding passionately like he wished Lex could actually understand something about him, actually understand how confusing life often is for him because of, despite, and completely independent of his powers. That it’s that confusion, coupled with the willingness to keep trying to get things right that makes him human, not his origins and not his genetic heritage.

I think it works. And mostly, whatever I might say about the action or the themes, it’s a movie that works because it felt fun even when things are falling apart or it seems like the effects overwhelm everything. I haven’t even mentioned the entirely CGI dog Krypto, who is pure chaos and adorable, and is inspired by a rescue pup the director and his wife adopted that never chilled out and never stopped tearing their place apart. He’s a legit great and entirely CGI character, but then so was Groot and no-one (except churls) complained about him.

It maybe, maybe bodes well for DC’s movies going forward.

Maybe

7 times when I was looking at this guy and thinking “you are such a nerd” during the movie out of 10

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“Parents aren't for telling their children who they're supposed to be. We are here to give y'all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own.” – my work is done here - Superman