James Gunn's Superman launches a universe, not a character

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8 hours ago

The following contains spoilers for Superman.
Back in 2013, Zack Snyder ended his divisive Man Of Steel with a scene that teased a brighter future: Henry Cavill's newly debuted Superman slips on some thick-framed glasses, walks into his first day at The Daily Planet, and shakes hands with a Lois Lane who already knows his secret identity. It's a concept the rest of the increasingly convoluted DCEU never really took advantage of (Clark wound up battling Batman and becoming a zombie instead). But it's notable that James Gunn's new Superman reboot starts by picking up that abandoned thread.
If you ignore the change in actors, tone, and costuming—and the addition of one ill-trained superdog—Gunn's Superman could almost be a direct follow-up to that Man Of Steel epilogue. As the movie opens, David Corenswet's Clark Kent has been operating as Superman for three years. He's got some prestige at The Daily Planet thanks to his exclusive 'interviews' with his own alter ego. And he's three months into a relationship with a Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) who knows he's a superhero. Finally, a modern Superman movie that explores what it's like to try to live a normal life when you also happen to be the strongest man on Earth!
Except, while Gunn's sunny, optimistic take is a breath of fresh air compared to the grim and gritty Snyderverse that preceded it, it doesn't really take advantage of its own setup any more than that Man Of Steel epilogue did. We only see Clark in his bumbling, glasses-wearing reporter persona for about three minutes before that thread is dropped entirely. And for a movie about a guy whose main superpower is being invulnerable, Corenswet's Superman spends a weirdly large amount of the runtime writhing on the floor in pain while others handle the heroism.
Though Superman may bear one hero's name, it's clear Gunn is as enthralled with launching a shiny new hero-filled DC Universe as he is telling a Superman story in particular—which, ironically, is the same problem the last DCEU ran into. (Gunn took over as the co-chairman of DC Studios in 2022, and this is the first movie in his relaunched cinematic universe.) The film's opening text informs the audience that we're in a world where 'metahumans' have existed on Earth for 300 years, which makes Superman just one of many powered-people on the hero scene. That's good news for those who have longed to see Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Guy Gardner's Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) on the big screen; less so for those who just want a fresh, clean take on The Last Son Of Krypton.
Gunn clearly wants his new DC Universe to feel like stepping into a comic book, which it very much does. Only, it's more like the middle issue of a massive crossover event than a true entry point. In fact, with so many metahumans running around, Superman sometimes feels more like an X-Men movie with an amped-up role for Cyclops. There are outlines of a unique hero's journey here: Superman debates geopolitics with Lois! He gets canceled online! He grapples with his heritage! He makes terrible strategic decisions! He literally fights a cloned version of himself! Yet none of those ideas are strung together in a particularly meaningful or insightful way because the movie keeps getting distracted by interdimensional portals and wacky side players instead of the emotional arc of its leading man.
The impulse to pile on comedic characters and sketch them out just enough served Gunn well in ensemble romps like The Suicide Squad and his Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy, but it winds up hurting him here. To squeeze in as many DC characters as possible, Nicholas Hoult's power-hungry Lex Luthor gets two superpowered henchmen, two vapid girlfriends (both end up incarcerated), an army of robots, a team of both human and monkey hackers, a sky-high command center, a secret pocket dimension prison, a kaiju deployment team, and an Eastern European political ally. But what he doesn't have is a scene that establishes or explores his motivation beyond a simple, spoken aloud obsession with taking down Superman because he's jealous of him. (Hoult tries his best to add some emotional layers, but in a world filled with metahumans, Lex's personal grudge doesn't land as strongly.)
Though you'd think skipping the classic Superman origin story would leave the film and its hero with more room to breathe, Gunn fills the extra screentime with more DC world-building instead—like the aforementioned 'Justice Gang' trio and their under-explained assortment of powers. (Hopefully you already know what a Green Lantern ring does.) In fact, there's really only one scene in the whole movie that takes the time to just let its leads meaningfully interact with each other, and that's when Clark agrees to let Lois interview him 'on the record' as Superman.
There are some promising ideas at play in the charged exchange that follows. Clark is an earnest do-gooder—he stepped in to stop a brutal invasion in a foreign country—but also woefully naïve when it comes to how that action might be perceived politically. (No wonder he has to keep interviewing himself to keep his journalism job.) The more jaded, cynical Lois is worried that her boyfriend's almost childlike sense of optimism might make them fundamentally incompatible as a couple. But once the movie introduces that dilemma, it doesn't circle back around to resolve it. Though the scene would seem to set up Lois and Clark's relationship as the heart of the film, in the end she's got less to do than Superman's dog Krypto.
Instead of dealing with questions of interventionism, Clark gets pulled into a sideplot involving a shapeshifting dad named Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) and his kidnapped CGI baby. Instead of grappling with the dynamics of her new relationship, Lois winds up briefly teaming up with the Justice Gang before being sidelined with a Daily Planet supporting crew that includes Perry White (Wendell Pierce), Steve Lombard (Beck Bennett), and Cat Grant (Mikaela Hoover). They're characters who each get about a line of dialogue before Lois has to inexplicably fly them all around in a shuttle. And for some reason, Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) is the one who does all the actual reporting for her big story.
Comedically, the film does gain something by dropping us right into the comic book deep end. It's funny to watch Clark exasperatedly worry about his dog while the Justice Gang fights a giant monster outside his window. And there's a cocky confidence to having a drunken Supergirl (Milly Alcock) randomly drop in ahead of her own movie debuting next summer. But the goofy nonchalant world-building also robs this story of a bit of its humanity, which is ironic when humanity winds up being so central to the film's climax.
Like Man Of Steel before it, Superman is ultimately a movie about Clark's heritage and how it shapes his heroism. Where Cavill's Supes saw himself as an alien living among men, this Superman's arc is about learning to see himself as a human who just happens to have an alien origin story. It's a clever pivot from the last DCEU set-up, although—like so many elements of this overstuffed story—the emotional details are a bit glossed over.
Gunn delivers an impressively bold twist to comics canon with the reveal that Clark's Kryptonian parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) sent him to Earth with the intention of conquering and ruling it. That's when Clark realizes that his real parents are the humans who raised him to be a good person, not the biological parents he only knows via hologram. Yet despite their ultimate importance, Gunn introduces Ma and Pa Kent (Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince) as sitcom-y Southern hicks who pop in for a quick phone call and then disappear for the first two acts of the movie. (They must have gotten their accents from the Alabama side of Kansas.)
Pa Kent eventually gets to deliver a big inspirational speech to send Clark into the movie's climax, but why not make his dynamic with his son more central before that? Why not explore the origins of Superman's wholesome optimism rather than just relying on Corenswet's charm to sell it? Why spend more time mocking bumbling blonde Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) than getting to know Clark outside of his supersuit? A finale in which a superhero literally has to fight another version of himself is the sort of thing that should have some thematic resonance (and it did, back in Superman III). Here it feels like just one more wacky comic book plot twist.
In some ways, Gunn's sunnier Superman is a change of pace from what the DCEU offered before, but in others it's just more of the same. (Not to mention a lesser version of The CW's similarly optimistic take on the character played by Tyler Hoechlin in Supergirl and Superman & Lois.) Gunn's goal may not be to literally introduce supporting characters in order to give them solo properties later, like the infamous Batman V Superman. But the result of prioritizing universe-building over character-focused storytelling is the same. Superman successfully launches a new tone and ethos for DC. It just doesn't launch Superman.
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