There’s a moment in the second act of James Gunn’s Superman where Lois Lane consoles the titular hero as he grapples with the revelation that his Kryptonian parents didn’t send him to Earth as a savior, but as a conqueror. Meanwhile, outside his apartment window, the Green Lantern and his Justice Gang are being thrashed by a giant alien squid.
“They’ve got it under control,” Superman shrugs, utterly nonchalant. It’s meant as a gag. But the juxtaposition is jarring, undercutting the emotional weight of Superman’s existential crisis. These tonal inconsistencies writhe through the entire film, undermining its potential to excel.
Gunn, the erstwhile architect of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, has been hailed as the possible savior of the DC cinematic universe after a decadelong debacle of misfires. While Marvel’s cinematic juggernaut became a rapacious box office machine, DC has been perpetually stuck in tonal purgatory.
Despite the filmmaker recently fanning the culture war flames and claiming Superman is “an immigration story,” the film itself is neither woke propaganda nor right-wing fodder. It is earnest in places, uneven in others, but ultimately a serviceable relaunch.
David Corenswet now dons the red cape (and underpants). Visually, Gunn bathes the film in playful pastels and populates the script with irreverent flourishes such as Superman’s super dog. It’s a marked departure from Zack Snyder’s desaturated, somber universe, steeped in quasi-religious portent.
Moreover, Corenswet’s Superman is younger and lacking the gravitas and temperamental restraint befitting his stature. In one particularly dissonant scene, he barges into Lex Luthor’s office, flings a weighty wooden desk across the room, and delivers a screeching tirade over the whereabouts of his dog, suspecting Luthor had taken him. It is unclear whether Gunn intended to humanize the hero (he is meant to be a god), but the scene just renders Superman petulant and emotionally volatile, more akin to an impetuous adolescent (or John Wick) than the mythic symbol of hope.
After decades of superhero-mania, franchises are rebooted more often than we elect presidents, so it’s a welcome relief that Gunn’s Superman spares us another funeral dirge for the ill-fated planet Krypton.
Instead, we’re thrust straight into the action: a thinly veiled analogue of the Russia-Ukraine war. A rapacious dictatorship seeks to annex a neighboring, ostensibly sovereign nation that, for reasons never fully explained, has both a primitive Stone Age population and petroleum reserves rivaling OPEC.
Behind the curtain is Lex Luthor — here reimagined as a geopolitical puppeteer bankrolling the aggressor. Nicholas Hoult is the best casting choice of the film, delivering a Luthor who exudes a calm madness and cold intellectual fervor. There’s none of Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic squirming or Gene Hackman’s campy theatrics. Hoult’s Luthor is uncompromisingly evil and delightfully mendacious.
The plot mechanics are tenuous at best, but Luthor’s endgame is lucid: manufacture a global crisis to bait Superman into a trap.
Gunn revives John Williams’s iconic, brass-driven theme — a nostalgic paean to heroism. However, consistent with modern interpretations, Gunn shies away from the loudly patriotic ethos in which Superman fights for “the American way.” He is an objective third party who chooses to live in America (you can draw your own conclusions from this) and chooses which conflicts to involve himself in.
Whether intentional or not, Gunn positions Superman as an allegory for American hegemony: flawed, faltering, but still preferable to the alternative. The Iraq War had its share of legitimate reproaches, but there is no doubt that Saddam was a mad butcher. It is in a similar vein that Superman perceives the corrupt Slavic dictator who was prepared to steamroll a sovereign state.
Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane voices the film’s most conspicuous objection to Superman’s intervention in the foreign war, warning that he’s “not the world’s policeman.” It’s a familiar refrain from libertarian and leftist isolationists who are currently fuming at President Donald Trump’s decision to bolster Ukraine’s missile supplies. Briefly, the film gives us a glimpse into what happens if the isolationists get their way: Luthor fills the vacuum left by Superman’s inaction, demonstrating, with unnerving clarity, that power abhors a moral onlooker.
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The highlight comes in the film’s third act, where, befitting the “American way” mantra, Superman’s Justice Gang (Green Lantern and company) ousts the corrupt dictator, paving the way to install a pro-American satellite regime. If only they could set their sights on the Ayatollah for the sequel.
Although James Gunn flirts with multiverse tropes, the film wisely stops short of drowning in them. Its tone veers unevenly — hindered at times by the overplayed gag of a campy Super-dog — but it still dodges the most pernicious pitfalls of modern superhero fare.
There’s nothing inherently inferior about DC’s source material. Superman and Batman (alongside John Wayne) are the closest things America has to Greek or Norse mythology. Gunn seems to grasp that, at least in part. But the instinct to puncture sincerity with cynicism still lingers. The DC Universe needs saving. James Gunn’s new Superman is a start.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.