Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman still inspires a sense of awe with each subsequent rewatch, nearly 50 years after its initial release. I can’t quite say why this hold true for me too, seeing as how I wasn’t even alive when it premiered. Maybe it’s Christopher Reeve’s impressive performance, and how he subtly alters his physicality to instantly switch from mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent to the nearly indestructible Superman, beyond merely removing his glasses. Maybe it’s John Williams’ score, which soars in time with Superman’s flights, granting them an almost magical quality. Maybe it’s that that movie came out at a time when the market wasn’t over-saturated with superhero pictures, and the endgame wasn’t building a bankable cinematic universe, but simply telling an inspiring story of hope and courage.
Writer and director James Gunn crafts his Superman from numerous influences, but he especially leans on Donner’s film. Hard. But Gunn’s movie couldn’t be more emotionally bankrupt. It opens smartly, with punchy title cards unfurling over Antarctica’s snowy landscape, adjacent to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, recapping the basic facts of Superman’s origins and the events that led to this opening scene. Our first glimpse of this Superman (played by David Corenswet) isn’t that of a super-powered being in control, but rather, one who has just been thoroughly beaten down by his enemies. He coughs up blood as his body lays crumbled in the snow, barely able to pucker his lips to whistle for his dog, Krypto, to come drag him back home.
But Superman gets messy, fast. It turns out that a few weeks ago, Superman halted the invasion of the country Jarhanpur by Boravia, an ally of the United States, without consulting with the U.S. government first, a breach of power that sparked global controversy. Billionaire tech genius Lex Luthor (Nicholas Holt) promises government and military officials that he he has the ability to kill Superman if needed, masking his own ulterior motives in engineering the Jarhanpur takeover and defiling Superman’s name, turning public opinion against him. Superman effectively spends the rest of the film battling three enemies: Lex, his past, and social media shit posts.
There’s something to be said for bypassing the overly familiar origin story in favor of jumping right into the action. But every characterization in the film is frustratingly thin, Gunn relying on the use of Williams’ iconic score to conjure up emotions in scenes that have none. It’s clear in some of the scenes between Clark/Superman and intrepid Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan)— who at the start of this film have been casually dating for three months— that Gunn is trying to replicate some of the sparkling banter that Reeve and costar Margot Kidder summoned with ease. But there’s no believable spark there, in no small part because the film isn’t interested in allowing Corenswet (who’s fine, but certainly could do more with better material) to play around with the disparity between Clark and Superman. His adoptive parents back home in Smallville, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell), are shallowly rendered as country bumpkins. Back at the Daily Planet, Clark’s colleague Jimmy Olson (Skyler Gisondo) treats his infatuated secret source— Lex’s girlfriend Eve (Sara Sampaio)— with unsettling disdain that’s played for laughs. It’s a neat subversion of expectations that Krypto, the supposed wonder dog, is a good-hearted dumbass (he violently, excitedly tackles Superman every time he sees him, barely registering his commands), but the way Gunn constantly puts him— and the infant son of another metahuman Superman encounters and ultimately teams up with— in peril is more often than not a cheap method of manipulating the audience’s emotions.
To its credit, there are some refreshing touches here that veer away from the dark and gritty aesthetic of the DCEU under Zack Snyder. This movie is garish in a different way, but at least Superman’s suit is vibrantly colored and designed to appear closer to Reeve’s suit. You can even reach further back in time and locate the similarities to the 1950s The Adventures of Superman television show starring George Reeves and Max Fleischer’s animated Superman shorts from the 1940s, both in the style of Superman himself but also the B movie absurdity of the conflicts he gets involved in. Gunn— who helmed the irreverent Guardians of the Galaxy series for Marvel and the 2021 The Suicide Squad for the previous DC cinematic universe— appears to have a good time playing in the sandbox, inserting everything from a kaiju battle to pocket universes in his film. It sounds fun on paper, but Gunn is never able to strike a balanced tone between light adventure and serious political and ethical commentary. The former reaches for humor that lacks the natural ease of the Guardians ensemble; here, the bulk of it stems from the Justice Gang, a group of superheroes Superman attempts to work with that includes Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and it’s pretty forced. The latter is loaded primarily into the front half of the film, as Superman’s true motivations on Earth are called into question, but Gunn never tackles the questions he poses beyond the surface level, and his use of fictional, Middle Eastern-coded countries and their brown citizens as window dressing for the conflict between Lex and Superman is borderline horrid.
Superman has its heart in the right place, and— despite being the film to kickstart the new DC Universe (DCU) under Gunn’s leadership— it downplays the unnecessary cameos and teases toward future projects. But its core message of kindness prevailing is espoused without any underlying philosophy and is absorbed by so many poorly fleshed out ideas, an oddly insular environment (more information is told to us through news broadcasts on TV rather than shown), and interactions that are either hollow or off-putting. “Hashtag Supershit” indeed.
Superman is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 129 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Katie at the Movies 