Superman
Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult
Action/Superhero | PG-13 | 2 hr 9 min
Superman is here to save the …day? Warner Bros.? Going to the movies in general? Whatever the case, Superman simply gets its titular hero right, so despite a few places where it tries to do too much, it delivers a great time at the movies.
With the dramatic rise of the superhero genre the past 25 years, it’s easy to forget the film that first proved the viability of transferring a hero from the comic panels to the big screen. It’s not X-Men, Spider-Man, or Iron Man, but rather a film released nearly three decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe took off—1978’s Superman, directed by Richard Donner and starring Chrisopher Reeve.
It was an incredible hit, both critically and at the box office, and although it took a few decades for other studios and filmmakers to figure it out, its legacy undoubtedly lives on today with every superhero movie release. This year’s Superman, the first in James Gunn’s new-look, revamped DC Universe, clearly uses its originating predecessor as a blueprint, and that’s a very good thing.
Most importantly, it nails the three characters it had to nail—Lex Luthor (Christopher Houlte), Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and of course, Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet). All three are clearly written and portrayed with an understanding of what makes each compelling, and it makes the whole engine go. Also like the original, this Superman looks great and has more than a few exciting visuals and set pieces, aside from a few sequences in a Luthor-created pocket dimension that look troubling like some of the recent Zack Snyder misfires.
However, Superman also deviates from the original in a few places, mostly for the better. Like 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, Superman skips the origin story and instead starts with Superman as an established hero. He’s the most iconic hero ever, and nobody’s interested in seeing a baby fall from the stars, grow up in Kansas, decide he can’t play football because he can’t reveal his powers, move to the big city and play himself off as a meek, scatterbrained journalist, etc., etc. We’ve seen it many times, and it’s just not interesting.
Also, unlike Reeve’s Superman, Corenswet’s Superman struggles, and he struggles a lot—in fact, Superman first barrels on screen in retreat, bloodied, bruised, and broken. Superman never has it easy throughout the film, which creates a necessary tension in a story supposedly about an unbreakable, unstoppable alien being.
Superman only falls short when it overreaches. For example, it constantly fights itself on how big of a story it wants to tell. There’s a wonderful scene with Clark’s parents, the Kents, on their farm in Kansas, featuring a quiet and earned moment of reassurance to Clark, and it’s truly moving. At the same time, there’s so much the film wants to say, and so many characters it wants to introduce, that it often stretches itself too thin.
Most of those things are interesting (the “Justice Gang,” how the media interacts and turns on a dime regarding Superman and what he stands for, Luthor’s pocket dimension, interwoven international conflict and Superman’s place within that conflict), but it’s just too much to bite off in two hours. This is especially true with some of the film’s bigger social and political commentaries, which sometimes feel scattershot, forced, and clunky.
Thankfully, those issues never cause too much drag and don’t take away from the film’s overall fun, and frankly, that’s a relief. The (movie) world needs Superman, and now it’s got him back for years to come.
Discover more from Martin City Telegraph
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.