Latest from Time Magazine
Time Magazine
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Without Birthright Citizenship, America Hangs by a Thread
President Donald Trump is attempting to rewrite the Constitution without amending it, one executive order at a time. One of his biggest targets: the birthright citizenship that has defined American identity for over 150 years. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump's order, which had directed federal departments to deny birthright citizenship from children born to mothers and fathers who are not legal American citizens. Now, a class-action suit on behalf of children and parents impacted by Trump's order will proceed. By attacking birthright citizenship, Trump not only strikes fear in the hearts of many Americans—such as myself—he also threatens to unravel the thread that binds all Americans together. Indeed, my story of birthright citizenship illustrates how tenuous, and sometimes arbitrary, the process of becoming a 'real' American can be. I was born in the Philippines. Whenever asked the inevitable "Where are you from?" questions that every Asian American knows, I would deflect by telling people I was born in an American military hospital in the Philippines. I always added that my father was a tall, blond, blue-eyed man from California to ensure people understood he was a "real" American. This response usually ended the questioning. So deeply embedded are the concepts of jus soli ("right of the soil") and jus sanguinis ("right of the blood") in our American psyche that these explanations satisfied most people's need to categorize my belonging. But when I recently checked my birth certificate, I learned I was born in a regular Philippine hospital, and not a military hospital as I'd believed. I had not received birthright citizenship on the grounds of being born on American soil. Four years ago, a DNA test revealed that the man I'd called 'dad' my entire life wasn't my biological father. My American citizenship—which I so greatly value—relied on a 1968 legal presumption that children born in wedlock belonged to the husband, no DNA proof was required. My citizenship hung by a thread I never knew existed. But others are not as fortunate as I. Consider Jermaine Thomas. Thomas was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany in 1986 to an American soldier who served his country for 18 years. In May 2025, Thomas was deported to Jamaica, a country he's never seen. Despite being born to a naturalized American citizen on what most people consider American soil, the courts ruled that Thomas wasn't an American citizen. His father hadn't met the requirement for 10 years of residency in the U.S. to pass citizenship to children born abroad. Turns out, military bases abroad aren't actually U.S. territory, so they don't count toward residency for citizenship purposes. Like Thomas, I'd tied my sense of American belonging to what I thought was an unbreakable thread. Unlike him, my thread held through bureaucratic rules and legal presumptions that determined our vastly different fates. Still, people see my Asian face and doubt whether I am American. 'Where are you really from?' they ask. When you've spent your life fighting to be recognized as a 'real' American, you learn to recognize patterns of othering of those who are not white. This pattern is one which supporters of Trump's immigration policies have embraced with open arms. For instance, the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increased the ICE budget by tenfold. In a jubilant response, far-right commentator Benny Johnson wrote on social media: 'We're about to see an American 'Deportation Machine' on steroids. The Great Replacement died today.' The Great Replacement is a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims there's a deliberate plot to replace white Americans with non-white immigrants through immigration and higher birth rates. Trump's week-one halt of all refugee flights, except for white South Africans, sent another clear message about what it means to be American. The administration also terminated protective status for thousands of Afghan refugees, allies who risked their lives for American forces during our longest war. These interpreters, guides, and support staff who served alongside U.S. troops now face deportation back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where they're marked for death. Even risking your life for America isn't enough if you're the wrong color. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh made the subtext explicit in a social media post praising the South African refugees: "They're productive members of society and they speak English. In every measurable way, they're a better cultural fit than the waves of so-called 'refugees' we've welcomed by the boatload for decades." My mother's family arrived as Vietnamese refugees in 1975, when over half of Americans opposed their resettlement. "They bring only disease, corruption, and apathy," one constituent wrote to Congress. Yet President Gerald Ford understood our values differently. "To ignore the refugees in their hour of need would be to repudiate the values we cherish as a nation of immigrants," he wrote. If Trump had been President then, my family may have been turned away and my uncles, who'd fought alongside American forces, would have faced persecution or death in Vietnam. If not for the thread connecting me to my American citizenship, I might not have lived the flourishing life I have lived in the U.S. since I was 5, enjoying a freedom and prosperity that wouldn't have been available to me in Vietnam, or anywhere else in the world. When you've spent your life defending your Americanness against those who see your Asian face and assume you're foreign, seeing how tenuous that citizenship is can make you feel betrayed by your country. For decades, birthright citizenship has protected us from those who might wish to pick and choose who gets to be American. Now, this fundamental principle is at risk of being eroded. This erosion affects every American, not just immigrants or people of color. If presidential interpretation can override constitutional text, if executive orders can redefine citizenship categories, what other rights become negotiable? For those of us who've always had to prove our belonging, the threat feels immediate and visceral. It won't matter how well I speak English or how well I have culturally assimilated, my Asian face will always mark me as someone whose citizenship could be questioned, whose belonging could be revoked with the stroke of a pen. As we approach the 250th birthday of our country, we must ensure that no child who qualifies for citizenship under the 14th Amendment will ever be categorized as an 'other.' The 14th Amendment was written to guarantee that birthright needs no asterisks, no conditions, no politician's interpretation.
Time Magazine
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Superman Is Punk Rock, After All
In the battle for supreme superhero coolness, Batman has been the unofficial champ for nearly 40 years. In 1988, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland rescued him from '60s TV-show camp status with their flinty, inventive graphic novel The Killing Joke, a Joker origin story that stressed the grim psychological similarities between Batman and his most enduring enemy. Tim Burton's two marvelous Batman movies took the character's morose nature seriously, but not more seriously than his savoir faire: the Burton Batman movies also have gothic elegance on their side. But Christopher Nolan's 2008 Dark Knight leaned right into Batman's twilight gloominess. In Nolan's vision, Batman was a vastly complicated superhero, brooding and unknowable. Suddenly, loving Batman—not the Batman-dance goofball Adam West played on TV, or even the grand, pulpy vigilante as originally imagined by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in a 1939 issue of Detective Comics—made you complicated and unknowable, too. Batman, who relied not on superpowers but on his own intellect, was the thinking-man's superhero. By comparison, Superman—who'd made his appearance just one year earlier than Batman, in another Detective Comics publication, Action Comics #1—was kids' stuff. Faster than a speeding bullet! So what? More powerful than a locomotive! Who cares? Superman, despite his status as (arguably) the first superhero, and perhaps the most famous, has long been uncool. Which is exactly what makes him great. There's no existential B.S. with Superman; he belongs to everyone. He's kind, cheerful, and sturdily nonpartisan, caring only for the supremacy of right vs. wrong. Even if you were a Batman diehard, he'd happily save you, kind of the way U.S. presidents used to vow to serve all citizens and not just the ones who'd voted for them. The Superman temperament is one thing James Gunn gets right in his otherwise sub-mediocre reboot Superman, starring David Corenswet, a Juilliard-trained actor who understands how the strapping charm of the caped superhero is directly entwined with the insecurity of his more awkward alter-ego, journalist Clark Kent. The point isn't just that stalwart reporter Lois Lane (played here, appealingly enough, by Rachel Brosnahan) can swoon over Superman and feel only mild affection for Clark Kent, ostensibly because women tend to go for the hot guy over the nice one. (In Gunn's reimagining, she knows about Superman's dual identity from the start, anyway.) The more interesting angle of the Clark Kent/Superman flip-flop is that while being Superman allows the character to fulfill the most unrealistic expectations of masculinity, being Clark Kent frees him from them. To play Superman, you've got to have a little candy-apple sweetness in you, and Corenswet does. He also has the right amount of wheatfield swagger, another essential Superman quality: the superbeing otherwise known as Kal-El may have been born on another planet, but he was raised by kind midwestern farmers. Corenswet has the right look—he's got the glossy black hair, the resolute jaw—which points to another general Superman strength, particularly on film. Because Superman doesn't wear a mask, his emotions are always on display. And we've been lucky: we've had plenty of good-to-great Supermen, even in not-so-great Superman films. Brandon Routh, who starred in Bryan Singer's 2006 Superman Returns, is the almost-forgotten Superman, but he was a terrific one. In shaping the character, Singer and Routh stressed Superman's vulnerability, and not just to Kryptonite: he was a man out of time and place, urged by his father, Jor-El (represented by a ghost version of Marlon Brando, who'd played the same character in Richard Donner's superb 1978 Superman), to use his outsider status to serve the world of the humans. Routh's Superman could never be as mopey as any of the film Batmen, but there was something vulnerable and melancholy about him even so—he came off less as a comic-book hero than a matinee idol, but either way, his sense of dislocation was stark. In one of the picture's most moving scenes, this Superman uses his X-ray vision to gaze through the walls of the house Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane, having forsaken him, now shares with her young son and her fiancé (James Marsden). He sees the coziness of their home life, including their little squabbles. This is the kind of life he'd like for himself, but he'll always be an outsider, looking in. Our next big-screen Superman barely survived the preposterous self-seriousness of the stories Zack Snyder built around him in Man of Steel (2013) and Batman vs. Superman (2016). But Henry Cavill prevailed: his Superman and his nerd-to-die-for Clark Kent were of course gorgeous to look at, but in the first movie especially, both guises carried an erotic charge that's usually forbidden in the world of comic-book movies. When Amy Adams' Lois Lane is wounded in the Arctic while working on a story, the ever-ready hero emerges from nowhere, ready to cauterize her wound with his X-ray eyes. 'This is going to hurt,' he warns her, though his smoldering warmth is like faux anaesthesia—surely, it's got to feel great. In Batman vs. Superman, a movie that attempts only feebly to settle, once and for all, the question of who's the greater superhero, Snyder instead just focused on pumping the doom juice. Ben Affleck makes the most dour Batman imaginable; Cavill is forced to spend much of the movie looking noble and pained. No matter which superhero you prefer, Snyder served both badly. Besides, when it comes to the best film Superman of all, there's no contest: it's got to be Christopher Reeve, who played Superman and Clark Kent in four Superman films, the first two of which—Richard Donner's 1978 Superman and Richard Lester's 1980 Superman II—are gems of the superhero genre. Reeve, like Corenswet, studied at Juilliard, and he took the role of Superman just seriously enough. Reeve had the gleaming, streamlined beauty of Superman as the character's co-creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, first envisioned him in 1938. But he also came armed with a sense of humor about his own handsomeness. He took clear pleasure in Clark Kent's clumsy pratfalls, making the most of even the tiniest gestures, bringing casual, offhanded glamor even to the simple act of pushing his horn-rimmed glasses to the bridge of his nose. As Superman, he was a living, breathing, Art Deco fantasy—muscular, yes, but more like a dreamy Adonis than a magazine-ad Charles Atlas. In Superman II, the most romantic of all superhero movies, his Superman/Clark Kent becomes acutely aware that Lois Lane (played by the feisty, luminous Margot Kidder) will only suffer, having discovered his dual identity: there's no way he can settle down and have the normal romance she yearns for. As Clark Kent, he bestows upon her a Superman kiss, and instantaneously that one bit of painful knowledge—that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same—is erased. Some Superman fans hate this plot point: it does not appear in a 2006 version of Superman II known as the Donner Cut, which includes patchwork chunks of footage shot by Donner, the original director of Superman II, before the film's wheeler-dealer producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, replaced him with Lester (who'd previously directed the wonderful Three Musketeers for them, as well as its sequel The Four Musketeers). The Donner Cut has its devotees, but I'm not one of them: If the Lester-Donner hybrid Superman II isn't perfect, it includes moments of lyrical beauty I wouldn't trade for anything, including that kiss, an act of mercy and empathy. Maybe the moment wouldn't work with just any actors. But with Kidder and Reeve, it's magic. Sadly, there's almost zero magic in Gunn's Superman. Its special effects are more overbearing than special; the plot is all problem-solving and no poetry. Even so, Gunn astutely picks up on the nice-guy aesthetic that sets Superman apart from many of his superhero brethren. At one point Brosnahan's Lois articulates a Superman character trait that he can only acknowledge is accurate: 'You trust everyone, and you think everyone you've ever met is beautiful.' She tells him he's just not 'punk rock,' though he wonders aloud if she's wrong. He posits, almost melting the universe around him with his impossibly blue eyes, that maybe caring about people is the real punk rock. It's dorky cornpone dialogue, but Gunn is onto something, the same diffuse yet potent concept that Joachim Trier articulated at the press conference for his film Sentimental Value when it premiered at Cannes in May. 'Polarization, anger, and machismo aren't the way forward,' Trier said. 'Tenderness is the new punk.' As a character, Siegel and Shuster's creation deserves better than Gunn's Superman. And that's unfortunate, because we probably need a great Superman now more than ever. When he first appeared, well into the Depression, it's no wonder Superman had an almost immediate hold on the public imagination, at a time when so many many Americans were feeling helpless. If you had generational wealth in your pocket, you were probably doing OK. But if you were either a recent immigrant or the child of immigrants—and given the large number of people who'd emigrated to the United States in the first 30 years of the 20th century, there's a good chance you fell into one of those categories—Superman, himself a transplant from another planet, must have felt like kin. Then as now, he had a stake in the value of tenderness and kindness; he took it upon himself to right all sorts of wrongs that humans inflict on one another. In his resolute squareness, he was also the coolest—and he still is.
Time Magazine
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
What Superman's End‑Credits Mean Amid Franchise Fatigue
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the endings of Superman, Sinners, and 28 Years Later. Let's get this out of the way. Does Superman have an end-credits scene? Yes. In fact it has two. Do they matter? They do not. One involves Superman cuddling his dog Krypto—cute but not exactly offering up anything in the way of plot development. In another he banters with Mister Terrific, a superhero who helped save the world by closing up a portal to another dimension, about the imperfect alignment of the two halves of Metropolis that got ripped apart in that cataclysmic incident. Again, funny, but offers no hint as to the future of Superman or his various friends and foes in the DC Comics film adaptations. The lack of substance in these two scenes may come as a surprise to many moviegoers. We've come to expect our summer blockbusters to conclude with a sequence buried in the credits that sets up the sequel or spinoff or next chapter in the superhero saga we just watched. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't invent the end-credits scene: '80s comedies like Airplane! and Ferris Bueller's Day Off wrote stingers for laughs. But the MCU jumpstarted the modern trend way back in 2008 when Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury showed up to recruit Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man into a new supergroup. (Spoiler alert: They're called the Avengers.) Nearly every Marvel movie since has tacked on a scene or two during the credits teasing the upcoming movies in the franchise. Other cinematic universes—the DCEU, Fast & Furious, Pirates of the Caribbean, John Wick—followed suit, training audiences to stay put in their seats, just in case. Superman is launching the brand new DCU (the DC Universe, rebranded from the old DCEU or DC Extended Universe). So one would expect Superman director and co-creative mastemind of the DCU, James Gunn, to seize the opportunity to tease one of the DC projects coming out next year like the Supergirl movie, the horror film Clayface, or even the HBO show Lanterns. But he opted for a more comedic direction instead. Some fans might welcome the Superman stingers as refreshingly light diversions. After all, audiences seem to have rebelled against the amount of homework they've been asked to do to keep up with superhero films and series these days, a frustration that has manifested in cratering box-office returns and depressed streaming numbers. Others might wonder why they sat through a long string of credits only to be rewarded with style over substance. In theory, the answer might be the immeasurable value of learning the names of the many, many stunt performers and CGI programmers who worked on this film. But let's be real, you were probably scrolling your phone during the credits, weren't you? It begs the question, what are post-credits scenes for these days, anyway? Three of this year's biggest movies—Superman, Sinners, and 28 Years Later—take three notably different approaches to their ending scenes. The evolution of the stringer suggests that directors are eager to evolve the rote end-credits scene into something more innovative or, let us hope, entertaining. Sinners puts a crucial scene in the credits On the opposite side of the post-credits scene conundrum from Gunn's Superman sits Ryan Coogler's Sinners: The horror film's mid-credits scene serves as an essential coda to the story. Before my press screening of that film, a docent was sent into the theater to instruct journalists to remain seated through the credits, despite the fact that by Coogler's own assertion, Sinners is a stand-alone work, not the first in a burgeoning vampire universe. Good thing he did, because without the heads-up, I would have missed a key moment of closure to the story. The movie, set during the Jim Crow era, flashes forward to the 1990s. First comes a bit of stunt casting: Legendary blues musician Buddy Guy plays an aged version of the main character Sammie (portrayed in the rest of the movie by Miles Caton). He has grown from aspiring singer to successful musician playing a club in Chicago. Then, a moment of surprise: Vampire versions of Miles' family members, Michael B. Jordan's Stack and Hailee Steinfeld's Mary, have survived the epic battle at the end of the film and come to chat with Sammie. Coogler elicits a chuckle from the audience with Jordan's and Steinfeld's period-accurate, completely over-the-top '90s getups. But the heart of the scene is the moment of closure for Sammie. Sammie once abandoned his priest father and religion to pursue the blues in a metaphorical deal with the devil. He found happiness in doing so, despite carrying the scars of the night when he summoned demons with his angelic voice. When Stack arrives at the night club, he tells Sammie that the old musician will die soon and offers to make him immortal. Sammie turns Stack down. Sammie has lived a full life but also seen the ills of the Earth and will be ready to depart. He admits that while the night he fought vampires and lost nearly everyone he loved still haunts him, the preceding day setting up the juke joint that Stack opened with his twin brother Smoke was the best of Sammie's life. In a movie that wrangles with the complexities of religion and the vampiric state of a predominantly white-run music business that feeds on the creativity Black artists, among other themes, Sammie's happy ending—and, seemingly those of Stack and Mary—hold real power. The film is not complete without this conversation and Sammie's decision to forge his own path rather than the one laid out for him by the metaphorical devils and angels on his shoulder. As I left the theater, I wondered aloud to a colleague why Coogler would have inserted that scene mid-way through the credits rather than simply ending the film on that moment. I worried that some audience members would walk out without seeing a crucial piece of Coogler's story, and when I saw the film again a few weeks later, at least a handful of people did. That's a loss. According to Coogler himself, "The whole script was about that moment." Coogler, like Gunn, was forged in the fires of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the former having helmed two Black Panther movies, the latter three volumes of Guardians of the Galaxy. They seem to have come away from the experience with different lessons. Marvel has recently developed a reputation for introducing character and plot points in post-credits scenes that never manifest in future films. There was the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 spinoff super-team involving Sylvester Stallone and Michelle Yeoh that disappeared from the MCU. Charlize Theron popped up in the stinger for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, never to be seen again. Brett Goldstein made his debut as Hercules in a Thor: Love and Thunder end-credits scene that seems to be headed nowhere. And remember when Eternals previewed three different superheroes—Mahershala Ali as Blade, Kit Harington as Black Knight, and none other than Harry Styles as Eros— never to speak of those character again? Gunn, newly minted as the head of a competing cinematic universe, might be wary of overpromising and underdelivering. Fair enough. But Coogler finds himself embracing what is, perhaps, inevitable: Movies of a certain size may always contain these scenes. And he decides to deliver poignancy and character development instead of that mild hit of serotonin we get from hearing a new superhero name dropped onscreen. 28 Years Later teases a trilogy pre-credits That's all well and good if, like Coogler, you're determined to escape franchise filmmaking and direct movies that feel holistic and complete: The writer-director has said he has no plans to film a Sinners sequel. But what to do if you're helming one movie as part of a series and don't want to fall into the teaser trap? The latest entry in the 28 Days Later zombie franchise, 28 Years Later, offers yet another answer. The new zombie film, directed by Danny Boyle, is the first in a planned trilogy. Nia DaCosta will direct a 28 Years Later sequel called The Bone Temple, and then Boyle plans to return for a third and final movie. Rather than relying on a post-credits scene to set up DaCosta's film, Boyle opted instead for a tonally jarring final act to his movie. The bleak but moving film—whose third act brings the death of the main character Spike's mother and the birth of a miraculously uninfected baby from an pregnant infected—takes a major zag as Spike sets off from his old sequestered home to find his way alone on the dangerous mainland. A character named Jimmy, who appears as a young boy at the beginning of the film, returns as a full grown man. Flanked by a tracksuit-clad group of parkour enthusiasts, Jimmy rescues Spike from a horde of zombies. The fighters call themselves the Jimmys and dress like Jimmy Savile, the British television presenter who was accused after his death of committing hundreds of instances of sexual abuse, many involving children. (In this universe, the zombie outbreak happened before Savile was outed as an alleged abuser.) Much of the film deals with icons of British culture—images of the queen, clips from Shakespeare adaptations, quotes from Rudyard Kipling—so a group of young boys' pop culture obsessions crystalizing when the infection took hold of the U.K. only for those young men to end up worshipping a monster does fit thematically in the film. Still, the allusion to a serial abuser has already stirred controversy. Whatever the actual influences behind the finale, it seems a prime candidate for a post-credits scene because of its major tonal shift, its clear agenda to set up a sequel, and its distracting reference to a disgraced television personality. And yet Boyle eschewed the convention, perhaps a sign that directors are trying, in different ways, to free themselves from the tyranny of the end-credits. Don't ring the death knell for the end-credits scene yet. It won't disappear. But it is evolving. Perhaps it's a sign that we have entered an era of post-MCU dominance. Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts will probably end the year in the top 10 highest grossing films, but they were beaten out at the international box office by A Minecraft Movie, the latest Mission: Impossible, and a handful of children's films: Superhero movies are not the assured home run they used to be. As audience expectations shift in search of something more original that doesn't strictly follow the MCU playbook, we can expect more freedom and experimentation. That's always a good thing. The next time you're watching a summer blockbuster in the movie theater, you might as well stay until the very end, just in case. You may see something unexpected. If nothing else, you may catch the names of a few hardworking grips and makeup artists.
Time Magazine
13 hours ago
- Time Magazine
The Story Behind One Night in Idaho: The College Murders
Nearly three years after four University of Idaho college students were stabbed to death in an off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho, in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, a 30-year-old former criminology student Bryan Kohberger confessed to the murders on July 2 and signed a plea deal that would save him from the death penalty. Kohberger, who was a graduate student at Washington State University, near the University of Idaho, admitted responsibility for the murders of sorority girls Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and a fraternity brother Ethan Chapin, 20. In August, Kohberger was set to stand trial, but under the plea deal, he would serve four consecutive life terms in prison. A judge will formally sentence him on July 23. The victims' families have had mixed reactions. While Leander James, an attorney for Mogen's parents, said outside the courthouse, "We support the plea agreement 100%,' Steve Goncalves, Kaylee's father, told NewsNation, 'This is anything but justice. This is the opposite of our will. There was no majority believing that this was acceptable." From the trial, the families were hoping to get some clarity on why these college students were targeted. Kohberger's motive is still unclear. A docu-series, One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, out on Prime Video July 11, outlines the turning points that led to his arrest and the leading theories about his motive. It also aims to humanize the victims, featuring interviews with their families and friends who shed light on their personalities. Here's what to know about One Night in Idaho: The College Murders. How Bryan Kohberger was caught 'There's a fair amount of detail that pointed in his direction,' Matthew Galkin, co-director, tells TIME. Kohberger's car—a white Hyundai Elantra that was registered to him—was caught on camera by the off-campus house where the victims lived. DNA on the knife sheath found at the crime scene was traced to Bryan's father, and then ultimately to Bryan. Cell phone records also showed that Bryan had been in the area of the crime scene. The device was turned off right before the murders and was turned back on right after the murders. The FBI honed in on him after he took a cross-country trip with his father and arrested him in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30, 2022, a little over a month after the murders. Theories about Bryan Kohberger's motive Many study criminology to learn about the criminal justice system. A theory in the series is that Kohberger may have studied criminology to prepare for committing a crime. In the series, people in undergraduate criminology classes with him at DeSales University say he was always asking questions about killers' motives and how killers' felt about the crimes that they committed. They don't recall him socializing on campus, just coming to classes and leaving right afterwards. One Night in Idaho also features administrators of a Facebook group that aggregated details of the case, who flagged that someone under the username Papa Rodger posted numerous times about the crime, including questions about how the killer held the knife. The user also posted about a knife sheath before the sheath discussed in the case. The person in the avatar even resembled Kohberger in real life, and the user never posted again after Kohberger was arrested. The series also explores whether Kohberger was an 'incel' (short for involuntary celibate), part of a movement of men who are frustrated that women won't have sex with them. The Facebook group admins point out that Papa Rodger is similar to the name of a hero in the incel community, Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who killed seven men and women near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a 2014 rampage that targeted a sorority house. DeSales classmates also say in the doc that they studied Rodger, and that Kohberger was especially curious about his case. 'It does seem like girls were the intended victim of Bryan's rage,' Liz Garbus, co-director of One Night in Idaho, tells TIME. What to know about the victims The series shows that the four victims were having a great time in college, surrounded by friends and family who loved them. 'We don't want to remember them just as victims, we want to remember them as human beings,' says Garbus. 'You get a sense of their personalities, who they like to hang out with, what kind of music they love, what their college experience was like.' Maddie and Kaylee had been best friends since growing up. They complemented each other, with Kaylee being the prankster and jokester, and Maddie being the quieter one. Friends described Xana as someone who could make friends with anyone and who had the best taste in music. The students left a large social media footprint behind and videos of their shenanigans are woven into the series. Viewers will see Ethan and Xana belting out country music like Luke Combs' 'Beautiful Crazy.' Ethan was a triplet, and his siblings also attended the University of Idaho. The surviving siblings are featured in the documentary, talking about how they still stuck together in college and were never apart for more than 12 hours. In the most moving parts of the series, the grieving parents talk about how they have found the courage to move forward with their lives after the children's murders, and their descriptions of what keeps them going can be useful to anyone going through a difficult time in life. Ethan's dad Jim talks about how he keeps his son's remains in the basement so that he can go down and talk to Ethan whenever he wants. Ethan's mom Stacy said at a certain point she just decided she was going to wake up and put her best foot forward, arguing, "you have a choice to get up and live your best life." Karen Laramie, Maddie Mogen's mother, says she is always thinking about "how would Maddie and Kaylee want to see me. Would they want me crying in my pajamas—can't get out of bed—or would they want to see me talking about them and how amazing they are? That's a struggle. You never know how strong you are until strong is all you can be."
Time Magazine
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The New 'Superman' Hinges on a Radical Reinvention of the Man of Steel's Parents
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the plot of Superman. The new Superman movie is pointedly not an origin story for the iconic hero. Audiences have already seen the planet Krypton blow up, watched Kryptonian scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara send baby Kal-El in rocket ship to Earth, and witnessed Clark Kent grow into a superpowered young man in Kansas, raised by his adoptive human parents Ma and Pa Kent. The '78 movie did it, as did Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it's such an iconic bit of pop culture that even people who don't read comics probably know the gist of it. It makes sense, then, that James Gunn's new movie doesn't retell this familiar tale. Instead, 2025's Superman starts when the hero has already been fighting crime for three years, reeling from his first loss in a battle. And yet, despite not being an origin story, Superman makes one of the biggest changes to Superman's origin the character has ever seen. There's a major plot twist involving Superman's Kryptonian parents (as well as a far less extreme but still notable reimagining of his human parents) that has big implications for the character going forward. Superman makes a major change to Jor-El and Lara When we meet Superman (David Corenswet) in the new movie, he's just gotten beat to hell by one of Lex Luthor's (Nicholas Hoult) supervillains and he retreats back to his Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica to recover. His robot servants start playing the holographic message his Kryptionian parents, Jor-El and Lara, left for him when he was a baby, since they know it comforts Superman. Played in a surprise cameo role by Bradley Cooper (who worked with Gunn on the Guardians of the Galaxy movies) and Westworld's Angela Sarafyan, the two speak in their native Kryptionian language while an English voice-over translates what they're saying. It's what you'd expect—they love their son, they're sending him to Earth so he can survive, etc., etc. However, the full recording got damaged when little baby Clark's ship crashed, so he's never seen the second half of the message. When Lex Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, he has one of his metahuman henchmen, the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), hack into Superman's files. She's able to recover the damaged part of his parents' message, which Luthor promptly shares with the world because it will do more to destroy Superman's reputation than he could've hoped. Jor-El and Lara are sending him to Earth with the hopes that he'll use his superpowers to rule it, encouraging their son to get a "harem" of Earth women so he can breed a spawn of half-Kryptonian superbabies. Superman initially hopes that Luthor faked the footage, but nope, it's legit. In other words, Superman's Kryptonian parents are kinda evil! This is wildly different from pretty much every past iteration of Jor-El and Lara. There's not really a comic-book precedent for this. Though Superman has had a few different canonical backstories in the comics, no mainstream origin had a Jor-El who sent his son to Earth for nefarious reasons. (Terence Stamp's Jor-El from the Smallville TV show is probably the highest-profile version of a Jor-El with dubious morals, but he wasn't this bad!) In the Richard Donner movie, Marlon Brando played Jor-El, and he radiated nobility and goodness even though Brando was reading all his lines from cue cards. In the Snyder movie, Russell Crowe played Jor-El, and he too had a noble, egalitarian quality. Both past movie superdads were major characters in the first act of their movies, unlike Cooper's Jor-El, and they also left their son messages encouraging him to help the people of Earth. "They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be," Brando's Jor-El says. "They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you... my only son." That's a far cry from "Get yourself a harem of Earth girls." Superman's goodness—the thing that makes him so special, even more so than his parents—has historically been chalked up to what both sets of his parents bestowed upon him. So, if this new movie Superman's biological parents were kinda evil, what about his adoptive folks? Ma and Pa Kent are different, too Superman also makes some changes to Jonathan and Martha Kent, the kindly couple who find a baby in their Smallville farm and raise him as their own. They're played here by Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell, who are hardly major actors; Vince is a prolific character actor who isn't close to a household name and Neva Howell didn't have a Wikipedia page when Superman premiered. Compare them to Man of Steel's Kevin Costner and Diane Lane or the '78 Superman, which had Western star Glenn Ford in the Jonathan role. (Martha was played by Phyllis Thaxter, a legitimate actress but one who was also the mother-in-law of the movie's producer, so that's a less damning comparison, granted.) Both previous movie versions of the Kents were paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility, strong, proud farmers from the heartland. There's an undeniable love and warmth to them, but also a stoicism as they teach their son all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities. Costner's Jonathan Kent suggests that his son maybe should've let his classmates drown rather than risk exposing himself by pulling their crashed bus out of the water, an incredibly weird yet on-brand choice by Snyder, though even that characterization is in service of making him out to be a serious, wise patriarch. In contrast, the 2025 Kents are kind of a joke, at first. They're originally introduced talking to their son over the phone, having tech trouble, making unhelpful suggestions, with exaggerated midwestern accents. They also don't share Superman's physique, looking more like an average American than, well, like Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. Rather than being some idealized super-parents, they are just kind of normal. When Superman and Lois Lane need to make a pit stop at the family farm later in the film, the Kents appear in the flesh. (Jonathan is still alive in this movie, unlike in the past films where he died in Clark's youth. Pa Kent's early death is not, historically, canon in the comic books.) It's during this trip home that we get a chance to see who these Kents really are, as Jonathan sits next to his grown-up boy on a bench and happily thinks about his childhood and how proud of Clark he is. They didn't raise their son for some greater purpose—as Pa tells Clark, "Parents aren't for telling their children who they're supposed to be." Instead, they just loved him. The movie ends with Superman in his Fortress of Solitude watching a different message from his parents; no longer the Kryoptonian one but a collage of home videos from when he was growing up, playing with Ma and Pa Kent. This Superman's parents put the focus on the character's humanity While past movie Supermen were born of the best of Krypton, brave scientists with the best intentions, and raised by the salt-of-the-earth epitome of "Real America," this Superman's folks are villains and normies, respectively. It's a big change to an origin story that doesn't typically get messed with to this extent, but it's one that speaks to the theme of Gunn's new take on Superman. Snyder's films, which the Gunn movie is in clear opposition to (Snyder wouldn't be caught dead putting a cute little superpowered dog like Krypto in his Superman movie), were very much focused on Superman's alien-ness. Man of Steel views Superman as a god, and in subsequent movies he's presented as a possible threat to humanity. Throughout the Snyder films, it's clear Superman doesn't quite fit in on Earth. The Gunn movie, though, basically throws all of Superman's emotional ties to Krypton out the Fortress of Solitude's crystalline window. The 2025 Superman is all about the title character's humanity, to the point where Superman gives Luthor a very on-the-nose (though not ineffective!) speech about how human he is, having worries and insecurities and fears just like everybody else. Depicting Superman's Kryptonian parents as enemies of humanity is a drastic change, and as a result it ends up pushing the character away from Krypton and towards humanity. Making his human parents be more relatably, charmingly, and dorkily human than the impossibly noble, larger-than-life past takes on Ma and Pa Kent strengthens this idea even more. He may still have alien powers, an alien dog, robot servants, and a secret sci-fi base, but no Superman has been as human as this.
