I love Superman as a character. Where others see his unyieldingly positive moral compass and uncompromising values of peace and justice as bugs, I see them as features. He’s a character who has persevered through nearly a full century of storytelling across numerous mediums, and I find him to be just as potent and prescient a symbol of hope now as he ever was.
So the idea of a new Superman movie, directed by James Gunn (a filmmaker whom audiences have watched transform from a cynical, nose-thumbing edgelord to an empathetic and hopeful storyteller in real time over the last two decades), that makes these core elements of the character pillars of his new cinematic story? That sounded pretty swell to me.
Does James Gunn’s Superman live up to those expectations? Is it the first genuinely great Superman film to be made in my lifetime? Well, to my frustration, the answer is a bit more complex than a simple binary “yes” or “no.” The film has its share of failings, which ultimately serve to hamper it in odd ways, but there is no denying that when Superman hits its high points, it delivers some of the greatest cinematic comic book moments of all time.
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TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS FROM “SUPERMAN”
5. Joyfully Comic Booky
General audiences have never seen a live-action take on Superman that wears its pulpy, gee-whiz comic book influences on its sleeve to the extent that Superman does. For as much as I love the Richard Donner films and as much as some fans love the more recent Zack Snyder-directed films, those are works that very much feel like depictions of what happens to our world when Superman shows up. The new film places Superman in the midst of a much larger, zanier, and more phantasmagorical world than he’s ever been a part of in live-action before, and its very much to the film’s benefit. As the first film in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s larger DC Universe, Superman does a great job of throwing audiences into the deep-end of an already-in-progress comic book world that feels fleshed out and cohesive.
4. The Kaiju Setpiece
The strongest single setpiece in Superman is one that has been heavily featured in the film’s marketing, and sees the last son of Krypton squaring off against a giant mutated kaiju monster in the middle of Metropolis. Not only does this moment feel ripped from the pages of a Silver Age comic in the best of ways, it also immediately plays like an insatiably iconic Superman moment. Superman spends the entire sequence not attempting to overpower or beat the monster, but instead save the civilians within its path and find a way to extract the monster from the situation without hurting it. All of this is further complicated when the Justice Gang, a gaggle of other superheroes, show up with vastly different intentions than Superman’s own.
Over the course of this setpiece, you get to see Superman try, fail, learn, and evolve in phenomenally compelling form. It’s a big effects-driven sequence (like most of the film’s big action beats) but it prioritizes heart, emotion, and compassion through its titular performance (more on that in a few) in a way that just flat-out rules.
3. Weakness: Loss of Focus
It’s strange to leave a Superman movie wishing you could have spent more time with Superman.
On the one hand, it’s a testament to the strength of the performance and Gunn’s crafting of this iteration of the character. On the other hand, it keeps the audience at arm’s length from the central protagonist for the entire latter half of the film and results in some of the resolutions at the film’s end feeling underdeveloped and landing with a thud.
Following the midpoint of the film, Superman becomes so narratively dense that it offers precious little time to explore any more of the fascinating ethical and philosophical conundrums it set up in its first act. Even worse, while the film is to be applauded for sending Superman as a character on such a large-scale journey of introspection, it wastes any and all of that goodwill by not allowing us to experience it alongside him. There’s exactly one scene in the second half of the film where it feels like Clark/Superman is given any time to meaningfully grapple with the revelations at hand, and it is among the film’s strongest scenes. But for so much of the time, the narrative feels woefully untethered from the thematic heft and character-work it should be striving to explore.
Nowhere is this more apparent than it is in the film’s third act, which sees the film quite suddenly becoming a much more typical blockbuster affair at the cost of its own emotional resonance. In theory, there are elements of the climax which could have been tied into the themes at hand in more palpable and affecting ways, but in execution, they just aren’t. The result is a film that feels as if it resolves its biggest themes and characters arcs somewhere off-screen, much to my chagrin.
2. The Cast
Which is all the stranger given just how banging this cast is. Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and especially David Corenswet as Clark/Superman are all so wonderful in their respective roles that they each manage to extract these characters from beneath decades-worth of expectations and nostalgia and create distinctly new iterations that work so well. The chemistry between the trio is also off the charts, with essential dynamics such as Clark/Lois relationship and the Superman/Luthor antagonism being the center of some of the film’s greatest moments.
In addition to this, the supporting cast is stacked with phenomenal performers doing great work in the margins. Personally, my favorite of these is Pruitt Taylor Vince as Jonathan Kent, who makes a stunningly disarming meal out of the morsels the film gives him.
1. Superman as an Active Character
The coward’s way out of writing Superman is to present him as a passive character: he’s not someone making active decisions rooted in passion or conviction that dictate the story, but rather someone that the plot simply happens to. Audiences have seen this more than a few times in recent years. James Gunn mercifully figures his own way out of this issue and instead gives audiences a Superman who is highly driven and plays an active role in his own story from the moment the film begins.
This is, again, a testament to both Gunn’s writing and directing and Corenswet’s performance. Superman as a film has to ultimately settle for being good rather than great, but this iteration of Superman as a character soars to such insane heights that I cannot wait to see more of him.
RGM GRADE
(B-)
Superman can’t help but fall a bit short of lofty expectations. The film is made with real craft and has a great many jaw-dropping moments within its runtime, and yet I couldn’t help but feel like the loss of focus in the latter half yielded a work whose whole was less than the sum of its parts. Having said all of that, when it works, it genuinely soars.
