REVIEW: ‘Superman’ is bright, hopeful and jam-packed. Almost to a fault.
David Corenswet debuts as the Last Son of Krypton in Superman, directed by James Gunn.
A title card at the beginning of James Gunn’s Superman tells us that his new version of the character “announced” himself 3 years before the events of the movie. What form that announcement took is for anyone to guess (A megaphone? A social media post?). All we need to know is that we’re not getting an origin story – there have been plenty of those in superhero cinema. I can’t say I’m mad about that; it’d be hard to find someone who desperately wanted to see another rehash of Superman as a baby, getting adopted by Kansas farmers and learning about his powers.
On a meta level, Gunn’s movie is an announcement of its own. He and his newly reset DC Universe of movies and TV shows need a standard-bearer, and that role naturally falls to the so-called Big Blue: the most powerful hero in the lineup and the one mainstream audiences know the best. And as certain toxic fans out there will be quick to tell you, Gunn wants everything about this new era of stories to be different. He wants a brighter, more uplifting tone (at least for Superman) and less grungy realism compared to the DC Comics-inspired movies of the last 20-odd years. By wiping the slate clean and starting again, there’s a lot to set up, and much of that falls on the shoulders of this new movie.
Understandably, that leads to a bit of a scramble to cram everything in. In addition to getting to know Supes himself (as played by David Corenswet), we meet a new Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), and a refreshed crew at the Daily Planet, with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, among others. There’s also a nascent Justice Gang, featuring a Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced).
Superman is taken into U.S. government custody by Ultraman and The Engineer.
Yet more villains and supporting characters also join the fray, and Gunn’s script keeps a lot of plates spinning so none of them feel too left out. Gunn seems to trust that audiences can keep up; maybe he feels like the genre is mature enough now that people don’t need to be helped along as much. If you can recognize several dozen heroes in Marvel’s Endgame battle scene, the thinking goes, you can learn these faces, too.
The movie partially succeeds at that. There certainly aren’t any dropped plot threads or forgotten characters, though sometimes it feels like we’re getting the “A” plot of two movies stuffed into one. At its core, Superman is about Lex Luthor’s attempts to discredit the hero. Since he’s failed at killing him for 3 years, Luthor resorts to spreading misinformation about his Kryptonian parents’ intentions, to make the general population hate and fear him. It works at first, and combined with some relationship friction with Lois, it sends Clark into an existential spiral.
Over the opening weekend, a mini culture war erupted over Clark’s status as the ultimate illegal alien or immigrant. Those are compelling dimensions to his character, but the movie doesn’t devote a lot of time to it. It’s more concerned with the influence of Clark’s parents, both his biological and his adoptive ones. Is he cursed to be a tool of destruction, changing global affairs and overruling the decisions of the puny humans? Or is he more of a beacon to allow humans to focus their “capacity for good”, as Marlon Brando’s Jor-El says in the 1978 Superman?
A modern Superman movie needs big action set pieces, and layered amid the character drama there’s also a bunch of material about stopping an interdimensional rift that Luthor opens in the middle of Metropolis, as well as a conflict between two foreign countries that the villain is manipulating. Plus a battle with a titanic kaiju, some fistfights with the masked Ultraman and his accomplice, the Engineer. And somehow the movie still finds time to include a scene where Superman has to save his dog, Krypto, and an alien baby from a netherworld prison (which also has a black hole).
Hoult's Lex Luthor strikes a good balance between intelligence and impotent rage.
As overloaded as it is, there’s still a goofy, light-hearted quality to the whole experience, and that’s what saves the movie from feeling like a chore. Little moments, like Superman saving a squirrel from the rampaging kaiju or the banter between Lois and Green Lantern at the Justice Gang headquarters, do as much to introduce us to the Gunn-led DC era as do the details of the plot.
That leads to a valid argument from some critics that the movie is merely a vehicle for Gunn to spotlight little-known characters he’s more interested in, like Terrific and Metamorpho. After all, his previous team-up films like The Guardians of the Galaxy series and The Suicide Squad were built around that strategy. Even so, I’d sooner have a bustling pantheon of wackier characters to bounce off the somewhat boring, Boy-Scout Superman than the dour alliance in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.
However you feel about Gunn as a filmmaker, time will tell if a sunnier, more optimistic vision of these characters will connect with people. Much like Disney’s approach with Star Wars, Warner Bros. is hoping to diversify into adult-oriented, profanity-laced TV shows like Lanterns, perhaps so the fans of the edgier stories feel seen. Personally, I’m ready for the studio to take a crack at this kind of tone, if only because it unlocks the huge variety of comics and characters that we’ve never seen in live action before. Sometimes you have to make a big entrance to get something going, and this Superman is definitely that.
Superman gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Superman gets kicked around a whole lot in the fight scenes, enough that I can expect some people to get angry that he’s too “weak” in this version.
Hoult’s Lex Luthor indulges in some textbook monologuing in the climax. Syndrome would be disappointed.
Krypto is fun, but so chaotic that I’m looking forward to him getting a little bit more training in subsequent outings.