After involving himself with a conflict between Boravia and Jarhanpur, breaking federal law in the process, Superman (David Corenswet) found himself the target of Ultraman, a powerful entity that handed the Kryptonian being his first defeat.  Despite public opinion beginning to waver on him, Superman is determined to stop the unjust invasion of Jarhanpur by Boravia, and after recovering at the Fortress of Solitude, he again makes his way back to Metropolis to formulate another plan of attack wile balancing his duties as an everyday, normal human, Clark Kent, reporter for The Daily Planet.  As he gathers more information about the invasion, he begins to uncover that billionaire technology developer and military contractor, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has a vested interest in the fall of Jarhanpur. 

James Gunn writes and directs Superman for Warner Brothers and DC Studios, the inaugural film in the latest iteration of the comic book universe after the Marvel-alum was tasked, along with fellow producer Peter Safran, on creating a large-scale narrative that could be more competitive with the Disney counterpart with this overarching phase being titled “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters.”  Running 129 minutes, the film eschews the temptation to present another origin story for one of the most famous characters in all of comics, and instead opens in the aftermath of the hero’s defeat.  It is a bold strategy that helps shave potentially 40 minutes of well-trodden ground off of the total runtime, but that is about where the inventiveness ends as Gunn rummages back through his same old bag of tricks, so while fans of this director’s specific flare may find the film enjoyable, anyone looking for something akin to the previous DC films – perfect counterprogramming to the cheeky humor, corporate servitude, and poor visuals compared to the Marvel films – will leave disappointed. 

The biggest issue with the film is the lack of visual appeal.  Gunn has employed a bright blue and red color palate reminiscent of the vibrant hues of the Saturday morning cartoons or the illustrated pages of the comic books, and also instructed costumer designer Judianna Makovsky to dress the title hero in the blue body suit with red briefs.  That is all well and good – and a reprieve from the desaturated grey tones that plague many modern blockbusters that try to hide shoddy CGI – but the way he instructs cinematographer Henry Braham to frame the images and editors William Hoy, Jason Ballantine, and Craig Alpert to assemble the footage, it looks atrocious and downright juvenile especially when it is coming from a studio with money available to them.  That it made it this far is a clear sign of a creative choice gone awry and a studio too scared to tell its new resident egoist to go back to the drawing board.  If this is to be a sign of what is to come – and, honestly, it shares a lot of the same visual cues as Andy Muschietti‘s The Flash (2023) – it sets a frightening precedent.  Beyond the clearly layered, heads-on flying scenes, or the pixelated mess of a proton river, the fight scenes devolve into everything wrong with modern action films; too fast, and too much smash.  It is incomprehensible, and while it was a bold move to set these altercations largely in the daylight where there is less room to hide the digital artifacts, it is still wild that a studio hedging so much of its future on this title would allow it to hit 4,135 screens looking the way that it does. 

While the film leaves much to be desired in terms of visual appeal, casting director John Papsidera assembled a competent troupe to inhabit Metropolis.  Unfortunately, Gunn’s script is the most formidable foe and with few exceptions, the cast struggles to save their performances under Gunn’s juvenile tendencies.  Corenswet, to his credit, is a serviceable hero at the front of the franchise, but the role is so dully written that he is the least memorable part of his own film.  Superman, by default, is a tough character on screen because his powerset makes him nearly invincible so there needs to be something else there for audiences to grab on to and foster a connection.  Instead of building out this character, Gunn saddles the actor with terrible one liners that make the film feel completely unserious tonally while thematically being rather deep. Gunn either does not trust his audiences enough to process the story he is telling, or subconsciously he does not trust his own competence as a screenwriter that he constantly has to undermine and disarm any moment of sentiment with cheesy, misplaced, humor.

Net to Superman, Hoult’s Lex occupies probably the second most amount of screentime of the main cast, but again his motivations are so black and white, bad guy bad/good guy good, that he is hardly an engaging villain despite the jaw-tiring amount of scenery chewing the actor is – admittedly 100% – committed to doing.  Without a real motivation to help inform the front two acts, we cling to the hope that Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) may help to better set these characters up as actual people instead of archetypes, but she is relegated to stooge-like character asking questions not of Superman, but of Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), with whom she spends most of her screentime with.  Gathegi is one of the standouts of the film, saddled more with exposition especially in the more goofy sci-fi aspects of the plot, but he is able to imbue the character with the right gruff sensibility that counteracts some of the pesky, sillier aspects of the film.  The other standout is Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), a slightly bumbling reporter at The Daily Planet, who quickly finds himself in over his head given his past involvement with Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio); a thankless role that Gunn, quite rudely, keeps returning to as the butt of his jokes. 

Ultimately, the jokes are the major undoing of the Superman, a film that inherently was focused on themes of immigration and human dignity, but as the world around us continued to devolve, it became a frightful mirror of not only immigration, but an indictment of billionaire private contractors and the military industrial complex supporting a genocidal army for personal gain.  To be fair to Gunn, this script was in development before the real world headlines mirrored the headlines gracing the top fold of The Daily Planet, but that he takes these heavy and important themes and still treats the film with such a lack of severity shows his weakness as a screenwriter.  Nothing matters in this film.  We do not need, and thankfully are spared, an intricate understanding of the Boravia and Jarhanpur conflict, but even without the parallels to conflicts raging today, Gunn’s conclusion wipes its hands of any lasting impact.  Beyond that, Metropolis is in near ruins, but Superman flies off with his lady and all is well in their sheltered world.  Again, this is an emblematic problem with many films in the action genre – especially comic book films – where the hero skips off despite the massive loss and destruction left behind by their exploits, but given how unsubtly Gunn weaves in these real world issues and themes, to take such a saccharine shortcut at the end makes it feel like he was using these real world struggles as little more than props for his slobbering vision in the same sneakily nefarious way that the development and deployment of the atomic bombs was tied into the backstory of Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) in Chloé Zhao’s Eternals (2021). 

With Gunn at the helm of the new DC Universe, the franchise takes a pivotal first step forward; a large step, but one that lands quite softly.  There is no personal identity here as seen in Angel Manuel Soto‘s delightfully campy Blue Beetle (2023), unless of course one counts Gunn’s cloying and desperate-to-be-cool voice.  Perhaps it is simply age catching up with the Kryptonian almost 9 decades since he first graced the pages of the $0.10 cent comic books, and while Gunn does try to modernize the character, the result is paralyzingly vague in the details not to mention the strange clash of digital and physical media at play in the background.  Had the film been more singularly focused on Superman instead of setting up all of these potential avenues to branch out, perhaps this hollow ring would have sounded more layered and interesting, but there is no arc or growth for our hero.  Sure, his moral compass is an integral part of who he is, but Gunn actively refuses to define the various conflicts that are at play across the runtime in favor of showing off his new toys.  Simply put, Superman finds himself sidelined for much of his own movie, not even to focus on his nemesis Lex, but to pivot attention over towards The Justice Gang.  The film may be building towards something – most likely, Gunn’s ever-growing ego – but Gunn committed the cardinal sin in franchise filmmaking; not focusing on the film at hand.