At the start of Superman, after he’s lying broken and bloodied in the snow, and he gets dragged to the Fortress of Solitude by Krypto, and his robots put him in a special chair to blast him with yellow sun energy, and the healing process is so painful he screams as we hear his bones cracking back into place, he rolls out of the chair, and while kneeling on the ground, his first word is “golly!”
The first time I saw it, I thought it was just a funny character gag, the same way that many versions of this character has had others calling him “Smallville” or “Boy Scout” to make fun of him. But seeing it a second time, I realized it’s the first example of the movie’s surprisingly focused theme, which is iterated over and over again throughout: Clark’s earnestness, idealism, and kind-hearted desire to do the right thing are his strength, not a weakness.
I was unsure whether it was a good idea to see the movie twice in two days. But I know that I tend to leave movies on an “action movie high,” which can sometimes make me have a too-charitable impression that I later regret. I also thought that if I wasn’t preoccupied simply trying to make sense of all the manic weirdness, I’d be able to watch the movie more objectively and critically.1I’m wary of becoming Nicole Kidman-like in my breathless praise of the magic of AMC Theaters, but I have to say that living a short drive away from a really nice theater (albeit attached to an exhausting theme park), and with a subscription that includes multiple movies per week, it’s been great for short-notice reservations for movies I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
Well, that backfired, since I went away somehow loving the movie even more than I did yesterday.
I’ve always been someone who liked but never loved the character, but today I found myself tearing up at every moment with Krypto, and every shot focusing on the S logo on Superman’s chest. It managed to bypass the critical portions of my brain and lodge itself directly in my heart.
Even more surprising is that it disproved my initial take on the movie as being over-stuffed, messy, and unfocused. Going in knowing what the movie’s major themes would turn out to be, I could see that practically every scene was, in one way or another, in service of illustrating, reinforcing, or clarifying that theme.
This is not a subtle movie. Everything that I described as if it were an undercurrent of the movie is all right there, on the surface. Characters say it explicitly, multiple times, and it’s further illustrated in several different ways, and even repeated in the choice of the final song. Lois says directly that she’s a punk rock girl who questions everything, but Clark trusts everyone and thinks everyone is beautiful. He responds that maybe that’s the new punk.
Which again, just seemed like a catchy, memorable line at first. But what keeps it from being too simple and too on-the-nose is the wonderful idea at its core: in a world where everyone has become skeptical, and cynical, and distrusting, it’s daring to simply be earnest and idealistic.
This movie fully commits to that idea, and I think part of the reason I didn’t recognize that at first is because I had so many preconceived notions about this as a James Gunn movie. Mostly from Guardians and The Suicide Squad. He’s always struck me as going for flippant and edgy above all.2And in my defense: the interactions between Metamorpho and Clark are the exact same gag as Drax and Mantis, so it all felt familiar. Sure, being earnest and heartfelt is all well and good — “I’m Mary Poppins, y’all!” from Guardians 2 is still a highlight — but only in moderation. You’ve got to undercut it before it gets too maudlin and corny. Like Martha Kent, ignoring that I’m a grown man sitting in a crowded theater with tears in my eyes over a dad’s love for his son, and (good-naturedly) calling it “mush.”
So I initially left the movie appreciating that it was a joyful celebration of comic books, heroism, earnest kindness, and doing the right thing, but still strictly in terms of comic book fantasy. I was happy that it portrayed Superman as aspirational. But aspirational implies unachievable — we adults recognize that the corny, simplified values of comic book stories are nice, but the real world is complex. Superman isn’t just an alien, but a fantasy version of an alien. We can’t always do the right thing, any more than we can fly or shoot lasers out of our eyes.
Again I was reminded of the opening to Richard Donner’s Superman: black-and-white footage of theater curtains opening, onto an image of a comic book cover, with a child reciting the voice-over. In retrospect, it seems adamant that it’s four levels removed from reality. Anticipating that audiences in 1978 are going to have preconceived notions of comics as kids’ stuff, and making it completely clear from the start that even though this movie is set in the present day, the sentiment is nostalgic for the simplicity of children’s fantasy.
There was a great thread on Bluesky — I’ve lost it and forgotten the originator, but I think it might have been comic book artist Steve Lieber? — that pointed out how grim, gritty, “adult” takes on Batman were inherently flawed, since the entire premise of Batman is inherently childish: as a child, he pledges to wipe out all crime.
Conventional wisdom says that Batman is the DC character most suited to more “realistic” or “mature” adaptations, simply because he doesn’t have super powers. But in fact, that’s the only detail about his character that’s in any way relevant to most readers, and everything else about his experience is even more alien than a super-powered Kryptonian. If you start interrogating that premise with more mature questions, you either make him seem silly, or like a super-villain. “Why does a billionaire spend his resources fighting petty crooks and the occasional supervillain, instead of putting an end to the poverty that’s the root of most crime?” “What happens to a city when a single, very wealthy, individual ignores the justice system and appoints himself as an extra-judicial vigilante?”
You can totally understand why there have been so many pushes over the years, with Batman in particular, to reject the idea that comics are silly kids’ stuff by pushing it in the completely opposite direction. These stories are designed to be accessible emotionally (even if rarely accessible in terms of continuity) and to deeply connect with readers, so those readers can find it insulting when people are dismissive of that connection.
I think the mistake with so many adaptations is to assume that if you just take the fantastic or juvenile elements and present them in enough of a grounded and mature way, you show why this material still resonates with adults. A huge part of what makes Superman such a great adaptation, in my opinion, is that it lets the wacky and goofy stuff remain wacky and goofy, instead of treating it like a liability that, if left unexplained or justified, would doom the character to be nothing more than frivolous kids’ stuff. It recognizes that all of the silly, bizarre elements are what make the character so memorable over so many decades, and they’re the vehicle for making parables centered on the core ideas that make up his character. Ideas that may not necessarily be “adult,” but which are universal.
That’s why the conflict of Boravia invading Jarhanpur is crucial to the story. It is very much a superhero comic book version of a war: the countries are fictional, the invading leader is a cartoonish caricature3His official portrait showing him holding a squirrel is an amazing detail, the defenders are idealized underdogs, the conflict is almost entirely the actions of a single super-villain, and the problem is resolved by exposing the super-villain and killing the bad guy. I thought it was an obvious, possibly too obvious, analog to Israel’s aggression against Gaza, but I saw a video that pointed out it was more directly inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think that keeping it in the realm of superhero comic book conflict is a positive: it keeps it independent of any real-world political or cultural history, and simply about the universal idea of aggressors vs defenders.
You could make a strong argument that it’s inappropriate to put an analog of real-world atrocities into a comic book movie, that it trivializes the deaths of thousands of people. But I think it deliberately and effectively distances the story from its real-world analog, and focuses it instead on the behavior of those of us who are largely not directly affected by the real-world aggressions. How do we react in these situations?
Lois’s lengthy interview of Superman gets at this directly: she brings up all of the complexities surrounding the conflict, suggesting that Superman should’ve spent more time thinking it through before acting. There are political allegiances, media optics, the history of the Jarhanpur government’s atrocities, the Boravian government’s insistence that they’re freeing the other nation from tyranny, etc. It’s all the stuff that we tell ourselves to make sense of it: it’s complicated. We tend to think of that as being the mature, nuanced, and realistic take.
Clark angrily insists that it’s not complicated. People were going to die, and he stopped it. So is that overly simplistic, or juvenile? Or have we spent so many years convinced that the mature take is to treat everything as an issue with multiple equally valid viewpoints, to the point that we’ve lost the simple ability to distinguish between right and wrong?
The battle itself is depicted as something that’s a lot more black-and-white, with an overly-powerful mechanized army against a practically defenseless country, including children. There’s even a beatific child holding up a makeshift flag with the Superman emblem, and a soldier aiming his rifle to murder the child in cold blood. It’s not a realistic scene, but a heightened, melodramatic, “comic book” one. And I say that’s because the conflict itself isn’t the point. This isn’t a political story. It’s supposed to have all the nuance removed, because it’s showing you an obvious injustice. And it’s all about the “Justice Gang” going in to do the right thing.
It’s significant that there’s so much attention given to the flag, and the children chanting “Superman,” but Superman never shows up to save the day. Instead, we see the characters who’d earlier insisted that there was nothing that they could do. Their hands were tied. It’s complicated. They arrive in Superman’s place, to show us that this version of Superman isn’t aspirational. He’s inspirational.
Treating him as just a super-powered alien allows us to think of his virtue as alien. “Sure, if we had his powers, we could afford to be virtuous, but in the real world, we have to acknowledge that there’s only so much we can realistically do.” That’s what we tell ourselves to justify our own inaction — if not apathy, then helplessness. The melodrama of the war scene reduces it down to a question of what we can do, even if we aren’t Superman. And for that matter, even if we don’t have a Green Lantern ring or a magic mace or elemental powers. The super powers aren’t the point here; the motivations are.
Which gets at how my criticisms changed after a second showing. Earlier, I said that one of my only criticisms was how far it went making the Kents out to be small-town yokel stereotypes. After seeing it again in the context of everything else, knowing how the movie was going to end thematically, I think it was important: the younger, city-dwelling characters are mocking Clark’s upbringing, but later we see that his upbringing was crucial to turning him into a hero. Making Clark out to be some naive farmboy simpleton, as a lot of adaptations tend to do, is another way of making him out to be an alien. Letting the audience say that we too could have that idealism if we’d had a simple, uncomplicated upbringing, but we’re cursed with knowing how complicated things are in the real world. This movie joyfully rejects that kind of apathetic cynicism as bullshit.
Now, I think my biggest criticism4And not that it matters in the slightest, but the reason I gave it 4 1/2 stars instead of 5 is the extended slug-fest at the end. It does have some thematic resonance: it gives Clark an opportunity to show mercy to the bad guys, it shows that Superman’s strength just isn’t in his super powers, and it shows how Superman succeeds with the help of his allies. But it goes on too long, and it descends into fight scenes for their own sake, instead of feeling like it has genuine personal stakes beyond “who would win?”
A couple other things that seemed to have more significance in a second viewing: one was the bank of social media monkeys trashing Superman online. On my first watch, it seemed just like a pointed gag, but considering how much of the overall story is about media manipulation — and a media environment that gradually degrades our integrity and makes us feel helpless — it helps reinforce the idea of what’s actually important vs what’s just noise.
The other was that Lex was almost always shown surrounded by a control room full of his sycophantic supporters. I realize that most if not all the characters have precedents in the comics, and I also recognize the simple narrative necessity of giving the villain people to explain everything to. But it also drives home the idea that the people doing the most damage in the real world are incapable of doing it alone; they need people who are willing to abandon their integrity to help make terrible things happen. And importantly, to do it from a distance, to afford themselves plausible deniability. They’re callously talking about how long it’ll be before Superman suffocates, all while watching from a safe distance.
I guess another minor criticism is that the reveal about Kal-El’s Kryptonian parents slightly undercuts the significance of this as a story about immigrants. Its value to this specific story is obvious and powerful: Kal-El carries nothing from Krypton except his super-powers; he is Clark Kent in every way that matters. The problem is that that makes it a story about an immigrant assimilating into his new home, instead of preserving his old culture along with the new one. Ultimately its value in this story and this version of Superman is worth the loss, I think, but it does seem to be sending a subtly mixed message.
And I’ve seen a bunch of different takes on Superman, so the idea of Superman vs Clark, and how much of what he is comes from his being an alien vs how much comes from his upbringing, is familiar. But none of them have hit me anywhere near as hard as the ending scene, with Clark watching video of his real parents. There have been plenty of takes on Superman’s origin story, but none have been so effective at showing exactly why his origin story is so important.
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