The Newest Superman 2025

I had some thoughts after watching the latest James Gunn interpretation of Superman.

It’s nice to have Superman back! You know. Superman. The original 1938 Superman. It’s not campy, because the original Supe wasn’t. It became so to make it okay to do a movie about a comic book character in the 1970s. In 1990, Warren Beatty tried to bring Dick Tracy to the wide screen, but it just didn’t gel and was also too campy. And scary. Trying to recreate the look of the weirdly drawn villains from the comic strip did not translate well to a mash-up of human and cartoon. Yikes.

But then, of course, there was the Batman series on television in the mid-1960s that also went for the camp, when the original Batman  from 1939 was very much not camp.

And it’s not gritty, like the last few Superman iterations, because somewhere in Hollywood, some bro told some other bro that bros only like gritty for their superheroes. (*spoiler. It ain’t true*)

The thing about Original Superman is the same that goes for Original Star Trek; It doesn’t need to be gritty to be enthralling. It just needs to hold to its original ideals, and that is HOPE. Superman always meant HOPE. And Star Trek too, because we hope that by the 23rd century, there won’t be pettiness, greed, and corruption because we will have gotten over them. It may not be realistic, but it’s still nice to think it can happen.

So when you make a gritty Superman, with parents played by lofty actors giving speeches to their extraterrestrial adopted son with soaring music in the background, this is not what the creators wanted. This adopted son of Kansas comes from real people, people you’d meet at the local Hy-Vee, who drive a battered pickup truck.

Actors Pruitt Taylor Vince as Jonathan Kent, and Neva Howell as Martha Kent, Clark’s adopted parents.

And that’s what this film delivers, a believable couple who only want the best for their boy. (Oh, and by the way, if you are looking for yet another origin story, this isn’t the place. Finally, a filmmaker understands that we KNOW where Supe came from, how he landed as a baby in Kansas to the Kents, and became Clark Kent, leaving Smallville for the bright lights and big city of Metropolis to become a newspaper reporter. Yeah. We got it.)

This Supe can also get hurt. Not just heartsore but physically hurt. That’s how Superman started out. But with each new iteration they seemed to ramp up the superpowers until he was so godlike there was nothing to root for. Ho-hum, he’s going into another deadly encounter. WILL HE MAKE IT? (Yes, he always did, and easily, so there was really no tension).

There’s already a relationship with Lois Lane. Gunn knows we know it, so why waste precious film footage rehashing it again? No, we jump right into this new story, of Clark discovering who he was supposed to be and must come to grips with it. And a not so veiled at all Musk-like Lex Luthor who doesn’t just have henchmen like in films of old, but very Doge-like techno bros and gals who have sold their souls and do it for the prestige and the money. Yes, it’s all in place, too screamingly realistic with a Balkin authoritarian invading a nearby -stan and moving to obliterate the population (so in one stroke a Gaza/Ukraine mash-up. Yes, we see it.)

Supe is an immigrant, like many others who arrived, assimilated, and tried to be good hard-working people and got crushed by an unfair and often corrupt system of government. It’s woke as hell –thank goodness — and I hope the MAGAs who were looking forward to yet another superhero film with fighting and smashing (and they clearly have missed the meaning behind ALL of them) are missing the meaning behind this one too. Lex Luthor is the BAD GUY. Musk is the BAD GUY. Russia is the BAD GUY. Israel is the BAD GUY. I have never experienced a movie SO prescient so quickly out of the box.

And it feels good. It feels good to have this Superman. Because he may be a super man, but he’s vulnerable in ways they didn’t allow him to be before. “Who am I?” he must ask himself now. And he can’t help himself but BE the good guy, rescuing people, the people of Earth, because that’s what we want him to be.

Did I enjoy the film? Yes, I did. I enjoyed all the little feels they gave us, and the fact is, it may not be a great movie, but it’s a feel good movie. We like when good triumphs over evil. We could really use that about now.