This movie is definitely the best live action Superman film since Christopher Reeve’s. It is charming, bombastic, wholesome and packed with a love of comic book absurdity as well as ham and cheese. If you wanted a grounded and realistic portal of Superman, not only is this movie not for you, but why are you even watching Superman to begin with? No really, Superman is a character that’s powers are so absurd and ridiculous that he can be very hard for people to write or make interesting because it’s so easy to forget there is a person behind all the punching, flying and laser eyes. The fact that James Gunn remembered that there is a man within Superman, and builds the story around Clark Kent as a person and how choosing kindness, empathy and compassion is always needed no matter how hard it is to implement in our cynical, complicated world that our hero lives in.
Now there are a lot of people saying that this movie is inherently political and yes, it is. The fact that simply having a movie about a dude from another world who flies around in spandex and has nothing but love and compassion for his friends, family as well as pity and mercy towards his enemies would somehow be considered controversial at all to some people is exactly why our society needs a film like this. Yes, there are political satire elements that are so overt that they have the subtly of a rocket launcher. But that’s the point of Superman, to be a man trying to bring the best out in everyone around him and not have to hide his ideals from a world that is so easy to forget such things at a pin drop or because it’s convenient for than regardless of political alignment. He is a character that should always choose helping others even if doing so is harder. If having basic human kindness is now a political statement, then according to Clark himself in this film, “That’s Punk Rock,”.
David Corenswet brings a performance as Superman that is not only strong and powerful, but also sweet, naive to his own detriment and even kind of just dorky in the best way possible. During a fight with a giant monster his super powered allies; Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathen Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) get fed up with the fight taking too long and opt to kill it. Superman laments that they could have found a more humane way to get rid of the monster than killing it because it was basically a wild animal that has no concept of morality. When his girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) starts asking genuinely intelligent journalistic questions about the international conflict he threw himself into just to protect civilian lives, he gets genuinely upset because he literally did not think of the political ramifications at all. When he surrenders himself to the US government after the horrible truth of why his parents brought him to earth is revealed he turns himself in just to make the world not be afraid of him, despite not realizing the full grasp of the amount of pies Lex Luthor has his fingers in resulting in him being held in an illegal prison for superhumans run by Lex Luthor.
On that note, Nicholas Hoult’s performance as Lex Luthor is one of the greatest evil, mad scientist, billionaire performances. It will be a gold standard of super villains for years to come. Every time he is on screen, he exudes an aura of delusional grandeur, contempt for basic human decency, and just pure weaponized pettiness. There was not one scene where I did not want to see Lex Luthor get punched right in his smug bald face. He breaks into Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, Kidnaps Krypto the Super Dog, and kills a street vendor in Russian Roulette while interrogating Superman. Lex Luthor does not view human life and relations as even transactional; that’s at best generous. Lex Luthor views everyone and everything around himself as tools that exist for him to use as he sees fit. He discards people violently when he no longer needs them due to his insecurities about himself. In the face of a world where super powers are making having nearly unlimited resources and money not enough, he would risk everything to feed his own ego. By the end of the film, he nearly destroys the Earth just to hurt the one man he cannot buy or influence, all for the sake of his narcissism.
Yet, Superman, despite having every reason to just kill this man by the movie’s end, just has nothing but pity for Lex. He views the fact that Lex could have used his resources and power to help others as a waste of a brilliant mind. The idea that one man would go so far just to hurt one person is so absurd that when all is said and done, Superman just feels confused and bad for a man that I know I would not have. Most of us, had we been thrown into a similar interaction would have wished irreparable harm upon a monster such as Lex. Thankfully, Krypto throws Lex around like a squeaky toy while Superman scolds his dog for misbehaving to my personal delight. Never once does Superman want Lex Luthor to die. He wants him to get better and hopes that someday he can. The fact that Superman is willing to show such a powerful level of kindness to a mad man hell bent on hurting him is exactly why Superman is Super.
Gremlin Reviews 