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« on: August 18, 2025, 04:06:11 AM »
I too have watched Superman. I think it's...pretty good, yeah. The biggest thing I took away from this movie is that it felt like a very deliberate, very precise rebuttal to Zack Snyder's Superman movies. I don't simply mean that the basic Superman material is covered better insofar as this is a better Superman, a better Lois, a better Lex Luthor, etc., but that some of the specific subjects that Snyder chose to cover in his movies, Gunn also chooses to cover, and handles them all much, much better. The possibility of Superman being widely distrusted. A Superman who gets involved in foreign wars and causes political blowback. A government hoping to rein Superman in being taken advantage of by an opportunistic Lex. What sends an even clearer message than this is Gunn's explicit rejection of Snyder's view of Superman and whatever wacky philosophy he thought drove him. Superman's moral compass in this movie comes from the Kents being good people who encourage him to always follow his heart and do the right thing, rather than the Kents being sacrifice-obsessed weirdos who tell him what to do against his better judgment, and this movie's Superman firmly rejects the image that Snyder and his fans have of him as an untouchable god who floats above us, instead insisting that first and foremost he is one of us. It could not be more clear that Gunn is not a fan of Snyder's take on Superman, and he made a movie that's practically its antithesis.
This is a great Superman. He's extremely likable and charismatic, and while he's certainly not flawless, he's unambiguously a good guy you want to root for. There's also a great Lois, who's funny and likable with a strong personality of her own and vivid chemistry with Superman, and I really like that their relationship is in kind of a rocky place at the start of the movie. Lex is terrific, the first and so far only live-action version of the character to be accurate to the source material, and I again strongly suspect that he was deliberately written to be a point-by-point "this is how you do it" response to Jesse Eisenberg's abysmal Lex from BvS. He's confident and compelling instead of an obnoxious giggling weirdo. He's a believable genius instead of a list of "smart" highbrow references. He's a believable skilled strategist instead of the audience simply being told that he's figured out who Batman and Superman really are offscreen and also has managed to engineer the movie's entire plot. The Snyder connection might honestly be a stretch when it comes to Lex, as any comic-accurate Lex could very easily feel like a pointed rebuttal to Eisenberg's terrible Lex, but I'm inclined to believe it really was on purpose simply because of the other parts of the movie that were definitely deliberate responses to Snyder's movies.
Speaking of controversies about what in the movie is or isn't deliberate, I'm convinced that the war subplot is absolutely a fuck-you to Netanyahu and Israel over what's going on in Gaza currently, and one that I'm honestly very surprised and impressed Gunn managed to include in a mainstream, big-budget Hollywood movie. And yes, I'm aware that he's denied it's based on Israel and Palestine. Of fucking course he has! He has to deny it, because if he admitted it, then his career would be over forever, and no amount of protests from his films' casts would resurrect it this time. Looking at the movie, Boravia, the aggressor country, is a longtime ally of the U.S., which is receiving constant arms shipments and indirect military aid from the U.S. to help them wage their unjust, brutal war on the country of Jarhanpur. Superman's intervention on Jarhanpur's behalf is condemned by the U.S. government, which immediately begins plotting against him, because for whatever reason they're very invested in making sure Boravia conquers Jarhanpur. Oh, and Jarhanpur is a Middle Eastern country. That's not Russia and Ukraine, and it's not just some generic conflict with no real-world parallel. It's clearly Israel and Palestine, and I can only assume that Gunn did a very good job of bluffing the studio executives and telling them what they wanted to hear even while slipping an obvious pro-Palestine message into his movie.
The movie does, however, have some flaws, and I'd say on the whole it's considerably weaker than The Suicide Squad, or to compare to another fairly recent DC reboot, The Batman. The biggest stumbling block for the movie to me is that it feels like it begins in media res and never stops to let the audience catch up. I don't mind skipping the origin story, but you still have to introduce your main character and the conflicts they face organically to the audience. This honestly feels less like just skipping the origin story and more like someone over your shoulder fast-forwarding through a fictitious first forty minutes of the movie, saying, "Nah, you don't need to watch any of this boring shit, let's just get to the good part." I'm sure most people who liked this movie don't agree with me on this, but I'm of the perhaps old-fashioned belief that movies always need proper introductions to their characters and conflicts regardless of how popular the IP they're adapting is, and you can't get away with just shrugging your shoulders and saying it's Superman, so everyone knows the deal already and we can skip some of the steps. It's not true, for one thing, as there are millions of casual filmgoers who enjoy capeshit movies without knowing anything about the properties beyond what they see in the occasional movie, and even if it were, the movie is still a self-contained medium that should stand alone, not stand within a broader context of capeshit movies being an enormous phenomenon that everyone on the planet already knows about. And I'm sure that the rushed opening probably feels less jarring on subsequent watches when you already know where the movie is going and what Gunn is trying to do, but like I said with BvS, movies shouldn't need repeat viewings to have the intended effect.
I've also got to say that I think there's a bit too much humor in this movie. GoTG and TSS made sense as comedies. Superman doesn't. Should it fall on the lighter end of the tonal spectrum, sure. Have some humor, absolutely. But be an outright comedy like all of Gunn's previous capeshit films? No, I don't think that's appropriate. Superman needs to be played a bit more straight and have a bit more grandeur. At least to me. Again, I'm sure a lot of people disagree with me, and I'll admit it's not a huge deal; just a personal preference on my part. I'll at least give Gunn some credit in that he understands that humor comes in many more forms than just quips (unlike his contemporaries in the MCU), and most of his jokes land. One big exception is the whole Jimmy-Eve thing. I don't get it. It's not just that it isn't funny; it's that I don't even understand the joke. Is it that a beautiful woman is into Jimmy, of all people? Is it that he has no interest in her? Is it simply how overbearing she is? Whatever the joke is, it doesn't work for me. Also, as far as the effects go, Metamorpho's powers look awful, his baby is both extremely ugly and very fake-looking, and the proton stream or whatever it was at the end of the second act was CGI slop that turned the movie into a PS3 game for a few minutes.
Here's another thing that I'm sure many, if not most people will disagree with me on - I didn't like Hawkgirl killing Netanyahu in cold blood. Or at least, I don't like how it was framed as a triumphant, heroic "you go girl!" moment. Superman's refusal to kill unless it's absolutely necessary in this movie is a moral principle, not a personal preference like his favorite flavor of ice cream. Superman doesn't kill people who are at his mercy because he's a good person and he recognizes that that's wrong. That is the framing of the movie. It's not objectively correct, necessarily, but it's the movie they chose to make, and they have to stick with that. Hawkgirl killing Netanyahu in a scene framed as triumphant and heroic flies in the face of all that. You cannot say in the same movie that Superman doesn't kill the defenseless because he's a good person and that Hawkgirl does kill the defenseless because she's awesome. It's not how movies work. For a scene like this to have worked, it needed to have been darker and edgier, with some acknowledgement that she's crossing a serious line, and that this will likely cause serious conflicts with Superman and/or other governments down the line. Not a "fun" crowd-pleasing scene capped with a peppy one-liner, followed by zero consequences for or even acknowledgment of what she's done. This really bugs me. It's the movie having its cake and eating it too. None of this is helped by the fact that as a character, Hawkgirl has far less focus than the other two members of the Justice Gang and no discernible personality outside of a handful of quips.
The last criticism I have is that the climax of the movie did not need to indulge in the cliché of the giant portal/pillar of doom that needs to be closed before everything is destroyed. It's a tired, dusty plot beat that we've seen in about a dozen capeshit movies by now, and it just doesn't add anything to this one. We've already got the action in Superman's fight with Ultraman, and we've got the thematic clash between Superman and Lex to hammer out the message of the movie. That's all we needed. I don't think anyone in the world would have walked out of this movie feeling unsatisfied simply because its climax didn't also have some apocalyptic CGI raging in the background. The dumb portal in this movie feels like it's here more out of a sense of obligation than anything else.
Despite my complaints, though, this is a good movie and a solid start for the new DCU. It's not the best it could have been, but it's fine for what it is.
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