Up, up, and away! D.C.’s failed attempt to make a grimdark version of the MCU is finally over for good. Comic book auteur James Gunn (writer-director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and the remake of The Suicide Squad) delivers the perfect rehabilitation of Superman for our times, defending his old-fashioned image while still delivering enough goofy comedy and self-aware commentary to satisfy today’s sophisticated audiences.
Since we all know how Superman came to earth from Krypton as a baby, was raised on a farm in Smallville, and took on the secret identity of Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Metropolis Daily Planet, Gunn eschews the origin story route and instead starts his Superman reboot with the world’s most famous superhero already in flight. The film begins in media res with Superman (David Corenswet) having just lost a fight for the first time. The usually invulnerable superhero has found his match in Ultraman, an artificial being created by genius tech CEO Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).
Superman has never been one to think through his plans carefully. Why would he, since he can generally solve anything by being stronger than everyone else? All Superman thinks about is saving innocent lives, so he flies headfirst into the middle of a war between Boravia and neighboring Jarhanpur. But Ultraman, AKA the Hammer of Boravia, is strong enough to actually injure Superman when directed remotely by Lex and the LutherCorp team from the safety of their command center.
LuthorCorp has made billions of dollars from government security contracts, and stands to make billions more from a war between US ally Boravia and the smaller, poorer country Jarhanpur. With an alien from the planet Krypton intervening in world affairs without a clear motive other than kindness – and who in today’s cynical world can believe someone that powerful would be kind – Luthor is able to convince the Pentagon to allow him to imprison Superman at a black site detention center so off-the-grid it’s literally in another dimension.
There’s a lot going on narratively between introducing the idea of metahuman superheroes (including Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern and his incipient Justice League-like team) who seem to routinely battle kaiju-size alien creatures in Metropolis, Luthor’s plot to use the international invasion to discredit Superman, Superman’s romance with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), the unstable interdimensional rift Luther has opened, the workings of Superman’s crystalline Fortress of Solitude where he lives with Krypto the Superdog, and more. But at 129 minutes Gunn keeps the film mercifully short for a comic book blockbuster, and all these seemingly disparate narrative threads turn out to be tightly woven together to create a satisfying tapestry in the end, with not much surplus.
The action set pieces are excellent here as well. Gunn smartly shoots almost the whole movie with a kinetic, fast-moving camera that glides through long takes, circling one subject and then another. Establishing this style in the early dialogue scenes — that take place on real sets with real actors — helps sell the big action scenes made entirely of CGI, where special effects fight other special effects. You believe these fully digital shots because you believe the camera is real. It’s a humanistic approach to special effects that’s mostly been lost in today’s big-budget Hollywood slop.
Like Guardians of the Galaxy, there’s a lot of weirdness in this Superman film that all works far better than it should. James Gunn learned the right lessons from Richard Donner’s beloved classic Superman: The Movie (1978). Superman is a sincerely corny guy who says “golly” and was raised with old-fashioned Midwestern values; the heart of the story is his romance with Lois Lane; Superman is a better character when he’s vulnerable but still a heroic ideal; the joy when crowds of people are cheering for Superman makes us want to cheer along; and you can’t make a good Superman movie without the John Williams theme.
He also learned an important anti-lesson: even when things get weird, just stick to the classic superpowers. No turning back time, no amnesia kisses, and no cellophane “S.”
Gunn has always excelled at movies with ensemble casts and emotionally charged relationships, so it is not surprising that he devotes a large amount of screen time to Clark Kent’s relationship with Lois Lane. Donner did the same thing. Between the extended origin story section and the romance scenes, there’s very little time for the villain plot in Superman: The Movie. But Gunn ends up making Lex Luthor’s hatred of Superman central as well.
Without spoiling anything, I can say Luthor’s cynical and politically “realist” critique of Superman’s power allows Gunn to give us an interesting twist on the Messianic idea that Kryptonians Jor-El and Lara send their infant son Kal-El to Earth to be humanity’s savior. In the previous Superman movie Man of Steel and its sequels, Zach Snyder explored the fascist themes implicit in this framing, having Jor-El say his son would “be a god” to the Earthlings. The Lex Luthor of that series argues that an omnipotent being like Superman poses an existential threat to humanity.
For Gunn, however, Kal-El is not a god who is inherently better than humanity. Deep down, he’s really just Clark Kent, a guy from Kansas who’s trying to do what he can to help people. He’s not perfect, but when he makes mistakes he tries to do better. It is not Superman’s inherent power that makes him a hero, but his choice to use that power for good.
Put into political context, it is not one’s national identity or origin – one’s blood – that makes someone exceptional, but one’s choice of how to use one’s abilities to help others. No ethnicity, not even Kryptonian, grants a person supremacy over other ethnicities. Americans might have done some bad stuff in the past, but Gunn points out that we don’t have to be the way our ancestors wanted us to be. We can forge out own values, based on truth, justice, and peace for all humanity.
I guess that makes the film “woke”? Well, that, and the fact that Superman has always been woke, ever since his first appearance in Action Comics #1 which described him as “champion of the oppressed.”
