Superman (2025) – Blue Towel Productions

Like many who are commenting about this movie, I love the character Superman.

In comics, he’s been one of my favorite characters since the John Byrne-helmed Man of Steel reboot from the late 80s, but my enjoyment of the character goes back a lot further than that. I watched a lot of Superfriends cartoons, I had fun with repeated of the old George Reeves TV show, but I really loved the Christopher Reeve version that hit in 1978. That movie hit me at just the right time, filling my little starry-eyed brain with visions of how awesome superheroes could be.

And so I was there as the movie’s sequels starting coming out, and as the series eventually just petered out. And I was there in 2006, when we started hearing about Superman Returns. I was excited, and I was there in the theatre to watch it. And I was disappointed. There were things I was impressed by, but when it came to the casting, characterization and actual story, the movie was a bit let-down.

And then I was there as 2013’s Man of Steel was being promoted, and again I was excited! Especially after I watched the trailer–it struck a beautifully inspirational tone that I thought suited Superman perfectly.

Unfortunately, the movie itself did not strike the tone that the trailer had, coming across instead like the filmmakers were struggling to just get their heads around the character, like they couldn’t understand the appeal of Superman. This led to some genuinely baffling story decisions, and a film that while visually impactful was ultimately another let-down.

And as DC Extended Universe ran out of steam and James Gunn was brought on to the shepherd the latest big-screen adaption of Superman (as well as the rest of DC’s properties in the now-named DCU), I was excited, once again. I thought, as I have before, maybe this will be the one, maybe this movie will be the Superman movie I’ve been waiting for all this time.

And nicely, it worked out for me to go and see it on opening night at one of our local theatres in Perth. And…

I was not disappointed!

I’ll say it again, I liked it a lot.

Spoilers Ahead

Now was this the Superman movie I’ve always wanted? Probably not, but that’s a good thing. It’s better that I got to watch a film that took things in directions I would not have chosen than just that someone had read my mind and somehow made a movie as some sort of wish-fulfilment for me.

And there were things in Superman that I genuinely did not like. I’ll mention some of them up front here just to get them out of the way, because overall they did not sabotage my immersion into the story or my enjoyment of the whole film sufficiently to turn this into a negative review.

There is a plot contrivance, for instance, about an incomplete video message from Superman’s parents, Jor-El and Lara (their only appearance in the movie), which gives some inspirational words about their benevolent intentions in sending their child to earth, which are definitive for how the hero sees himself and understands his purpose. But it’s fairly obvious that eventually the rest of the message is going to be recovered, and will turn out to be a disappointment. And this is exactly what happens.

When we do hear the rest of the message, it’s extremely direct about how bad the Kryptonians really are–they straight-up tell Superman to rule earth without mercy and to kill anyone who gets in his way. There’s no reason this had to be so on-the-nose–a more nuanced darkness in the message might have helped things feel less contrived.

Similarity, when the bad guys use this message to turn public opinion against Superman, it all happens extremely quickly. The news breaks, and within minutes everyone in Metropolis has seen the video and decided they hate Superman more than anything, in spite of all the good he’s done. One guy with incredibly self-destructive tendencies even throws something at him as he skulks away (consider what this guy is doing, my daughter pointed out to me. He has come to believe that Superman is an evil warlord intent on global domination who is powerful enough to kill him with a thought, and he decides to antagonize him, to make Superman angry at him personally. Good thinking, Einstein.)

Later all this reverses, and again, public opinion shifts with astounding abruptness. I don’t mean “abrupt” as in “by the next day”, but rather, “by the next minute.” It’s contrived and silly, but it’s not a fatal flaw. Part of this is because even though the way things are happening lacks deftness, the fact that it’s happening makes perfect sense. So the story holds up, it’s just the execution is too breezy for its own good. I also can accept the rushed quality of these sequences because they at least do the job of moving us quickly to the more important parts of the story: it’s less critical that we see precise process of public opinion shifting than it is that just that we understand that it has.

Other problems? The so-called Justice Gang (a group of corporately sponsored superheroes who occasionally help Superman) are hit and miss.

I think Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern, while extreme, works fine, but Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) isn’t always fully convincing as a real person, and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) doesn’t really get any development at all. The movie doesn’t do a great job even highlighting what she looks like in combat, which would seem to be the basic thing you’d want to see, and I found myself distracted by the fact that she kept giving these hawk-screeches whenever she was flying at somebody. In the absence of anything meatier to remember the character for, they just come across as hokey.

And right at the end, I thought it was dumb and obvious when a secondary baddie decides to mock Hawkgirl for not being the sort who will kill him, because she’s probably just like Superman. Guess what happens to him? It’s like that guy wanted to die.

Off the top of my head, those are the main things I didn’t like about the movie. Do they sound sort of…petty? Sort of nit-picky? That’s right, they mostly are. In most of the more important aspects, I loved Superman. Or at least I liked it a lot.

So, what are some of those important aspects?

Well, first of all, there’s the pace–Superman moves along at a happy clip.

This is especially obvious right at the start. There’s no origin story here, no lengthy scenes of Krypton, no baby Superman landing on earth in a rocket. Make no mistake, I love this sort of stuff, but in a world that has had decades of more or less continuous Superman content on the big screen and the small screen, it’s just not necessary. Instead, this film opens with a bit of text that tells us that metahumans have been around for a few centuries, and that Superman landed on earth 30 years ago and has been active as a hero for three years, and indeed is currently in the middle of a fight. All the set-up the movie needs to tell its story is right there in those few sentences.

And the film continues to move along like this for its entire runtime. There’s plenty of action, but things slow down when they need to: to explore relationships or emotions, and only rarely to deliver tiresome exposition, and almost never (and I can’t stress how important this is) to throw out nostalgia-fuelled callbacks to previous Superman presentations, nor to set-up future projects in this newly minted DCU.

This leads to a related point: with one brief exception, everything that happens in this movie is important to this movie.

That may seem like a no-brainer but in a world of cinematic franchises that is frequently concern with streaming tie-in series and fuelling this with nostalgia, it isn’t. And you might think that as the starting point for the new DCU, that Superman would be pre-occupied with laying the groundwork for other projects, but instead the movies shows remarkable restraint. There are a bunch of other super-heroes (Guy Gardner, Mr. Teriffic, Hawkgirl and Metamorpho) but they all have roles in this story that justify their presence, and nothing they do feels like it’s setting up some future sequel. We don’t even get any hints or teases about upcoming villains or cosmic threats that Superman will have to deal with somewhere down the line–no Darkseid, no Doomsday, no Brainiac, nothing.

And I think that’s great! Reading about it, I know there are a few characters that are callbacks to previous projects, or call-forwards to potential future ones, but watching the movie I didn’t notice that at all, and so was never distracted from the experience of Superman itself. This is exactly the way “easter eggs” should be used–they might add something for those who know, but if you want to ignore them, you can. This philosophy even seems to extend to the movie’s mid- and post-credit scenes.

Superman has got these, because of course everyone expects it to, but all they do is offer further brief moments about Superman himself. They do not try to whet our appetite for movies that are not here yet. I know some might want to use these sequences as commercials for future movies, but I’m kind of tired of that and am happy with what we got.

There is a scene that is being used to set up another movie, but that is just folded into the movie itself–this is Supergirl’s appearance toward the end, played by Milly Alcock. But this isn’t just a cameo being shoehorned in–it’s a legitimate expansion of Superman’s character and world, and so it still fits as part of this movie. (And indeed, it actually goes a long to explain what the deal with Krypto is).

Superman‘s one “gratuitous” cameo, the only thing that actually pulled me out of the movie for a moment, is John Cena who shows up very briefly as Peacemaker (from The Suicide Squad and then his own TV series). I can’t really defend this except to say that 1) it was very short, and thus not disruptive for more than an instant and 2) it was interesting to note that he is one of the few survivors from the DCEU to make it into this new production era.

Another positive about Superman, at least for me, is just how wildly imaginative the movie’s world is.

By that, I mean it strongly vibes off of Superman’s world in the comics, at least from the 60s onward. That world is one where crazy stuff happens every day. It’s a place full of super-heroes and super-villains. It’s a place where an aliens might invade the earth, where primitive monsters might emerge from deep underground, where beings from parallel universes might broach the dimensional divides, all before lunchtime. It’s a place where crazy things might happen and do happen, so that all of our heroes have earth-shattering things to deal with, maybe in every single issue. (To get a sense of this, go read old Silver Age comics, or if you want something more recent, go read Astro City).

In Superman, this means that Superman can fight a fire-breathing kaiju that the bad guy Luthor got from somewhere (it’s never explained where), which he hopes to take to an extra-galactic zoo–a threat that is over and done with in one scene. And Lex Luthor can create a “pocket universe” that he keeps his enemies prisoner in, which has a got an anti-protons river (or something?) that takes you toward a black hole. And the Justice Gang can fight a big extra-dimensional imp over the city, and it’s not even something Superman is worried about. (This was actually one of the more mystifying parts of the trailer, where we saw what seemed to be some gigantic cosmic orb zapping the city, barely in focus in the background, while Superman and Lois were sharing a tender moment in the foreground, apparently unconcerned. Lo and behind, when I see the movie, it turns out that my impressions were exactly right! It’s nuts!)

Now I say all this as a strength for the film. Comic readers like myself have been reading this sort of craziness for years and thinking it was awesome all along. I love the fact that the movies seem to have fully caught up after all this time. With The Fantastic Four coming out in a couple of weeks, this seems to be the month where Hollywood is absolutely embracing this.

But I can understand if for some in the audience this might be a turn-off. Maybe the world will feel just too off-the-wall for them, too far out there. I can see that, but I hope they’d give this movie a chance anyway. My wife, who is a much more casual fan of science fiction or superheroes than I am (and not a comic reader at all), also enjoyed Superman, even while recognising that a lot of what is going on is very silly.

I think it all works because of perhaps one of the most important positives about Superman, which is that the characters are treated with authenticity and believability.

In other words, though the world is silly, the characters are not. Some of these characters are super-powered, some are just civilians, some are heroes and some are villains, but they are all people, and the movie takes the time to get into the humanity of the most important ones (the relative lack of this with Mr. Terrific or Hawkgirl is part of the reason I didn’t like them as much).

David Corenswet does a great job as Superman–he’s not as iconic as Christopher Reeve (it will probably be a long time before anybody can claim that) but I’d say he’s the most relatable as a person that I’ve ever seen the Man of Steel be (Tyler Hoechlin from the Superman and Lois is the only other contender). Corenswet’s Superman is easy to connect with–even with all his extraordinary abilities, he is also just a guy wearing a suit trying to do good. There are some good sequences of him in costume which highlight his intelligence and resourcefulness, as well as his power. There are scenes with him as Clark Kent, which though brief, do a good job establishing his alter-ego–he’s he’s probably the only version of Clark other than Christopher Reeve’s that I can believe people might not recognise right away as Superman.

But most interesting are the scenes with Lois (who knows his identity) or with his parents, where he’s just being himself. Here we really get a sense of his motivations, his struggles and his hopes, and we have the opportunity to be connected to Superman the man more than in any other film version of the character.

I also loved Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane (I’m a big fan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel so I’m predisposed to like Rachel Brosnahan).

Her performance is solid, and it’s married well with the writing and directing to bring the character to life. The movie takes the time to get into what Lois wants and how she approaches her role as a journalist. She’s also balanced–competent and capable, but not cartoonishly so. And the scene where Clark lets her interview him as Superman (highlighted in marketing material) is excellent, and a great way to unpack what makes both characters tick.

The other major player is of course Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, who sells the idea of Luthor being driven by irrational hatred of Superman more than any other version I’ve seen. But at the same time, the film still finds time to find his humanity–not to make him likeable or sympathetic, but to make him understandable, even with how immoral and reprehensible he is.

I also enjoyed Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen, who has a couple of nice scenes, and whose biggest challenge, amusingly, is that even though he’s a pretty normal looking guy, women everywhere seem to find him super-hot. It’s not explored at any great length but it fits well with the idea of the unhinged life that some versions of Jimmy Olsen seem to live. And I just loved Ma and Pa Kent (Neve Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vance), who are just so overwhelmingly ordinary. Lovely people, full of good values, but in most ways unimpressive. The movie makes them feel real and genuine, while still being admirable (and in this way, miles better than the version of Jonathan Kent that we saw in Man of Steel).

So beyond the good character work and the way that it plays as naturally grounded against the backdrop of the crazy world they all live in, I was also happy with the movie’s actual story. In terms of plot, it’s about Superman dealing with Luthor’s unbalanced efforts to destroy him, and trying to stop the devastation this causes to the world. With respect to character, it’s about Superman’s struggle understand his relationship with his adopted homeworld, and to come to terms with his own purpose and identity. And as regards theme, it’s about (amongst other things) the value of trust and decency, and the recognition of our common humanity, regardless of our origins. All of these things work well with each other, making for a cohesive story that delivers a meaningful punch.

Plus of course there is Krypto, who is a lot of fun.

Actually the whole thing is fun. There is fun super heroics, fun action and fun drama, all wrapped in zany high-concept goofiness that somehow never sacrifices the authenticity of the characters.

Like I said up above, Superman is not necessarily the Superman movie that has been in my head all this time. But that’s not just okay, it’s good. In fact, Superman is better than whatever movie in my head, because the movie in my head isn’t real. It doesn’t have a coherent story, consistent characters or a distinct aesthetic style.