‘Superman’ Review
Unrelentingly goofy until it tries to get serious, and then it’s even goofier somehow.
SUPERMAN IS ONE OF THE MOST UNRELENTINGLY GOOFY movies I can remember seeing.
I don’t mean this derogatorily, precisely, despite being one of the strongest and longest defenders of Man of Steel, a movie noted for its self-seriousness. James Gunn is simply going for a different vibe, and when he sticks to that vibe, Superman works. Mostly. If you dig what Gunn’s laying down.
We’ll get to Superman (David Corenswet) himself in a moment, because the movie really lives and dies by every supporting character and how quirky they can get. There are Superman’s robots in the Fortress of Solitude, who disclaim any possibility of emotional attachment and then squeal in delight when Big Blue throws them a spare glance. There’s Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), who is a cub reporter and sexual dynamo, an irresistible magnet for every nine and ten in a five-mile radius. He is pursued by Eve (Sara Sampaio), Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) selfie-snapping supermodel girlfriend, who spends most of her time making silly faces while Superman tries to save Metropolis from her billionaire boyfriend’s various villainies, most of which involve framing (kinda) Superman as some sort of nefarious invader.
Superman is aided in his efforts to save Metropolis by Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), a Green Lantern with a bowl cut and an impossibly large ego who spends most of the movie trying to convince Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) to call their team the Justice Gang. Mr. Terrific, meanwhile, speaks in the cadence of a 1970s soul singer and wears a jacket with his own name on the back of it. And then there’s Krypto the Superdog, who spends most of the movie bouncing around the frame and causing general chaos. He’s a bad dog, but hey. Everyone loves him.
Again, the plot—Luthor wants Superman out of the picture and he’s ginned up an overseas conflict to goad Superman into interfering in the hopes of demonstrating that this god-like being sees himself as master of the planet rather than subject of any of its states; he’s got a point, but he doesn’t need to be such an asshole about it, and it’s hard to care about the plot of a movie that serves as little more than a brand extension for Warner Bros.’s desire to reboot their DC line of heroes—is secondary to the vibe, the sense of humor.
And I have simply always been in tune with Gunn’s particular brand of silliness. One very small example: There’s a moment in Superman where a TV chyron reads “METAHUMANS KILL THING” after a big fight involving Superman and the Justice Gang against a kaiju ripping up downtown Metropolis, and the hands-in-the-air bluntness of it just made me snort-laugh. You can imagine the poor dude at the computer in a Metropolis newsroom trying to succinctly explain the absurdities he and his fellow citizens have been exposed to and throwing that on the screen. We’ve all been there.
Corenswet is more than capable of playing the Big Blue Boy Scout, with his “aw, shucks” demeanor commingling nicely with the occasional flash of superhuman petulance. He’s more man-child than man; whereas Christopher Reeve played Superman as something like a dad and Henry Cavill like a Stoic philosopher, Corenswet feels more like an older cousin.
It doesn’t all work; I don’t think Gunn quite knows what to do with Lois Lane, who is reduced to spouting platitudes like “I’m punk rock!” and engaging in an endless early back-and-forth with Clark Kent about what Superman hopes to accomplish by inserting himself into an international conflict without the support of the United States. But the film really hits the skids when Gunn tries to stop being goofy and start being real, at least in part because I don’t think he has really thought through the metaphors—about immigration, about unilateral intervention on the world stage—he’s playing with here. To understand why, we need to discuss the treatment of Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) and Lara Lor-Van (Angela Sarafyan), Superman’s Kryptonian parents.
(Some heavy spoilers to follow; for those who simply want the thumbs-up or ‑down, consider this a mild thumbs-up with a warning that Superman is a very weird movie.)
We all know the story of Superman, right? Last son of Krypton, sent to Earth in a rocket ship by his parents before their planet explodes, lands in a cornfield in Kansas, et cetera? Jor-El, traditionally, has been a wise and just figure; he believes Clark can do the people of his new planet good, that he can help them find their way, serve as a symbol, and so on. And that is, at first, how he is portrayed in this film: The message to Kal-El was corrupted when his ship crashed, so Kal/Superman/Clark only had the first half or so, and that was the gist. Survive, thrive, do good, the usual.
Lex breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and one of his minions recovers the rest of the message; in it, we learn that Jor-El wanted to tell his son to conquer Earth, to kill as many people as it takes, to form breeding pools of Earth women and impregnate them so his invader seed can replace the Earthborn stock. The Great Kryptonian Replacement, if you will. I need to be absolutely clear: I am not exaggerating at all. This is literally the plot of the movie. I initially thought we were going to find out that this is a lie by Lex, that he mistranslated the message to slander Superman, but no. This is what Jor-El actually believes, leading to Lex ranting about Superman “grooming” humanity. Luckily for us, Clark Kent was raised by Ma and Pa Kent to be a good, decent, American boy, the sort who says things like “golly” and rescues squirrels from being crushed by giant monsters. So no laser-eyed grooming gangs here.
It’s often said that Superman is a story about the immigrant experience, that he was created by the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe looking to explain the experience of being an alien in America. Gunn himself has argued that this is a movie about immigration; Hoult’s Lex Luthor spends most of the movie ranting about Superman’s status as an alien, how he cannot be trusted, how he is an outsider who should be feared and contained and forcibly expelled, if possible. Superman is good, so immigration is good, right?
Well . . . maybe. The case the movie is actually making—the case being made by the film’s final shots, in which we see images of Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van replaced by images of Pa and Ma Kent in the Fortress of Solitude, the case being made by Superman himself when he argues that he is human because he was raised by humans—is one about assimilation, about the importance of abandoning the defunct, broken ideals of your homeland and embracing the ideals of the land that took you in. It’s arguing that if you reshape an immigrant from birth into the image of a white-bread couple in the heartland amidst the cows and crows, he’ll turn out fine. And if not? Well, have fun in the Super Harems, I guess. And this is what I mean when I say that Superman gets even goofier after Gunn tries to get serious.
Ultimately, Superman is about a guy raised to do the right thing and act decently by a nice married couple from Kansas whose belief in his own righteousness turns him into the world’s policeman. And if that ain’t American Greatness, well, what is?
