So despite the DCU having already gotten an unofficial start with Blue Beetle TWO YEARS ago, the newly rechristened DCU kickstarts its new beginnings with, who else, but Superman. The last time he started a franchise set to take down Marvel, it was quickly torpedoed by a constant rodeo of leadership changes, ill-advised creative decisions and an egregious lack of forward planning. Now, with a semi-fresh slate and determined to find a newfound sense of purpose, the DCU looks to Superman once more to rekindle the flame of hope and inspiration that has long defined the Man of Steel.
It can’t help getting in its own way sometimes….but this is a damn good start.
James Gunn’s directorial style is not for everybody; that much has been made clear. But it is easy to see how much he LOVES and respects the source material of whatever he adapts and he wholly reignites that childlike exaggerated sincerity that always resonated with Superman. Capering and gamboling the material with a bluntness at its most anarchically chaotic and atomic, his hands-on approach builds this spectacle on the foundation of something true.
Everything about this presentation I knew I was going to vibe with: this entire world is one not just inspired by comic-books but one that devours the medium whole and spits it out, freshly lacquered and hyper-literal of its own stylization while physically inhabiting their structure to a T. Unapologetic about its own earnest, unashamed artifice, it is a clear invitation to nostalgia, not just based on imitation or slavish homage but a feverish act of communion with a spiritual, loving hyperbole and the faintest of self-aware restraint. While not yielding to a literal panelization of the screen, this is a hearty embrace of the pulpy, melodramatic and the surreal despite quickly spiraling into a three-ring circus of superhero worldbuilding; one that Beth Mickle’s production design tries very hard to lean into. Every set piece looks specifically engineered to look and feel as Silver Age as possible, mixing classic and contemporary styles to create this oversized ‘bigger is better’ principle and yet it lacks the same allure of grandeur in its scope that other Superman films achieved.
The scale is nearly immaculate but everything surrounding it feeling smaller and more circumspect sort of cripples that worldbuilding a little bit.
Whether stationary to reflect the more grounded drama or frivolously pirouetting like every sequence was a full-page spread, Henry Braham’s cinematography is very purposeful with the framing of each shot, the positioning of said frame and what every movement is meant to represent. Editing-wise, Craig Alpert and William Hoy’s efforts dance between old-school sensibilities of comic panel storytelling with the modern need for fluidity and immediacy, color grading is blooming with brash primaries, secondaries and an unashamed embrace of neon adding to the retro-futuristic feel, the lighting feels awash with vibrancy and the visual effects, while gradually solid, are still a tiny bit wonky and it’s easy to see which one is which.
I can see why the tone would be problematic; frantically spazzing in and out between cartoonishly campy levity and somber emotional dreariness with hardly much leeway to adopt a balance between them, especially when the pacing isn’t nearly as tight as Gunn’s other superhero outings (not to say the pacing is terrible through and through, however). But I appreciate how playful it is and how it has no aura of shame about what it represents. John Murphy and David Fleming’s combined score is a charming blend of bombast and reverence, playing with familiar motifs from previous iterations while carving its own path forward, the crackling sound design has a nice diegetic and non-diegetic balance to them, Judianna Makovsky’s costume design is the premiere definition of simple, yet effective and the action sequences are equally as exhausting as they are enthralling. They’re hyper-kinetic, somewhat disorientating and coked up on SO much energy yet still coherently choreographed amid the blurry.
With the movie’s stylistic thesis staked, it falls to the cast to carry the high-wire act of earnestness without toppling into camp—a feat not all of them can accomplish with a perfect calibration of sincerity and self-awareness. But they knew exactly what was required to bring to the table and they all delivered, even if their characters were weirdly executed or had limited time to do much of anything. David Corenswet has this puppyish, boy-scout charm and stalwart vulnerability that he spreads evenly between his alter egos, Rachel Brosnahan achieves textbook Lois Lane with relentless tenacity, bustling assertiveness and the sharpest of gazes and Nicolas Hoult, with uber quicksilver menace, leans into this Lex Luthor as both a highly intelligent, eidetic figure and a fickle, egomaniacal jackass who’d risk blowing up the world to serve his vanity rather than go to therapy.
I can make peace with most of the dialogue but the comedy’s a different story; mostly because it retains many of James’s classic Gunnerisms: some of them work well, others I can do without.
Here’s the thing, guys: we’ve been here before, ad infinitum. Nothing about this particular story was ever going to be fresh or bring something new to the table and, to its own strangely endearing credit, it barely even tries to be. Every individual plot point or dynamic presented here is one that you’ve seen in other media ventures, TV shows, comics or other superhero movies in general; we all knew how this movie was going to end. The structure unfortunately falls victim to the ‘And then’ method of storytelling, forgoing ‘Therefore’ and ‘But’ between every beat, not to mention how safe some of those beats are, like dominoes gently toppled by a comic-book historian with a checklist. Falling into so many familiar superhero genre trappings, the plot is overstuffed to the brim with so many characters, so many callbacks, so much fan-service on the verge of imploding under its own weight and it juggles so much of it, it forgets to take a breath more than once. It feels so well-worn you half-expect the movie to openly wink at you every ten minutes.
This feels more like a Superman greatest hits mash-up instead of a cohesive and focused narrative. And yet, the weird thing is….I don’t really care.
While I won’t go as far as to call this a celebration of those outgrown tropes, as it did take a while for me to get on its wavelength, it registers and layers each individual quality of every conflict and despite not giving us enough ample timing to draw us into said conflicts, there’s just enough connective tissue between all these developments to where it feels like you’re only JUST following the same story. I can’t guarantee you won’t get whiplash from everything happening but once we get past the first half hour, the film locks a groove on its momentum and maintains it all the way through. Unironic pathos was something I caught a lot of here, as the film is less concerned with surprise than with resonance; it gradually starts to earn its own narrative density, because it never loses sight of why these stories persist in the first place and its heart never stops beating. To me, the overstuffed plotting is not a mistake, but a test: Can you still care, even after being force-fed this much spectacle? The answer, at least for me, was yes—though not in the way I’d expected.
Drawing us into a setup every bit as curiously timely as it is depressingly accurate, the modern-day, real-world parallels it paints are striking. While very much inspired from All-Star Superman and built out of the cloth that made the animated series so beloved, a good chunk of this movie also reminds me of Superman Vs. The Elite, a story from 2012 built to critique and examine Superman’s wide-eyed idealism in a cynical modern world while tagging on a wealth of socio-political parallels that make the story timeless. It may not focus on that topic as extensively as that movie but this one is the most keen on not losing sight of that immigrant experience and as much as such heavy-handed topics like war-for-profit invasions, supplying weapons to foreign territories, social media crucifixion, fake news, etc are grossly overused these days, it still hits twice as hard for our outer world today and achieves what it sets out to do: juxtaposing Superman's unwavering optimism with the aforementioned cynical modern day world.
The extensive comparisons it paints with power asymmetry between both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S’s involvement in sending constant weapons to Israel for their genocidal assimilation of Gaza makes for a damning indictment for both those funding the mess and the ones complacent in the chaos and it made me believe, for a few precious hours, that we can still possess the potential for boundless goodness. And in a world consumed by fear, division and the 1% constantly controlling the narrative, characters like Superman represent a beacon of light, guiding us towards a better tomorrow.
People have been vocal about one change to Superman’s backstory that ties into his internal struggle for the rest of the movie and….while I won’t say I don’t understand the gripes against that change, it’s one of those things where I struggle to see the real issue behind it. Heroes’ backstories can change for the better or worse depending on the story and while I understand the execution of that reveal being VERY controversial, I can see why that element was placed into the film in the manner that it was.
Taking off with the cheekiest of grins and only JUST sticking the landing, “Superman” didn’t need to be this epic revival; it just needed to revitalize some semblance of hope for DC fans after the conveyor belt of constant disappointment. Yes, it’s pure junk food through and through: familiar, empty calorie, and not particularly healthy but it’s also an experience so unguarded about its own earnestness that it’s almost impossible not to root for the film in spite of itself getting in its own way.
