For my eighth birthday party, my mom took me and some of my classmates to see the hottest movie in theaters at the time: Superman. Then we went back to my grandparent’s farm and flew kites until the sun went down. It’s still, to this day, the best birthday party I ever had. Thanks, Mom!
I tell this story to say, don’t expect me to be objective about Superman. He is the archetypal superhero. Yes, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were inspired by the larger-than-life protagonists of pulp magazine and newspaper comic strips, like John Carter of Mars and Doc Savage the Man of Bronze. But after Action Comics #1 introduced Superman to the public in April 1938, those kinds of characters would forever be called “superheroes.”
Siegel and Shuster were both children of Jewish immigrants who came to America and Canada fleeing anti-Semitic violence in Eastern Europe. Superman’s origin story bears the marks of his creators’ life histories. Like Moses, who was set adrift in a basket of reeds by his desperate mother, Kal-El is set adrift in a spaceship by his desperate parents, Jor-El and Lara, to escape the doomed Krypton.
When I saw Richard Donner’s Superman, I thought that the most unrealistic element of the story was not a guy who could fly and shoot heat rays from his eyes, but that a respected scientist like Jor-El could warn his government about the impending destruction of his planet and be ignored. Now, as the Trump administration has fired everyone in the government working to reverse climate change, I have to admit Siegel and Shuster nailed it.
Kal-El crash lands on Earth and is adopted by a childless Kansas couple, Ma and Pa Kent, and raised on their farm under the name Clark Kent. The Kents quickly discover that this is no ordinary immigrant orphan, and instill in their adoptive son the principals of “truth, justice, and the American way.” In 1938, “The American way” meant Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The laissez-faire Roaring Twenties had collapsed in a shattering crash, and the Great Depression had impoverished millions of Americans. Threatened with fascist movements both foreign and domestic, Roosevelt reimagined the government’s role by articulating the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Superman’s early opponents included greedy landlords, gangsters, and the Ku Klux Klan. When World War II started, Superman punched a lot of Nazis, and Hitler’s propagandists railed against the character as a symbol of degenerate democratic values. But Supe’s arch enemy was a mad scientist named Lex Luthor — a tech billionaire like Elon Musk with a bald head like Jeff Bezos.
So when you hear MAGA goons decrying James Gunn’s reboot of Superman as an excessively woke interpretation of the character, you can tell them they’re full of crap. If you want to see what a real perversion of the character looks like, it’s what we’ve been seeing for the last decade in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Justice League, and the unwatchable abomination Batman v. Superman: Both Our Moms are Named Martha.
As portrayed by Henry Cavill, Superman was defined by his brooding depression and alien superiority to the pathetic humans around him. But James Gunn knows that Superman is upbeat, kind to a fault, a champion of the downtrodden, and more than a little corny. The core of Man of Steel is a fight between Superman and evil Kryptonian General Zod where Metropolis and its citizens are collateral damage. The core of Gunn’s film is a long scene where Superman (David Corenswet) is aggressively interviewed by Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) about his botched attempt to stop a war. “What about diplomacy? Who gave you the right to intervene?” asks Lois. Superman brushes all those concerns aside with “People were going to die!” That’s enough for him. Later, Gunn steals a moment from a slam-bang action sequence for Superman to save a squirrel.
In the 1950s, when Superman was the best-selling comic on the planet, an elaborate mythology was built up around him. No longer the Last Son of Krypton, he had a cousin Supergirl, a son Superboy, and Krypto the Superdog. But since the 1980s, superhero comics have tried to move away from that goofy “Silver Age” tone. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins scored big by asking, “What would Batman look like in the real world?” But while that approach succeeded for two and a half good Batman movies, it poisoned the well for the other heroes in the DC stable. Superman is not meant to be realistic. He’s meant to model virtuous thought and heroic action for kids. Rather than treat it as embarrassing, Gunn leans into the Silver Age weirdness. Krypto is back, and he almost steals the show. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has an outlandish array of super-science weapons to fight Superman, including an army of mind-controlled monkeys pumping out anti-Superman social media content. I lol’d.
Gunn wastes no time with the origin story. Clark Kent is already Superman, Lois Lane has already fallen for him, and Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) has already figured out that his co-workers are hooking up. Superman is not invulnerable. He loses fights. He needs help from his friends. One crucial tweak to the standard Super-narrative involves the last message from Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) to his son, which sets off a crisis of conscience in Clark. This turns out to be Gunn’s crucial insight. To paraphrase LBJ, doing the right thing is easy — the hard part is figuring out the right thing to do.
And that is how you write a good Superman movie.
Superman (2025)
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