Superman returns

SUPERMAN

2025

Written and directed by James Gunn

Spoilers: moderate

Not even a couple of years ago, Warners admitted the game was up with their superhero universe, the DCEU, which had rarely hit Marvel levels of return-on-investment but was for some reason expected to, though I'll tell you what I've always told you: I enjoyed it, and, right up till the end, its wild undiscipline made me smile.  So they've rebooted it now with great speed—something of a "I can't miss you if you don't leave" kind of thing, honestly—under the leadership of a certain James Gunn, who did a bit of work in the DCEU, having directed The Suicide Squad, but whose fame (and present job) rests principally on his stewardship of MCU's Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, generally considered the extreme of the "auteur" end of the MCU's truncated spectrum of directorial personality, and which he finished up with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4 back in 2023, and if that confuses you it just means you didn't see The Suicide Squad which, in fairness, a lot of people didn't, so I don't really understand why he has the present job.  I'll give Gunn this, this first film of his "DCU" (oh, that's hardly confusing), which Gunn wrote and directed, actually is a different movie than the only other one he's made since 2014, and so it's not just Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 5, something that it seems like it'd be impossible to do with Superman, but I still kind of expected it and, indeed, it's sure not for lack of trying.  Instead, it's the same movie as Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, just all... Gunnified.

It is also, it turns out, cinema's big contribution to our culture war for the summer; hooray.  My position is: "for this?"  So here's the thing, Superman is a reasonably fine movie, with a misting of audiovisual politics overlaid atop a relatively basic Superman story that manages to make its particular politicized audiovisual components non-idiotic mainly by virtue of being for children, whereas it's mostly about plumbing the depths of utter decency in the heart of the man whose most distinctive trait is being the most decent entity in any universe, which it undermines to a small but rankling degree with an insipid but apparently instantly-classic dialogue revolving around "punk" "rock," and by the randomly-generated shared universe friends that Gunn's decided to toss into his mix, because you can't just quit an addiction to wacky ensembles cold turkey.  (The other plank of its "woke" platform is—you believe this commie shit?—Lex Luthor being bad.)  It's arguably less political than Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, and my side should've learned, at some point, that hyping up corporate art for messaging's sake is counterproductive, though that's still better than right-wingers who are surprised that Superman, whoa, cares about people.  But hey, it's reasonably fine, I said, and it is, but I kind of don't like it.  To the extent I do, it's because it's difficult to get me to dislike a Superman movie, and while there's very good things here that outweigh the bad things, by my tally they don't outnumber the bad things, and it's either my least favorite Superman movie or it barely clears Superman II and III, so I'm probably going to spend most of our time here shit-talking it.

So—and I think it's important to understand this though I also don't think it's been flawlessly thought-through—Superman acknowledges that you know who Superman (David Corenswet) is, and what Krypton is, and so forth, and that even if it's a reboot that doesn't mean you still have the patience for any more of their Goddamn foundation-laying.  Thus we find a DC Universe that's already humming right along, with Superman in particular having been a fixture of Metropolis for years, while Clark Kent has already begun a romance with and even revealed his secret identity to his fellow Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), though I don't believe he's yet had any direct confrontation with his billionaire archenemy, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).  That's about to change, for the Kryptonian has recently intervened, for the first time, in human international affairs, putting a halt to what appears to be Russia's invasion of Gaza, hence how the movie is political* (and, sure, that's not apolitical: it does ask, "what would Superman's feelings about Russia and Israel's recent actions be?" and unsurprisingly supposed them to be negative; on the other hand, the screenplay itself is a stock comic book situation and almost entirely unallegorical, so this is predominantly a matter of accents and of iconography that almost feels like it's making fun of pre-war Palestinian protest imagery with its unarmed brown people arraying children like a moral fortification against an army, which makes even less sense when one recalls, in the movie, we have an actual sovereign country with, presumably, its own real military).  Anyway, Luthor exploits this diplomatic crisis, sending a quasi-false-flag metahuman, Ultraman, posing as a Not-Russian (they seem otherwise quaintly-stereotyped and barely threatening, so perhaps a Not-Transnistrian), to Metropolis to bring out Superman, who dutifully emerges to do battle, which causes the United States to... bitch down for some reason, rather than bomb the pissants who just attacked America.  Well, the government is much angrier at Superman.

Luthor is also using this as a distraction to break into Superman's Antarctic (oh, fair enough) fortress, which he accomplishes alongside his shapeshifting cyborg ally the Engineer (María Gabriela), and they hack Supes's mainframe and recover the corrupted second half of his inspirational message from his long-lost Kryptonian parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan), where they go on to exhort Kal-El to live up to his mighty destiny and enslave humanity.  Luthor, giddy at such an unexpected and scandalous goldmine, plasters it across all media, and the Metropolis mob's reaction to discovering that the god in their midst might murder them all is to, uh, get up in his face and throw garbage at his head.  Soon, Superman is compelled, by his squareness, to give himself up to the federal authorities; what he doesn't know but quickly finds out is that the government has deputized Luthor to imprison him in one of the middle issues of Marvel Comics' Civil War miniseries, i.e. a pocket universe.  Maybe Superman can get out, maybe he cannot, but it's up to Lois and the Daily Planet team and a small handful of Superman's superheroic frenemies to simultaneously get to the bottom of the conspiracy Luthor's hatched and find the bridge between dimensions, before Serbia crosses the frontier into Iraq and, even more importantly, before Luthor can achieve his obsession of destroying his hated enemy, even if his insane super-science methods have put the whole planet into danger.

So the good is very good, and central to the movie's aims, so if it's got it, it would need to be entirely inept to fail, and it isn't that.  Corenswet, whom I've never even heard of, is pretty much an unimpeachably good Superman, earnest and sweet and even funny (and rather passionate and frustratable in a way that allows him to feel human and engaged in his own dramas rather than only a remote aspirational figure), and a signal shift from the disaffected and distant Superman we got from Henry Cavill, which isn't a knock on Cavill or those movies, but even if you might love his Superman he wasn't necessarily easy to like, which is certainly not any problem Corenswet has.  Basically there's scarcely a performance in the bunch I would throw out, regardless of whether the character is necessary or always hitting their target: Brosnahan is a nicely prickly foil to Clark and/or Kal-El, and possibly even smooth enough to sell that whole "instantly-classic" exchange I mentioned where she declares herself "just a punk rock kid" despite having just battered her boyfriend with a rather hostile interview where she ran down the whole reactionary centrist checklist about why Superman has exceeded his function by fighting geopolitical villainy rather than space monsters, and which would be sandbagged pretty heavily anyway thanks to 1)several extraordinarily terrible joke punk band names, even for pop punk, as if somebody told Gunn it wasn't okay to step on Green Day's or whoever's shoes and 2)the fact that it's 2025.  Lois does, at least, receive a lot of screentime and narrative function this time around, though it does mean she has to become some whole other superhero's sidekick for most of an act to get it.  The cast's obvious champ is, at this point, completely unsurprising—because I really do need to stop thinking of Hoult as anything but an assurance—and he's a terrific Luthor, pursuing my own personal favorite interpretation of Luthor, begun way back by John Byrne and crystallized into its most explicit form by Grant Morrison, of the self-made master of the universe humiliated by the arrival of what amounts to a more-likeable Jesus, and so has, at great moral and cognitive cost, just barely managed persuade himself that he really does believe he's fighting for human dignity against an alien invader who must be a physical and psychic threat to humanity, because if he had that power, that's what he'd be; Hoult (and, credit where it's due, Gunn) pursue this with an intense self-awareness that he is more-or-less a giant toddler, but he's also having too much fun to ever stop, not always concealing the kernel of genuine fear so rooted in animal instinct it's not even sincere or insincere, it just is.

Still, if this is familiar-sounding even to one not steeped in comics history, then, like I said, it's because it's the same conflict as Batman v Superman except delivered at a different pitch, and outside of Hoult almost invariably less interesting, not solely because of that film's more somber treatment of a man angry out of pique and hurt at God and goodness—this one, I'll give it this, is closer to Morrisonian pop art in its presentation, down to some pretty startling concepts drawn from what Gunn understands "the Silver Age" to have been, even if it only ever quite feels like all the huge emotions we're supposed to have about Superman have been thrown haphazardly into any given early 90s issue of Action Comics—but less interesting because Batman v Superman had two frightened prometheans vowing to topple the deity they'd rejected, which gave it way more dynamism than the "oh, that Lex Luthor, he sure did always have an eye for a real estate deal" conflict here.  And then there's the rest of the cast Gunn brought in, and if Gunn chose them it pretty much inexorably follows that it's a joke cast, though it may also have been inevitable that the only ones you can rely on to be funny are the serious, primary cast (Hoult in particular gets the best comic business of the whole film in part because he's not defined by it, managing a graceful slide down the greased slope from "basically a charismatic cult leader" to "tantrum-prone madman").  Now, I'd been looking a bit askance at Superman since its trailers, and I'm not any closer than I was then to answering the question, "what the hell is James Gunn's relationship to the DC comics, anyway?", because there must be a relationship, but it's so idiosyncratic that I just don't get it.  This is made clear within, like, the first couple of minutes, with the logo of the plutocratic villain's company, "Luthorcorp."  And, like...  Luthorcorp?  Have you been annoyed for the last forty years that Lex Luthor used his first name for his corporation?

Something like this is the case in the most arbitrary assemblage I think I've ever seen in a superhero film, starting with Guy Gardner (a pretty smartly-cast Nathan Fillion), "a" Green Lantern** rather than "the" Green Lantern, but at least comprehensible in that he is the Green Lantern most readily-fitted into the only kind of superhero film that Gunn knows how to make.  We then swerve to Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), the techbro who was haunted by a ghost until he agreed not to commit suicide and instead take on a stupid name and propound "FAIR PLAY," none of this being in the movie of course, so he's just this weird guy with a name and gimmick I've never really liked much who's rude to people in a serious way (I do think Gathegi is bringing a lot with his performance) and, I don't know, could be a good foil for Guy's unseriousness rudeness, in some other context.  And then there's Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), because things come in threes, though she might've had less "why is she here?" energy if she blended into a larger Justice, er, group.  (I mean, two of these guys are more customarily Justice Society figures, though as far as I know Gunn is sourcing this as much from the DCAU cartoons; and as I'm very confused by the Engineer, who's almost not even a DC character, let alone a Luthor henchwoman, if you needed such a person, Mercy's right there.)  Hawkgirl's only significant contribution, anyway, is making explicit how this "Justice Gang" subverts Superman's preferred morality in the sort of crowd-pleasing beat that I would find extremely pleasing in, say, Air Force One, and feels somewhat gross in its opposition to the avowed Clark-centered ethos of this movie.  Terrific, I suppose it's incumbent on me to mention, gets the big James Gunn Pop Music Action Sequence, and so as I said up top it's not for lack of trying that this isn't a Guardians movie—this is as much a knock-off of Vol. 2's "Come A Little Bit Closer" as is humanly imaginable without ever managing its joy, possibly because we're anchored to Brosnahan reacting to it, like her face is going to convince us to react to it with similar wonder—and the song is just terrible and the oner-based action filmmaking itself fairly lackluster, so I guess I maintain the ability to be surprised that such diminishing returns have been deemed not merely acceptable but worth celebrating.  (Meanwhile, is "Justice Gang" a bad name?  Well, I hope you're ready to have that "comically" litigated across 129 minutes.)  It's the same with the Daily Planet fellows, though Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) as a honeypot journalist with unaccountable Bondian sexual charisma is a joke that registers as conceivably amusing, even if it doesn't ever feel like it's finding any full expression.

All of this is to say that Gunn still hasn't found that much of a path forward for himself.  He's still competent at action (though the only things that thrilled me are Luthor- and Hoult-related: Hoult appearing to actively leverage "I have no idea what the VFX concept is or even exactly what my marks are" "bad" CGI-partnered acting to stride with immense badassitude through Superman's polar fortress, and Hoult shouting alphanumeric commands to "Ultraman" with a feverish mania that keeps it from feeling like he's running a bingo parlor); this does, however, overlook at least one scene (with Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) in the otherdimensional prison) that's staged so confusingly I don't understand how it worked.***  But a lot of my problem is that Gunn's sense of humor overlaps rather sparingly with mine, and, slightly more objectively, it's awfully forced: the idea of Jor-El and Lara sending Kal-El to Earth to conquer us is the kind of grim-and-gritty repositioning that I'd say asks for much severity and thoughtfulness, so it's a little deflating that the no. 2 item on the "conquest" checklist is Kal-El taking unto himself a harem, and moreso when it becomes obvious that this was just a feeder line for Guy (even if his response is righteously "Guy Gardner").  I'm likewise baffled, and perhaps slightly offended, by Clark's human parents (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell) rendered as hillbilly stereotypes so degenerate that Martha refers to a television as "the box" despite being born circa 1965.  There's also the humor, if that's what it's meant to be, of the crowds of Metropolitan bystanders, who don't flee when e.g. a giant monster arrives (they usually stand around filming with their cellphones), and sure, but between that and the human chain with no weapons besides an "S" banner in Not-Gaza, I started asking if Lex Luthor was right and if the presence of Superman does make us stupider and weaker.

Superman, I think this all indicates, is also overstuffed, and I haven't even mentioned Krypto, the Gunnest fucking thing here.  It's arguably a weirder reconceptualization than Superman's Evil Bioparents (which isn't a smear campaign that feels like it should work remotely this well with a Superman this established, but whatever), insofar as Krypto isn't even Kal's dog now (whereas the existence of Supergirl (Milly Alcock) is frankly confusing outside of the same old "product line showcase" that even I'm a little tired of), and the super-dog basically only exists to leap into the frame with rupturing violence, not precisely as a deus ex machina, so what I'm looking for is a Greek phrase that means "a plot device that ends any interesting dialogue scene that James Gunn doesn't actually know how to finish."  Altogether, then, it's cluttered, and not nearly as hefty as its boosters would like you to think it is; the better news is that it has a superb core cast, and Gunn's instincts towards poppy colorfulness are the correct ones for a Superman as different from Snyder's as you can get when the story's mostly identical, and it's a fun romp anyway.  Can't complain, not for all of 3000 words, anyway.

Score: 6/10

*Oh, and Kal-El is an undocumented migrant, I guess, something the movie I think consciously evokes, although not so hard that you remember it very often.

**A representative of an actual alien occupation force, of course, so probably not well-suited for this story the way it's told, even if Gunn brushes that off with a throwaway line.

***I also feel it's incumbent on a storyteller to establish "Superman needs to breathe in this one" ahead of time.