I finally got around to seeing James Gunn's Superman, the film that launches the (mostly) rebooted DC Cinematic Universe, dispensing with the DCEU that began with Zach Snyder's Man of Steel for a DCU that treats its continuity similar to how Disney has been treating Star Wars' "Legends" content - that it's not canon until they say it is.
In terms of a cultural moment, Gunn's Superman arrives in a time that, like Superman's original comic debut, was threatened by the rise of fascism, though in the 1930s, fascism was seen primarily as something happening elsewhere in the world (though never forget that there were those in America who were big fans of Hitler, and in fact the Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow policies in the US). Jews (though also homosexuals, Romani, and other minorities) were the primary scapegoats for fascists at the time, and Superman was created by two Jewish writers at a time when it would have been really great to have an incorruptible, invincible protector to stand up to evil.
I think one of the things about Gunn's take on Superman (and, naturally, one of the things that a certain subset of "fans" are not as happy about) is the strong emphasis on his moral drive. Superman spends this movie trying very hard to always do the right thing.
Much like 2022's The Batman (though I don't know if that will be reincorporated into the DCU or remain a stand-alone - when the trailers first came out, I scoffed "Oh yeah, that's what we really need, finally a dark and gritty take on Batman!" but I'll concede that I actually think the movie was decent, even if it tread a lot of the same paths as Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, albeit with a Fincherian visual design and a somberness that wasn't really part of Nolan's films,) the movie doesn't bother with an origin story. When the movie starts, Superman has been protecting the world for 3 years, and we skip past a lot of things: Clark and Lois are already dating, she already knows he's Superman, and he's already teamed up with other "metahumans." Basically, the movie goes: "yeah, you know all this stuff, let's get to the plot."
I think the reaction to this movie can't really be divorced from feelings about Snyder's take on Superman, as played by Henry Cavil (there was a whole clusterfuck regarding whether he was going to continue playing the role, now played by David Corenswet). Man of Steel came out a year after Nolan's final Dark Knight film, and took a lot of inspiration from Nolan's movies' darker and grittier world. Zach Snyder's take on Superman was as a kind of distant, mythic god-like figure, and there was a fair amount of criticism about the "Snyderverse" DCEU movies having a kind of callous attitude toward humanity. Superman infamously kills General Zod in Man of Steel to prevent him from killing an innocent family, but there were also complaints that the "flying right through skyscrapers" method that Superman employs in his fights in that likely caused tons of collateral damage.
In particular, this seemed to draw a strong contrast with Marvel's movies - even though MCU heroes rarely have a no-killing policy (Spider-Man does, but Iron Man and Captain America don't have such qualms as long as the people they're killing are deadly bad guys) where there was quite a bit of emphasis in The Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron on their efforts to evacuate and protect civilians during their climactic battles.
Snyder's vision seemed less concerned with the role of a hero as a protector of the defenseless and innocent, and more as a superhuman force to clash against other superhuman forces as a kind of mythic and symbolic clash of good and evil. That element, of course, is always part of any superhero narrative, but the complaint some people felt was that there was a certain lack of humanism to Snyder's take on the genre.
I'm not here to condemn Snyder as a director (he's not really to my tastes, and I don't think he deserves the blame for fans who have made his movies an ideological banner to wave in our "everything has to be deeply polarizing" times) but only to talk about how I think Gunn's take seeks to reincorporate a lot of the elements that critics found missing from the previous cinematic incarnation.
In one of the film's many action set-pieces, Superman at one point flies in an grabs a squirrel that was in danger of being squashed by a massive kaiju. This was, apparently, something that Jame Gunn had to fight for after test screenings found it silly and superfluous.
But I think it's brilliant. People complain about Superman being boring because he's just good, near-invincible, nearly all-powerful, and unflawed as a person. But I think the movie either leans into these issues or questions how true they are to make Superman feel unique and fresh.
(I'll note that Chris Evan's portrayal of Steve Rogers showed that you can have a deeply principled, Capital H hero that is totally compelling on screen, and I have to imagine that they took notes.)
The squirrel shows that his goodness is not something to just list as a bullet point and move on from. This is a guy who holds himself to a profound, insanely high standard. Whether he sees it that way or whether he just feels a deep emotional need to protect people, the point is that he is the guy who would consider it a tragedy for an innocent creature to be killed when they could have been saved, no matter how humble.
While the Justice Gang (the trio of other superheroes who are fun but also emblematic of some of the movie's pacing issues and overstuffed nature) does kill that kaiju, Superman is the one who would really have preferred to take it down non-lethally, or at least find a less painful way to euthanize it. He understands that this skyscraper-sized creature is ultimately just an animal acting on instinct and not with malice.
Superman's status as a moral paragon, and even his old-fashioned expressions (he says, unironically, Golly at one point) give him a specificity.
In a scene that I imagine has generated a lot of "takes," he talks with Lois about listening to punk rock as a kid, and while they disagree on the quality of the peppy, poppy fictional punk band the Mighty Crabjoys that he liked, he argues that his choice to be idealistic, hopeful, and heroic in the face of cynicism and distrust, is his own act of rebellion, saying "maybe that's the real punk rock."
And, I mean, that's the thrust of the movie.
While in this movie, many things about the world are already established, including a fairly blasé attitude the citizens of Metropolis have toward superheroes fighting giant monsters on their streets (we're emphatically not doing origin stories, even for the public's knowledge of all this superhero stuff,) the true debut here is Superman's enmity with Lex Luthor.
Nicholas Hoult is an actor that I think is basically good in everything I ever seen him in. And his take on Lex Luthor is fascinating for a couple reasons.
On a surface level, yes, he's basically a tech-bro billionaire with an inflated sense of ego, catastrophically too much money and resources to spend on his pet projects, and with greater access and influence than he should have. It's an archetype that resonates with real-world would-be-supervillains today like a certain entrepreneur who bought a popular social media platform so that he could control what kind of speech was used on it.
But while I think many portrayals of Luthor in the past, at least in recent years, have made him out to be suave, cool-headed, and disarmingly "reasonable," Hoult's Luthor is just an absolute shit. He's a rat bastard, motivated by a searing hatred and resentment of Superman. His Luthor is never cool, never likable, never charming, and never granted a sympathetic motivation for his villainy. He just absolutely sucks. And it's great.
While I guess I never put in a spoiler cut here, I'll just say that Luthor's plot involves a twist that is not entirely dissimilar to the one in Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, where suspected motivations are far simpler than they first appear.
Numerous choices, from aesthetics to the movie's ensemble, to the elements of the plot, all come together to emphatically lean in to comic-book goofiness. Not only does Krypto, the Super-Dog play a major role in the story, but we also have several Superman Robots manning the Fortress of Solitude. We have fully ditched the Dark Knight trilogy's "let's make this as realistic as possible" concepts, which makes sense given that, while Batman's superpowers are all technology and his own mental and physical conditioning and training, Superman's a space alien who somehow gets superpowers from being exposed to the yellow sun.
And that source of power actually serves as a major plot point.
While certainly far more resilient than a human being, and even most "metahumans," this Superman is not invincible. Our first look at him in the movie is when he plummets like a meteor in Antarctica bruised, bleeding, wheezing, and with numerous broken bones. We're told this is the first time he's ever lost a fight (and when we find out who his foe was later in the movie, this makes sense) and we actually spend the first few minutes of the movie watching him agonizingly undergo accelerated healing by having a bunch of magnifying lenses concentrate sunlight on him before he launches off to go in for round two over halfway across the world. (Yes, the Fortress of Solitude is in the Antarctic. I guess the melting ice caps make putting it on the North Pole less realistic. If only we had superheroes who could stop climate change.)
Again, I think there's a certain conversation here with Snyder's take on Superman as this ascended, untouchable mythic being. I should throw out the caveat here that the only DCEU movie I ever saw was the first Shazam movie, so I can't comment directly on Snyder's movies except second-hand, so take that big old grain of salt. Superman's invincibility is one of the main things that people claim makes him boring, and so to solve that problem, Gunn makes his Superman not quite as invincible. (Though I'll say that as someone who knows anything at all about physics, the notion that even Superman could survive floating in a river of antiprotons feels insane.) Yes, against most foes, Superman has the power to overcome them with ease, but it's a matter of scale.
At his core, Superman's strength (said pretty explicitly in the film) is that, despite his power, humanism is what drives him and actually makes him a hero. We get to spend a little time with the Kents, and it's clear that these are profoundly loving, supportive parents. A pep-talk by Jonathan Kent is what gives him the drive to keep going, and it becomes clear that these parents who took him in when he arrived on Earth as an infant are the reason why the planet has such a paragon to defend it (and other plot points that really re-emphasize this fact.)
It's interesting, because James Gunn made a name for himself in the superhero cinema landscape with dark deconstructions like Super, and later took the then-obscure Guardians of the Galaxy and made them some of the most popular superheroes in the MCU. Notably, with both that and his take on The Suicide Squad for DC, he made movies about anti-heroes finding a sense of family and belonging to become better and more heroic people.
In absolutely zero way is Superman an anti-hero. He's a superhero. He's the superhero. But I think that Gunn identifies humanism as the root of goodness (at least I do, but I don't think I'm just projecting here) and that guides both his bad-guys-make-good stories as well as his exploration of what the paragon of heroism ought to be. We can look at Superman and view him as someone who is always doing the right thing, always good, but internally, he's always struggling to be better. Indeed, when Lois points out that his initial warning to the leader of the aggressor country whose invasion he stopped could be construed, on a technical level, as torture and a death threat, he's utterly mortified. We never see this happen (it involves shoving the guy against a cactus and telling him that there would be consequences if he doesn't back off from his bellicose goals) but I imagine that this Superman is probably going to be a bit haunted by this, maybe for the rest of his life, fearing that he went too far, and likely looking back on it as an important example of how he needs to be better.
Superman isn't flawless. But I think the flaws are complicated and nuanced - his overwhelming goodness is good for the world, but I think he pays a steep price for it in that he can't really let himself relax. He's caught between the need to think through the long-term ramifications of his actions while also not getting bogged down in the kind of hesitations that prevent him from doing the right thing. People are going to die? That's an emergency that requires intervention. But it might also mean an international incident that's going to piss a whole lot of people off. And I think Superman knows that some people can become tunnel-visioned with their own moral sense and wind up doing bad things in the name of a greater good - and he struggles to monitor himself to ensure that he never falls into that trap, and perhaps needs people like Lois around him to question his actions and make sure that he's on the righteous path.
I do think we're at an interesting time regarding superhero cinema. It's been six years since Avengers: Endgame, the moment that now certainly feels like it was the grand finale of the golden age of the MCU. Marvel and Disney are kind of struggling to get back that feeling of appointment viewing they had through the 2010s (a pandemic that made going to the movie theater a no-go for a few years didn't help).
Gunn, of course, was one of the great success stories out of the MCU's mass film production machine, and what I have at least heard about his approach running DC Studios is encouraging (not only having an actual filmmaker running the studio, but also having a policy of "we need to have a good script before we try to make a movie" is the kind of no-brainer that nevertheless is often ignored by Hollywood, especially in the franchise film model).
And, given the state of the world and definitely the country, a nice dose of optimism is welcome. It's fucking scary to be an American right now, and there's a sense that we're losing something core to us that has been true for multiple generations.
Gunn's Superman might file off the serial numbers when it comes to actual real-world countries (especially because the warring, bordering countries about to go to war sound like, respectively, an Eastern European country and a state in India) but it's not ambiguous about the fact that Superman, as an alien, is also an immigrant, and that part of Luthor's hatred for him is from the notion that someone who "isn't one of us" can be so powerful and so beloved.
Frankly, I'm at a point where I fear that the overreach of our current government will try to punish a film studio for this mildly-left-of-center message, and given the capitulations that we've seen from various media companies in recent days, I wouldn't put it past them to at least try. (I also hope that some random guy with a blog won't be targeted for just being on the political left, but we're in stormy, uncharted waters here.)
That does really make you wonder, though: is this going to spark a new enthusiasm for the superhero genre that was so profoundly dominant for a good 11 years? I'm certain that Warner Bros. hopes so.
Of course, I never really had a problem with all the superhero movies coming out - it's only that I wish that other types of movies were given some space as well.
Superman is, honestly, part of the American mythos, and the reinterpretation of him as a character over nearly 90 years reflects, I think, how we see ourselves and our ideals. This is a version of that character I'm happy to see, especially given how much dread there is in the air these days.
Is it a strong start for a new cinematic universe?
I don't know. I think there's a little lack of focus. Superman makes sense as your DCU headliner, of course, and while Mr. Terrific lives up to his name, and many of the other side characters are fun (Nathan Fillion is great as Guy Gardner, the Green Lantern who's a bit of a dick.) While I think you could make the argument that this isn't so much a parade of back-door piloting (a problem that I think has really plagued the later years of the MCU) so much as just trying to establish that this is, from the start, a world where there are superheroes everywhere, I do think that the movie tries to stuff a lot of plot points and characters into a tight runtime, and maybe would have benefitted from some judicious cuts or some more room to breathe.
I also think that one of the smarter moves, I think, Gunn and Peter Safran could make with the DCU is to be less beholden to a "studio style." There's certainly a logic to trying to create a winning formula for these movies, but I also think that, especially after now 17 years of the current era of superheroic cinema, an approach that gives wider latitude to individual directors to make movies that build up their form and style in a way to match the story they're telling would be, possibly, the shot in the arm that the genre needs, or at the very least, something that allows audiences to move on from a stinker should one show up. The idea of a Clay-Face horror movie, which I think is on their docket, is promising in this regard.
Now, of course, I'd also love studios to be willing to make big-budget movies that are original stories, or at least to adapt stories that don't come from the world of superhero comics. When I was a kid, we got big movies like Jurrassic Park, the Fifth Element, and the Matrix. I don't need or want sequels to any of those, but I'd love an environment in which a kid growing up now can get in on the ground floor of some exciting new story, world, and set of characters.
