Don’t Let the Dog Fool You.
Spoilers for the new Superman movie below.
Much of the conversation around writer/director James Gunn’s Superman has been rooted around comparing/contrasting Gunn’s take on the character with the other most recent big screen representation of the big blue boy scout, that being the version played by Henry Cavill and essayed by director Zack Snyder in the movies Man of Steel, BVS: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League.
Gunn’s Superman smiles and jokes and saves squirrels from rampaging kaiju. Snyder’s Superman scowls and snaps necks and barely speaks. Gunn’s film is colorful and fun. Snyder’s DC films are allergic to color and proceed with a funereal tone even before getting to the actual funeral. Gunn’s film is optimistic. Snyder’s films are…not that.
None of this is to say that one approach is better than the other (Gunn’s approach is better. Way better. Obviously way better) but focusing on the pop color scheme and Silver Age sci-fi whizbang of Gunn’s Superman risks flattening it out completely and missing the caustic details that make the film shine. Yes, Superman ’25 is a movie designed to send you out of the theater in a terrific mood (to the tune of Iggy Pop, no less). But like fellow sentimentalist Frank Capra, Gunn understands that you can’t celebrate the human spirit without reckoning with the evils that also intrinsic to that same spirit. Our capacity for grace means nothing without our aptitude for savagery, and vice versa. To that end, Gunn finds the time between snappy banter and adorable super-pets to concoct perhaps the bleakest, most abjectly cynical moment in decades of superhero cinema.
Partway through Superman ’25, the Man of Steel (David Corenswet) has been imprisoned by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) in a pocket universe which, we learn, Luthor both rents out as a private prison for political dissidents and undesirables and uses to cage anyone in his own life he wishes to disappear. One of the prisoners boxed up beside Superman is, Lex tells him and us, Lex’s ex-girlfriend Fleurette (Paige Mobley) who had the nerve to write an unflattering blog about a certain megalomaniacal chrome-dome.
Superman is held at bay by a kryptonite-weaving Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), himself forced into service after Luthor abducted his infant son. After Luthor executes an innocent Metropolis civilian (Malik, played by Dinesh Thyagarajan), a moment that is itself bracingly cruel in a film that had to that point been a frothy delight, Metamorpho turns off the kryptonite and instead starts replicating a yellow sun in order to charge Supes back up to fighting strength.
As this is happening, Fleurette sees what the two meta-humans are up to, and what does she do? She immediately starts yelling for the guards in an effort to rat the heroes out. When another prisoner observes what’s going on, he joins in the effort to betray the escape plan, leading to the two prisoners screaming at each other over who should get brownie points from their captors for selling out a superhero’s efforts to save a baby.
If this sequence isn’t as overtly violent as Lex shooting a citizen in the head (not to mention the wanton acts of nihilistic destruction that littered Snyder’s various superhero movies) it is nonetheless so brazenly misanthropic a story beat that it has stopped me cold both times I’ve seen the film.
Here, Gunn has created a microcosm of the Joker’s dueling boat-bomb challenge from The Dark Knight, but in his version the everyday people not only slam the detonator down, they then bicker over who should get credit for being the fastest to being ruthless.
While this might be the standout moment of such cynical sentiment, all of Superman ’25 casts a castigating side-eye at the whims of an impressionable public. Sure, we may eventually take comfort in the reveal that, yes, Lex Luthor is personally responsible for the conspiracy to discredit Superman and mislead people, but what does it say about people that they were willing to be misled? Noticeably, Luthor’s organization isn’t staffed and maintained by anonymous stormtroopers. We see the giddy malevolence of his DOGE-esque command center, but also the bored complacency of the Hawaiian shirt-clad staffers who blithely supervise machinery splintering reality and imprisoning innocents.
Yes there is a poisoned media ecosystem feeding bad information to the public, but it’s an ecosystem that thrives on how readily individuals are to embrace their most negative and paranoid assumptions. And once that group-think sets in, a system of ruination snaps into place. Superman’s own allies in both the government and the costumed hero community turn their backs on him, prioritizing optics over basic decency.
If these are the kinds of people who populate this world, why is it a world worth saving?
I mentioned Capra at the top of this piece and that wasn’t an idle comparison. Capra’s films can be reduced to schmaltzy relics of Americana feel-good, a charge that was prominent in contemporary criticism and persists to this day. The climactic triumphs of Capra’s Everyman protagonists resound so powerfully that it’s easy to forget how those films spend the majority of their runtimes systematically and comprehensively dismantling these men, their lives, and their ideals. It’s only by crashing into abject despair and failure that a Capra protagonist can fully articulate why those ideals are so true and so vital, even (especially) in failure.
So while the betrayal in the pocket dimension prison (comic books are awesome) is a shock, what matters more is that the first thing Superman wants to do upon escaping is go back in and save those same people.
Gunn’s attitude is perhaps best encapsulated with a tracking shot near the film’s end: As the camera glides along, we witness Luthor and his lackeys being arrested, Krypto the superdog happily chasing around some liberated lab animals, and, most importantly, a tearful Fleurette racing towards her parents. In a Gunn film, monstrous behavior always has a human source. That doesn’t forgive toxic and destructive actions, but it does provide the humanistic runway that makes forgiveness possible. Fleurette collapsing into the arms of her mom and dad is the film’s way of underlining the simple correctness of Superman’s worldview. People fuck up. Scared, confused, desperate people fuck up bad. That doesn’t mean those people aren’t worth saving.
As a character, Superman continues to speak to us because even after almost a century of cultural evolution and revolutions, he can still embody those better angels of our being. By embracing both the best and worst of what we’re capable of, Superman ’25 provides a definitive new incarnation of its hero for our troubled modern world.
