Superman

When was the last time you felt really, really good?

Nearly fifty years ago, director Richard Donner, astride his toilet on a slow Sunday morning, received one of the most fateful phone calls in the history of show business. A couple of crank financiers had finagled the rights to a comic book, and were now offering Donner more money and more resources than any filmmaker had ever worked with to bring it to life. What they didn’t count on was that Donner would care very, very deeply about the responsibility lobbed his way. The care is evident in the final film in a scene that goes roughly like this: the female lead, Margot Kidder dangles from a helicopter hanging over the side of a skyscraper. Her grip loosens on the seatbelt as the aircraft tilts further and further off the edge. The film’s male lead, an unknown in dorky glasses and an ill-fitting suit, finds her hat on the ground and looks up; he knows she’s in danger, and knows the police and paramedics around him are helpless. And so he bounds down and across the street, tears his dress shirt to reveal a blazing gold & red “S”, and in one of cinema’s most total and magical transformations we watch Christopher Reeve fly up into the air, catch Lois Lane, and become Superman. In 1978, audiences around the world were made a promise that “You’ll Believe a Man Could Fly”, and Donner’s ability to deliver upon that promise, and his belief that maybe there was something to those comic books after all, changed the movies forever. Oversaturated as the genre may feel now, there was a time when the feeling was new and good.

It is now 2025. Superman has returned to us, and so has the feeling he embodies. Writer/director James Gunn has delivered one of the best comic book films in years, and almost certainly the best one to feature the Man of Steel in my lifetime. And not a minute too soon; you might have heard that things are a little dire at the moment, what with the encroachment of domestic fascism, and the international decay of democracy and civil rights, and the genocide and ethnocide and war crimes being commited by Israel and Russia. Movies don’t generally have the ability to solve those types of problems, but some have the ability to remind us that maybe we can. Superman is one of them. It a joyous thing, with color and life and empathy flowing through its veins. Mostly bereft of winking cameos and exhausting easter eggs for upcoming releases, Superman is, thankfully, a story about Superman. And miraculously, Gunn manages to make it a story about the everybody else, too.

No origin story. No plot to end the world. No intergalactic conference of gooey CGI bad guys. Instead, we go through a week in the life of Kal-El, known to his parents as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, known to the rest of the world as Superman (David Corenswet). There’s his private and public battles with tech-billionaire douchebag Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), the latter so envious of the former that murder seems to occupy his every thought. There’s the geopolitical fallout of having stopped morally bankrupt U.S. ally Boravia from slaughtering its neighbor Jarhanpur, the public wary of his good intentions. There’s his dog Krypto, a very good boy inbued with much of Kal-El’s powers and zero of his discipline. And then there’s his thing with Lois (Rachel Brosnahan), whose fleshed-out, back-and-forth, Howard Hawks scenes with her beau are unquestionably the best in the film. She seems to have an easier time accepting his secret identity than his natural idealism, both dazzled and frustrated by the overflowing goodness. “I question everything”, she tells him. “You think everything and everyone is beautiful.” And so, too, does the film he leads.

Gunn’s an expert within the genre; his three Guardians of the Galaxy films are beloved, and 2021’s excellent The Suicide Squad was probably the best DC release since Christopher Nolan hung up the cowl. He has his work cut out for him this time: attempting the third iteration of a character in two decades, at a moment when comic book adaptations are a dime a dozen, in an era where less people are flocking to the theaters than ever. Oh, the sigh of relief he must have breathed when Corenswet auditioned. And oh, how audiences will swoon for him. The guy seems born for the part. Not just because of how he looks and how he talks, but because of how fully he embodies the decency of Superman. Warm smiles, words of careful reassurance, clear-eyed reminders about the difference between right and wrong, cooking his girlfriend breakfast for dinner on their anniversary. When he rushes across the screen to save the lives of little girls and little dogs and little squirrels, we believe it. It takes a very good actor to make “golly” and “geez” sound like the most natural thing in the world.

It also takes a very good filmmaker to make a comic book movie that believes in something. Zack Snyder spent the better part of a decade turning the Big Blue Boy Scout into a lonely, monosyllabic statue who every other character fell over themselves comparing to a god. Gunn brings him back down to earth; he gets beat up, he gets tired, he loses faith in himself, he gets overlong phone calls from his parents. This means he needs help from others, be it Lois, Jimmy Olsen (Skylar Gisondo), the “Justice Gang” comprising of Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), middle finger-flipping Green Lantern Guy Gardiner (Nathan Fillion) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). The list goes on, which in the wrong hands might have unbalanced the story. But Gunn’s point, as it has been for the past ten years, is that good things come to those who work together; loneliness has never been a virtue in his eyes. After years of centering stories around manchild Peter Quill, I was convinced Gunn would be ill-equipped to make something this emotionally mature, to take on a character built entirely out of peachy-keen, Rockwellian purity. I’m very happy that I was wrong.

His confidence is obvious; while there are plenty of jokes and a couple of needle-drops, Gunn has become a strong enough filmmaker to avoid relying on these tricks. For one, he’s developed a visual style of his own: short lenses, acrobatic camera moves, sunny color palattes. It’s intimate without ever losing spatial geography, busy without ever making you naseous. But it’s his earnestness as a writer that’s never been more apparent, or appropriate. Every character has a story, a reason for existing, a beating heart within their chest, from Jimmy Olson’s trials with a clingy ex to Kal-El’s Kryptonian robots that yearn for feelings and names. A friend of mine asked me recently what I thought made a good director, and after rambling for a few minutes I finally spat out “thoughtfullness and empathy”. Few superhero films have genuinely demonstrated those qualities lately, but Gunn’s Superman has them oozing from every pore. As an angsty, self-centered teen, I used to see more of myself in Lex Luthor than his perfect, cast-iron nemesis. It took until now, and this movie, for me to want to be Superman.

This is supposedly the first film in yet another interconnected DC Universe, a fresh start captained by Gunn himself. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter to me, and I doubt it’ll matter to much of the movie-going public. What matters is that Superman is wonderful. What matters is that it’s magical; I’ve seen it twice cast a spell over an audience, slowly and persuasively convincing them of its kind spirit. What matters is that it’s more interested in people than in plot, in peace than in anger, in channelling a sense of good over a sense of corporate synergy. It’s a film that makes you want to fall in love, adopt a dog, call your parents, and punch a fascist in the face. It’s a film that makes you leave the theater wanting to be a better person and, maybe for the first time in a long time, convinces you that you actually can. In 1978, Richard Donner had the world believe that a man could fly. In 2025, James Gunn has me convinced that the rest of us can, too.

Superman is currently playing only in theaters.