2 hours 9 minutes, PG-13 for cussing and limb-breaking
Fair Value of Superman: $8.00. It’s a summer popcorn film, silly and unserious, a better than middling superhero flick that is made for fans of Silver Age Superman. I’m even willing to consider it in sharp competition with Richard Donner’s Superman II for the slot f being the second-best live action Superman film made.
Who Will Enjoy This Film the Most? Fans of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman will get the most out of the deep cuts and the balance of neon weirdness and painful earnestness in James Gunn’s approach. It has a lot of the usual touches we’ve seen in Guardians of the Galaxy: snarky banter, cool musical sequences, and a lot of rehabilitation restoration for neglected minor characters.
Who Won’t Enjoy This Film? Forget any moral reckoning, and the action is largely a blur of CGI with no memorable set pieces. This film is the polar opposite of the Zach Snyder films, a gigantic course correction in the opposite direction for the DC cinematic universe.
Core Idea of the Plot: Lex Luthor attacks on of Superman’s greatest weaknesses: his public perception, engineering events to smear and scandalize the Man of Steel, and ultimately disappearing him into a sub-dimensional oubliette. It’s up the Superman’s friends to get him out so that he can save the day yet again.
Let’s Talk About the Problem: To understand Warner Brothers and D.C. Comics, and to understand why James Gunn is being given the top chair, you need to understand what comic book critic Chris Sims called “The Problem”: D.C. Comics and Marvel Comics both want to imitate the success of their rival, but both companies fail, repeatedly, because the core tone and setting of the DC and Marvel Universes are fundamentally different.
At the heart, D.C. Comics is the most successful children’s superhero universe. Constructed during the golden age, then reforged through the squeaky clean era of the Comics Code Authority (also known as the Silver Age of American comics). With the exception of Batman, most of D.C. Comics characters are big, bright, and suffused with a tone of optimism and naivete.
By contrast, Marvel Comics established themselves by being the superhero stories for the junior high/ early high school crowd: themes of persecution, being misunderstood outsiders, and larger amounts of sex and violence than existed in the Justice League.
And ever since the 1960s, much as Hollywood movie studios frequently double each other (Armageddon v. Deep Impact, etc.), so too do the dominant comic book companies engage in a recursive loop. Thanos is a knockoff of Darkseid, Mongul is in turn a knockoff of Thanos, and Apocalypse is a knockoff of Mongul, ad infinitum ad nauseum…
And so for the past six decades, D.C. Comics has lurched from stagnation and failure to successful reaction to renewed stagnation to failure again. The Justice League became the Justice Friends, and things became moribund until Frank Miller turned everything over with The Dark Knight Returns. And then D.C. Comics swung in the exact opposite direction, with edgy writers like Alan Moore writing Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison writing Animal Man, all the way through the mid-90s when the gimmicky ‘Death of Superman’ run crashed the collectible comics industry.
James Gunn’s Superman is therefore the latest swing of the institutional schizophrenia of Warner Brothers and D.C. Comics. Jared Leto’s methed out Joker and the grim edgy Justice League of 2017 didn’t sell to a Marvel-fatigued audience, so they’re going back to the four color basics: a simpler and streamlined Superman punching back against giant kaiju and legions of power armored soldiers.
What Does This Film Get Right? The supporting cast! Nearly every scene gets stolen from the leads, whether it’s Nathan Fillion’s insufferable Green Lantern, or Sara Sampaio’s vapid and selfie-obsessed Eve Tessmacher (yes, Richard Donner fans, Lex Luthor’s original henchmen of Otis and Ms. Tessmacher are back again). They made Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) cool! Mr. Terrific has never been cool in all of the 83 prior years that the character existed!
Most especially, Nicholas Hoult deserves kudos for being the best cinematic Lex Luthor, nearly as worthy as Clancy Brown’s definitive performance in the DC animated cinematic universe. Hoult’s performance really drills down into the spiteful and petty envy, the insatiable narcissism of Lex Luthor. It’s a Lex Luthor who really hates Superman not because of Superman’s actions, or because Superman is an alien, but because Superman gets more public attention than Luthor.
What Doesn’t this Film Do? A lot of the emotionally cathartic bits come from what is a reprise of Guardian of the Galaxy 2: main protagonist is plunged into an existential crisis before he comes to apricate “just because he’s your father, doesn’t mean he’s your daddy.”. David Corenswet is more frequently reacting rather than acting. A part of it is just the pain of being the straight man: his nu-metal loving everyman gets drowned out by all of the scenery-chewing over-the-top rages of Nicholas Hoult and Nathan Fillion.
A Silver Age Movie for a Shit Age Audience: I don’t know that Superman will really perform that will, because it is precisely so antithetical to the moods and the mindsets of 2024. Fans of the big blue boy scout will rejoice, but I saw a lot of the audience jeering and throwing popcorn at the screen. The parallels- anxieties tech corporations running giant detention centers, persecution and hatred leading to the contention that ‘aliens have no rights’, are timely, but the message of this film doesn’t seem to be one that rural America wants to hear at the minute. This is a film that argues for kindness and compassion as being the greatest superpowers at a time where a nation wants little to do with either. People are complaining that Superman is woke- guess what, Superman was always woke, ever since he first debuted as an illegal immigrant attacking arms industry weapons dealers in 1938. When you’ve lost Superman, you’ve lost your soul, or at least, your inner child.
A Bubbly, Light Antidote to the Grim Darkness of 2025: the Superman/Lois Lane romance is present in the film, but it’s a mild sub-plot. Likewise, we get one scene with a decidedly midwestern Ma and Pa Kent (Neva Howell and Pruitt Vince). This films goes away from a lot of the core of other supermen stories, to instead present Superman as the bewildered straight man to a whirling constellation of screwball side characters: deep cut characters like Steve Lombard or Metamorpho get lines and scenes. If you want to see just how weird and colorful the D.C. Universe can get, this version of Superman can be deeply gratifying. If you’re looking for anything but a summer popcorn film, look elsewhere.
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