What cinema can do when kindness is a thing of past

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

It is difficult to not interpret the screenplay of Superman (2025) — whether the interpretation is naive or nuanced is another matter. You end up drawing parallels with the immediate surroundings, and slowly this imagination expands as time lapses. It crosses borders and seas, to think of a part of the world inhabited by those like us, humans, who are starving under the recklessness of a siege. Yes, we are talking about Israel and Palestine.
The premise of Superman has originally depicted the Earth as primitive and physically weak but not without sensibilities. Superman — Clark Kent after he arrives in America — was sent to Earth by his parents to save him from the destruction of their planet Krypton. He honed his skills to be able to focus on what's needed.
America's greatest superhero — who shifts between being a baby-faced, introverted, immaculate, soft spoken journalist, if there ever was one, to an extension of this persona with a few alterations to strength — has mostly been depicted without complications. His virtues are impractical, often boring. 'My parents taught me to hone my senses, Zod,' Superman (played by Henry Cavill) tells his nemesis in Man of Steel (2013), referring to his adopted parents on Earth.
So, what does James Gunn, the director of Superman (2025), do differently? Nothing, except diversify the skills of storytelling to hone his viewers and bring our focus to what's important and needed. He builds the foundation for the imagination of a reality — Superman (played by David Corenswet) stops the fictional Boravia from invading the neighboring Jarhanpur, and tells Vasil Ghurkos, the Boravian president, to leave. He calls out America's support in propagating this atrocity.
You don't have to scratch the surface of this reference to think of the Israeli ambush in Palestine. The casting, cinematography, and visualisation help — Boravians are White, ruthless and heavily armed while the people of Jarhanpur, played by west and southeast Asians, are famished and armed with whatever sharp objects they can find.
Boravia has aid and the latest weaponry and it isn't far-fetched to think that Jarhanpur needs the intervention of a superpower to be saved from annihilation. There is also what appears to be a 'political' prison where the primary villain, Lex Luthor, has held people and metahumans. And Gunn's Luthor is a tacit villain. His motives are as personal as they are political. He is an American billionaire tech mogul whose aid to Boravia is helping him buy a share of Jarhanpur.
It was all a set up and Gunn has been called out for making a superwoke spectacle. Gunn has denied these intentions. 'I've heard people say it was woke,' he said in an interview, adding that these layers may have crept in because originally, Superman was an immigrant as imagined by the character's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were also immigrants.
'...It's a story about kindness... And so what does that lead to? Well, does that lead to the way you vote? Sure... I mean, people did value kindness in the past... So that was always the centre of the movie for me, and it wasn't about anything other than that,' Gunn was quoted as saying.
But we are at a point where the most basic portrayal of good vs evil runs into debates of woke or apathetic, and, as Gunn points out, kindness is a thing of the past. Despite his intentions, or lack thereof, Gunn's Superman does not skirt over notions of good and evil by depicting unrealistic otherworldly circumstances. This 'woke' Superman is not on the fence. His popularity is waning because he chooses to side with what is morally right, which does not sit well with a population growing vastly intolerant towards immigrants.
Somewhere, despite classes in cinematic neorealism, we regressed from having to scrape through layers to get to the plot point through critical thinking. Our notions of good and evil have become rudimentary and siding with the good now amounts to inadvertent wokeness. We are being spoon-fed the plot to absorb the reality. The latest serving of Superman does a fantastic job of it. It tells the world that some circumstances require super interventions because humans are now indifferent.
This superhero was never meant to be more human than humans. Remember, he had to hone his skills, learn notions of ethics and morality. In a critical fight with him in Man of Steel, Faora-Ul, the Kryptonian war criminal, tells him: 'The fact that you possess a sense of morality and we do not give us an evolutionary advantage.' A reminder that all evolution is not good evolution. But this could also be open to interpretation. If not humans, maybe some lessons can be borrowed from metahumans.
After all, disclaimers — names, characters and incidents – are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental — and are only relevant in litigation.
The views expressed are personal.