Ever since the 1978-1987 run of Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve ended, filmmakers have been puzzling over how to make the character vulnerable in a meaningful way, to ensure that dramatic conflict in his stories doesn’t look like a breeze for such a godlike figure. Usually, this has involved looking to whatever version came directly before. With 2006’s Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer tried to tease emotion out of the characters’ own memories of the early Reeve movies, making it a strange but heartfelt follow-up. In 2013’s Man of Steel, Zack Snyder wanted to break from Returns’ constant challenges of lifting and Kryptonite; he placed Superman in an all-out brawl with an equally superpowered being, and added some ambivalence about the nature of heroism to boot. Now, writer-director James Gunn pivots away from that grimness in his 2025 Superman, for a story where the hero’s challenges are often downright whimsical, even as they rough him up.
Gunn’s major innovation here is dropping in on Superman (David Corenswet) decades into his life on Earth, and a few years into his stint as the protector of Metropolis, that great city so often beset with otherworldly disasters. In a break from superhero reboot orthodoxy, his origin story — you know the one; a baby alien sent to Earth from a dying planet and raised by Kansas farmers — is much-mentioned, but not dramatized.
As the movie opens, Superman is starting to dip his toe into international affairs. The results are not much less controversial than they are in the similar storyline in Snyder’s Batman v. Superman, in the previous incarnation of the big-screen DC Comics Universe. The audience first meets Superman fresh from a defeat at the hands of another superhero fighting on behalf of Boravia, a (fictional) country he has recently stopped from invading a neighboring country.
Gunn quickly dispenses with questions about whether Superman should serve as the world’s police force. He isn’t the only superpowered being (“metahuman,” in DC parlance) on Earth, but the others in the movie — Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) — are corporate-backed and seem less likely to operate without clear government sanction. Still, they ensure that Superman is not expected to personally fix every single worldly disaster. Considering that at one point, he goes out of his way to save a rodent during a city-wide catastrophe, this is probably a relief.
But this Superman, still early in his relationship with reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), has some psychological kinks to work out, mainly related to his superheroic self-image. Even if he no longer wears the Jesus-like onus of mankind’s great savior, making decisions and experiencing blowback as one savior among many nonetheless takes its toll. Parts of the public regard him with suspicion and second-guess his priorities, chipping away at his sense of purpose.
Those second-guessers include malevolent billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who neither Superman nor his human alter ego Clark Kent have apparently yet met. But they also include Lois, who knows about Clark’s high-flying secret, and feels ethically conflicted over his habit of granting himself carefully curated interviews at the newspaper where they both work. In their first big scene together, Superman lets her take a crack at interviewing him, and rankles at her questions about his unilateral actions in Borovia.
Corenswet, like so many Superman performers before him, has a difficult line to walk, figuring out how to convey Clark’s essential goodness without coming across like a ramrod-straight parody of an overgrown Boy Scout. Corenswet leans into the dorkiness charmingly, while teasing out some human irritation at the pitfalls of his chosen life. (Superman knows he shouldn’t read the tweets or pay attention to the trending hashtags, and yet…) Though a little bit of Superman’s faith in humanity gets the told-not-shown treatment, with Lois describing him in terms we don’t fully see played out on screen, Corenswet squares the hero’s big (and obviously heavily CG’d) physical feats with a surprising amount of interior conflict.
There’s more to Gunn’s Superman story than simply Superman chafing over public criticism and private self-doubt, but it all feels rather less cataclysmic than the Snyder version, despite another set of tall buildings that eventually do tumble like dominos. In some ways, Superman illustrates the limitations of the current superhero industrial complex, with Gunn swapping out Snyder’s preferred overused visual signatures for his own without rethinking the visual grammar of franchise filmmaking.
So instead of Snyder’s documentary-style snap-zooms, slow-motion interludes, and earthy color schemes, Gunn uses a hovering videogame-y camera, images with overexposed bright whiteness, and weirdly distorted close-ups. It might sound horrifying to admit this, but the Superman visual style makes Gunn’s statements in support of the 2023 DC flop The Flash seem, in retrospect, less like PR glad-handing, and more like genuine kinship. This movie isn’t as garish or misjudged as The Flash at its worst, but it’s similarly cartoony, and, for that matter, plenty toyetic. This isn’t the Superman equivalent of superhero high-bar marks like The Dark Knight, Logan, or Black Panther.
Gunn’s real superpower, though, is his ability to wear this comic-book nonsense lightly — to take it seriously within the world of the movie without feeling like he’s assigning homework. The other DC figures present in this movie aren’t primarily here to tease their own spin-offs or refer to comics lore; they’re obviously included because Gunn saw potential for some Guardians of the Galaxy-like testiness between teammates, and because he likes to depict oddball superpowers. (OK, one late-breaking cameo is definitely there to tease a future spinoff, but it’s also played for laughs, not portent.)
This is a Superman movie that favors sci-fi weirdness and slapstick over lugubrious exposition; it’s nearly as kid-friendly as the ’90s Superman: The Animated Series. There’s even a major plot point about Superman’s Kryptonian parents that could have easily fit on the cover of a Silver Age comic teasing a character-defying revelation. An exclamation of “This is not an imaginary story!” would not be out of place. The movie’s humor and sweetness offer plenty for comics-friendly adults, too, provided they haven’t taken a flying leap off the superhero train.
Yet there is a nagging feeling that, like some of the Clark characterization we glean from Lois, some of the movie’s resonance as an immigration story is vague and thin enough to have been boosted in post — or worse, played up on the press tour, after the movie was actually finished. More pointedly, Gunn uses Superman to amalgamate Elon Musk and Donald Trump into several different villainous figures. Hoult isn’t imitating either of them in his Luthor mannerisms, but there’s still plenty of Musk in his control room of young-ish gamer minions, believing in his promise of a tech-driven utopia that, naturally, he will rule himself. For that matter, the fictional countries on the brink of conflict clearly bring to mind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, in an attempt to make a Superman for “everyone,” it feels like Gunn may have watered the guy down, passing on the opportunity for him to take more contemporary versions of stands that were once commonplace. Historically, Superman would appear in PSAs against racism or in favor of public work projects: Here, he’s more likely to defend his love of the radio pop that he mistakes for punk rock.
Still, Gunn didn’t invent 21st-century superheroes with watery politics; that’s most of them, actually, and that tendency has only gotten worse with the quasi-political, say-nothing likes of Captain America: Brave New World. At least this one feels like the work of an individual; Superman is a surprisingly apt fit for the writer-director’s cute-ugly, emo-edgelord sensibility, with less belabored sentimentality than his Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Gunn cuts through the treacle with fists: Where Snyder’s Superman often looked stricken by his own torment (or annoyed at Batman), this one spends a lot of the movie getting his ass kicked before bouncing back. Even the bounding enthusiasm of his super-dog Krypto poses a minor threat to his well-being.
Gunn doesn’t just turn down the dial on Superman’s powers to hastily raise the stakes, either. If anything, he seems more interested in the mechanics of Superman’s individual saves than how he confronts truly apocalyptic threats. He spends much of the movie getting knocked around, and Gunn uses a more physically vulnerable Superman to key into his resilience as one of the most stubbornly touching aspects of his heroism. Yes, there’s also a hint of corporate resilience here, as Superman returns yet again for another universe-rebooting kickoff. But Gunn knows how to locate the human frailty in big-budget behemoths without weighing them down.
Superman opens in theaters on July 11.
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