[Spoilers for Superman (2025)]
With how much superheroes have taken over popular culture, the idea that superheroes are our ‘modern mythology’ is a statement that seems to ring truer by the day. Most people know the origins of Superman, there are science fiction tropes derived from Superman stories that people don’t even know started from Superman stories.
And yet, the key to a big screen Superman adaptation has yet to be cracked properly. Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) starring Christopher Reeve as Superman and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane is maybe the last time I felt the character work, everything since has had problems in some way or another. Zack Snyder’s take isn’t something I meshed with, but as time went on, I appreciated that it had an artistic vision of his own, and I can respect that a lot.
When they announced James Gunn for Superman, I was cautiously optimistic. I love his Guardians trilogy, I love The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, but going from that to Superman is such a tonal departure, add on top of that the fact that he’s also the head of the new DC Studios and I was left concerned with how things would turn out.
The leadup to the movie also just left me worried. I loved the castings, but some of the inspirations (John Byrne’s Superman) and how online Gunn seemed to be left me wondering if things would work out. When I went into the movie, I was at 70% hope juice – maybe it wouldn’t take me all the way there, but there would be things for me to enjoy.
Sadly to say, as much as I did like parts of the movie, the narrative backbone of the thing makes it all fall apart in a really bad way.
The biggest, boldest thing James Gunn’s Superman asks you to do is to treat this like you’re picking up a random issue of Superman and adding it to your pull list (to the uninitiated, a pull list is a service at comic shops that allow you to subscribe to series) without hunting down the back issues. It kicks off in media res with a text crawl at the beginning to give you some context, and then throughout the runtime, it treats everything in this same manner.- everyone’s motivations, personal relationships, all treated like something you’re expected to know.
To even go further into the in media res thing, it justifies the use of John Williams’ Superman theme, even if I still don’t like it. If James Gunn’s Superman is meant to embody ‘Superman’ in a broader context, then of course they would use the musical identity that is most associated with the character.
However, that decision is emblematic of the wider problem that is keeping this movie in a chokehold— a distinct lack of identity. James Gunn is so obsessed with the idea of making a “comic accurate Superman” that he forgets that the reason why we love Superman stories, or really stories in general, because of the artistic visions behind them (even if some part of the audience isn’t consciously engaging with that). He continues to cite Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman as an inspiration but clearly only views that as a ‘Superman’ story rather than engaging with it on a thematic level.
Credit where it’s due, it is a “comic accurate Superman” story, which is to say that if you went from reading a modern Superman comic to this you’d be able to point to these characters and say, “Hey, these are the guys I was just reading about!” but that’s where it ends. It’s only in the broader strokes, through the macro lens. I don’t really care about “comic accuracy” but I do care for some level of artistic merit, something this movie severely lacks. When Matt Reeves’ cites his inspirations for The Batman, you can see that he’s put in “the work,” that he’s engaging with those stories on a deeper level and using them to craft his own vision of “Batman” rather than try to be an approximation of ‘every Batman ever’. Even Grant Morrison, whose takes on Superman and Batman are meant to encapsulate everything from their entire history, is not an “approximation”, it is very much “Grant Morrison’s take”.
But it is also “comic accurate Superman” in the sense that like most Superman comics, it’s a white American dude trying to write about politics (both global and about the immigrant/diaspora experience) through the lens of Superman and then not doing a particularly good job at that. There’s also all of the silver age stuff going on that people seem to be loving that I cannot get behind, because they too just seem like set dressing and references for nerds to point to rather than actually trying to engage with them (in contrast to how All Star Superman views those beats). These are all things that turn me off from a lot of Superman comics, and it’s those exact problems that permeate through all of this movie.
To kick it off, the biggest problem I keep coming back to is that no one in this movie has a real arc. The interview between Lois and Superman, where she asks him whether he stops to think about his actions bc it can be seen as an intervention in global geopolitics only for him to rebut that by stating that he does things for good, because they’re the right thing to do creates a window to a more interesting movie by creating an expectation for character arcs that would spin out of it, and yet nothing really happens. At the end of that argument, Lois mutters how she said she was never good at relationships, but that’s a thread that gets remembered twice and is forgotten about. Clark’s struggle of figuring out whether or not he is doing “the right thing” is also just forgotten because the movie treats Clark’s worldview as the correct one. It’s fine if the movie does this, but the movie needs to justify it, and it never does. Lex, the primary antagonist of the whole movie, is a character we never get to sit with to really understand why he’s doing what he does and why he hates Superman (because again, it is expected for the audience to know). It’s only a conversation at the end that alludes to this (envy), but even that conversation is undercut by another in a series of bad jokes.
But also, we do not see these characters together enough. For a movie whose marketing is all about the trio, they’re barely together! It sucks because they have such good chemistry, on and off camera, and yet the movie does not utilize it enough. Furthermore, there’s a real lack of friction. Things kind of just happen at a breakneck pace and don’t really sit with anything, and it baffles me as to why. If I want to care about these characters, if I want to care about Gunn’s Superman, Lois and Lex, I need to be able to sit with them during their quiet, intimate moments instead of going through bombastic beat after beat. All of their depth comes from the incredible performances by Corenswet, Brosnahan and Hoult. I’m fine with that to a point, it’s a movie, the writing isn’t everything, but come on. Lois doesn’t even get to do any real investigative journalism, when that’s her whole shtick!
If I want to care about Superman, I need to care about Clark Kent. But Clark is such a non-entity in this movie that he may as well not exist, almost feels like adding him was a checkbox inclusion. He’s there for a little bit in the opening and then just gone forever, which is really weird when Perry (played by Wendell Pierce) mentions how he’s always late for work. But similarly to Clark, the Daily Planet is also an entity that is forgotten until the third act of the movie, with focus instead given to the Justice Gang.
The Justice Gang existing isn’t something I have a problem with, everyone in there is awesome and gives terrific (heh) performances, and as much as I love them, I do not understand why Mr. Terrific ends up being the lead of the movie for a certain portion instead of a character who actually exists in Superman’s orbit (Lois).
And then there’s the whole conflict between Boravia and Jarhanpur. There’s been talk online that this movie is anti-Zionist, while Gunn continues to deny that this movie has any direct connections to the Palestinian genocide. While I can believe the movie was written to portray the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I refuse to believe that Gunn didn’t have Israel-Palestine in his mind when the movie was being shot, especially when the imagery is ripped from it and Jarhanpur’s entire cast is comprised of Middle Eastern people. It’s cowardly too to act like there aren’t connections when there are. On top of that, given that the picture Gunn (and Peter Safran) are painting of the DCU is one where it’s more artist-driven than corporate mandated, him (especially as studio head) having to hold back the punch and act like part of this movie isn’t inspired by the Palestinian genocide does not inspire much confidence.
Furthermore, to go back to the Superman and Lois interview, the movie starts that conversation – should Superman intervene in geopolitical conflicts – but never stops to actually engage with that conversation. It also avoids the idea that the United States is involved in escalating the conflict and places that squarely on Lex (and in an admittedly bold moment of characterization, Lex reveals that he started the conflict purely so he could kill Superman). There’s also the final beat of Jarhanpur being saved by the ‘Justice Gang’, a superhero group funded by a billionaire rather than Superman, even though the last citizen of Jahranpur standing as Boravia’s soldiers keep marching on is a little boy holding up the flag of Superman.
It’s very bizarre, especially since the movie finally presents a big conflict for Superman – does he save Jahranpur or does he save Metropolis – and then proceeds to avoid it entirely. I understand that the point is to show that Superman has inspired, the way we should be inspired, but it does so at the cost of cutting off any friction (which is a big problem with this movie generally). But regardless, the conflict’s presentation feels crass to me. The imagery is meant to spark an emotion in the viewer, obviously, but the movie doesn’t seem to really care about what any of it implies. The ‘politics’ of this movie are simply set dressing, Gunn doesn’t seem to be interested in actually engaging with what any of this has to actually say.
I understand the conflict being an approximation of global conflicts historically, and how we all have to inspire each other to do what’s right. The movie is braver than most blockbusters in this regard too, clearly painting the oppressed citizens of Jahranpur as the ones who are right without making the situation one where you have to consider both sides, but I just wish Gunn wasn’t afraid enough to admit that he is also being influenced by current events when presenting it. It also comes off as worse when you consider what the movie has to say about Superman’s heritage. If Superman gives up his Kryptonian heritage and assimilates into being an American, and then the Jahranpur citizens are saved by the Justice Gang, another group of American heroes, then the movie places Americans as the saviours of this Middle Eastern stand in, the optics of which are muddy at best. Of course, this is all extrapolated and not necessarily said outright, but given that Gunn re-read John Byrne’s Superman while making this movie (and enjoys it!), and with ex-CIA comics writer Tom King being in the DCU’s writing room (who has given Gunn a lot of insight into Superman, as per various interviews), it’s hard to not read it in this way, at least subtextually if anything.
There’s a Frank Miller interview about The Dark Knight Returns where (and I’m paraphrasing here) he talks about how you can’t really ascribe politics to superheroes, and how they ascend that. I agree, because if we start really digging into that, we have to dig into the fascism of superheroes, and that’s a subject that’s far out there. The reason why I say this is because you can apply that thinking to Superman too – Superman as an idea ascends ‘politics’, he has to, but every work of art has the artist’s politics ingrained in there in some way or the other. If you put Superman in the real world, you would believe that he would be saving people for the greater good, that’s who he is. But when you ask political questions, you need to interrogate that. Like in Dark Knight Returns, the whole conflict of Bruce and Clark is rooted in politics, and in the same way, Superman’s actions in this movie are also rooted in politics. If a man with all of this power starts to intervene in geopolitics, what does this mean for everyone else? The movie asks this, and clearly asks the viewers to think about this, but then promptly forgets about it and moves on from it, never even answering the question beyond “do good,” which is such a nothing statement. It’s especially egregious when there are Superman stories that answer what it means to ‘do good’, Grant Morrison and Rags Morales’ New 52 Action Comics immediately comes to mind.
On that wavelength, I’d be remiss to not dig into the implications of Kryptonians being conquerors too. On a meta level, it’s clearly meant to address the various ‘evil Supermen’ that have taken the world by storm, from Homelander to Omni-Man. But the beauty of Jor-El and Lara sending Kal-El to Earth is the desperation of it all – it’s one shot, and all they have is hope, so that’s what they bank on. It’s what Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman perfectly surmises in its first page, it’s what Mark Waid and Leinel Francis Yu’s Superman: Birthright explores over the course of its runtime.
But even deeper than that, it’s just the implications of it given that Superman is such a powerful metaphor for the immigrant/diaspora experience. What does it mean to be like “your original parents sent you to eradicate a different culture with the one you have”? It’s wild that the reveal is done by Lex Luthor, a man who has been funding arms to Boravia, something that seems to be known information, and yet no one questions it. Wilder is that it never causes a lot of friction regardless, it’s used to send Superman to prison and then promptly forgotten about… until the ending of the movie. In the beginning, the Superman robots play the message (a corrupted version that cuts off the conquerors bit) his Kryptonian parents to help him relax, and at the end, the Superman robots play a series of videos from his childhood with the Kents, thus ending on the idea that Superman has fully assimilated into an American citizen and is leaving his roots behind, which is such an odd endpoint for a character whose whole deal is being representative of the diaspora experience (people love saying it’s an immigrant experience, but that one’s really Supergirl). It is also doubly odd when the movie opens by saying that Gods and Monsters and metahumans have existed for so long, and then sticks to this idea that ‘being Human’ is the best thing one could be. What? Maybe this is something that will get addressed in a later film, but I’m tired of how we view cape stuff as “maybe a future installment will address one of the thematic cores of the movie itself”.
The relationship between Clark and the Kents also cements his assimilation further. At the beginning of the movie, when Superman tells Krypto, “Take me home,” home refers to the Fortress of Solitude. Later, when Lois takes Clark ‘home’, it’s the Kent farm. It presents an idea of ‘there are two homes for Superman’, but when the ending of the movie shows the message from his birth parents being replaced by home videos with the Kents, even as it presents an idea of reconciliation I can’t help but feel it’s more akin to throwing out the pictures with your old parents and replacing them all with pictures of your new parents.
Speaking of wanting to care, this movie makes such a big deal of Superman caring about every life, to the point where we see multiple instances of him saving every life he can while engaging with an opponent, even the animals. He saves a squirrel! And yet, when he fights Ultraman/Bizarro, he just lets him get sucked into the black hole and seemingly die and never stops to reflect on it due to the breakneck pacing of the movie. Things just happen, they just keep happening, it never stops to show us how Clark feels during a moment beyond a broader lens.
There’s a great Superman movie somewhere in there, but unfortunately what’s presented to us is a movie that is afraid of being about anything, that is afraid of engaging with any of the hard questions, that’s afraid of having an identity.
Yet, there’s a part of me that still enjoys it (and will probably catch it a second time in theaters). I just hope whoever does the sequel (probably Gunn) is actually willing to engage with hard questions, and is willing to focus more on Superman and his orbit than launch an universe. At the very least, it’s getting people to want to engage with the source material, and it sparked a conversation as being a blockbuster that’s at least brave enough to portray the oppressed as being the ones who are actually good people without any caveats, so there’s the silver lining.
