I’ve made no secret of my continuing enthusiasm for superhero movies and comic book adaptations — when they deserve it. If James Gunn’s Superman is any indication, the summer of 2025 might have just saved the genre from the threat of waning general audience interest with a trifecta of fresh tentpole releases between this film, Thunderbolts*, and the upcoming Fantastic Four: First Steps. Obviously the jury’s still out on that last one, but with so much on the line for the newly-launched universe of DC Comics adaptations, Superman passes its particular tests with flying (no pun intended) colors.
St. Louis’ own James Gunn has now proven himself as the director with the single best track record when it comes to comic book adaptations. Superman feels like the pinnacle of everything he’s achieved in his five-picture run in the genre, his love for these characters infectiously oozing from the screen. There are times when he loves a little too much; at just over two hours, the film occasionally feels overstuffed. However, nothing on screen is ever boring or badly made, and it’s all paced beautifully.
We begin three years into Superman’s (David Corenswet) open super heroics, at a time when other metahumans (a term used in the DC universe to denote superpowered characters) have recently made their presence known as well. As his alter ego Clark Kent, Corenswet really delivers in an early scene opposite the equally excellent Rachel Brosnahan as his girlfriend and fellow Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane. They debate an action Clark took in a military conflict which ended a war but inflamed tensions between political figures and metahumans. This scene establishes so much of what the film goes on to explore regarding Clark’s identity and purpose. For all its expository dialogue, it’s also a fairly mature scene in terms of showing two lovers arguing realistically, and thus it’s a key example of Gunn successfully grounding the film — which does go to a lot of fantastical places — in a believable humanity.
The fantastical elements are often ironically provided by those who are less powerful than Superman, namely the arch-villain Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), and the trio of metahumans humorously referred to as the “Justice Gang”: Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). I think the “Justice Gang” is the main aspect of the film where audiences might feel either shortchanged or overstimulated, as they do take some amount of screen time away from Superman and Luthor, carving out their own little sections of the film. In my view, they are each either hilarious or just flat-out awesome characters respectively, and they are necessary to help Superman thwart Luthor’s far-reaching scheme, so I didn’t mind them at all. That’s especially true of Mister Terrific, a brilliant inventor/metahuman who fights crime with the help of an array of gadgets. It’s not as if there’s any real science in this movie, but Mister Terrific is just such a dynamic character here that he helps the “just go with it” factor significantly in one of the film’s goofier stretches. Gathegi brings an edge and pathos to the character that his two counterparts don’t have (not that they needed to), and he emerges as a pillar of why the film works as well as it does.
Hoult is electrifying as Lex Luthor, a confident yet slightly pathetic version of the billionaire tech entrepreneur whose neuroses feed into the real-world conflicts the film is obviously commenting on. I don’t mean “obviously” as a criticism, as the broad strokes of many a Superman comic are honored here while clearly crafting a story with a purpose in today’s world outside of merely selling tickets and merchandise. Like Clark’s actions which set the story in motion, Superman is perhaps slightly flawed, yet nonetheless incredibly pure, brave, and honorable. | George Napper
