The New Superman Is a Corrective to the Modern Superhero Movie

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The first word spoken by Superman (David Corenswet) in James Gunn’s lively reboot of the venerable comic-book franchise is “Golly.” (Well, other than a few inarticulate moans of pain at the movie’s very start, when we find this far-from-invulnerable Man of Steel lying beaten and bloody in the snow not far from his Antarctic retreat, the Fortress of Solitude.) That squeaky-clean interjection establishes right from the jump what will distinguish this Superman from so many 21st-century iterations of the now 87-year-old character: As played by Corenswet, Superman is earnest. Boyish. Sweet. Rather than being an alienated interplanetary refugee hovering glumly in space above a world where he will never truly belong, as he was in Zack Snyder’s unpleasantly dour 2013 Man of Steel, this Superman is very much a citizen of the Earth, a flawed and struggling human who makes mistakes and tries to fix them. Gunn, who’s revitalized the genre before with his playful Guardians of the Galaxy series, taps into the optimistic and kid-friendly tone of Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie and 1980’s SupermanII without seeming, as Bryan Singer did in 2006’s Superman Returns, to pay those classics solemnly reverential homage. In its modest way, this kind-spirited two-hour-long romp works as a corrective to the increasingly bloated and self-serious comic-book movie as we’ve come to know it.

The setup is blessedly constructed so as to sidestep the need for yet another laborious origin story. A series of witty explanatory titles situates us in time by establishing what happened three centuries, three decades, three years, etc., ago—right up to the three-minutes-ago mark, when, we learn, Superman was defeated in combat by his fellow “metahuman” the Hammer of Boravia. In the universe according to Gunn, the presence of superpowered beings on Earth is not a novelty worthy of “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”–style commentary from humans but an accepted fact of everyday life: At one point, two characters in a high-rise apartment chat over a cup of cocoa while, just outside the window, metahumans contend with an outer-space creature who’s little more than a minor disturbance.

Once his wounds have been healed by a staff of attentive robots at Supes’ icy man cave, he returns to his undercover life as Clark Kent, reporter for the Metropolis newspaper the Daily Planet. In the timeline established by those opening titles, his romance with fellow journalist Lois Lane (a sparklingly funny Rachel Brosnahan, star of The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel) is far enough along that he has recently revealed to her his true identity. This is a bold narrative choice, in that it removes the when-will-she-find-out suspense from their scenes together, but it’s also a smart one, in that we meet these two characters just at the moment when they’re taking their intimacy with each other to the next level. The scenes where they spar about the journalistic ethics of Clark publishing exclusive interviews with the Kryptonian who is secretly himself—and where Lois tries to conduct her own interview with her willing but publicity-shy new super-boyfriend—are among the movie’s best written.

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On the action front, Superman has a less pleasant but maybe just as personal relationship to negotiate. His archenemy Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), here styled as an egotistical tech magnate trying to stick his tentacles into national politics and international conflicts (timely!), has allied himself with the fictional nation of Boravia, led by a dictator (Zlatko Burić) who’s about to invade the also-made-up Jarhanpur. By standing up to this aggression on the part of Boravia (see: his aforementioned showdown with the Hammer thereof), Superman has put himself on the bad side of both Luthor and the U.S. government, which is backing the Boravian strongman.

Luthor’s company, LuthorCorp, has developed technology advanced enough to construct an interdimensional “pocket universe” where the villain maintains his own gulag-style prison; Superman, at one point captured there, befriends a sympathetic metahuman named Rex (Barry’s Anthony Carrigan), who enables his escape and later comes to his and humanity’s aid. Also intermittently helpful are the squabbling members of the Justice Gang, a trio of metahuman heroes that includes Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Green Lantern (an amusingly preening Nathan Fillion), and Mister Terrific (the excellent Edi Gathegi), a tech whiz whose ability to nip in between dimensions makes him a crucial ally late in the story. Just as key to the action as any humanoid meta-being is Superman’s cape-clad dog Krypto—a scruffy sidekick who would risk terminal cuteness were he not a believably ill-behaved pet rather than a virtuous canine in the Lassie mode.

Gunn’s script could be accused of stuffing too many characters and storylines into what should be a simple Saturday-matinee plot. There’s an arc about Superman’s long-lost Kryptonian parents that threatens to morph into a ponderous origin myth of the kind the film otherwise steers clear of, though this thread does get tied up in a lovely moment of self-recognition for the Man of Steel. And while Lois is never reduced to the passivity of a damsel in distress, she does spend a lot of time late in the movie just sort of standing around, stuck at the doorway of an interdimensional portal or witnessing a grand-scale fight sequence from within the safety of a magically created transparent bunker. These feel like problems that the screenplay never quite bothered to resolve, but they don’t slow down the movie’s brisk pace or get in the way of its buoyant tone. The general atmosphere of warmth and goodwill is combined with a subtle pro-immigration message that comes through most strongly in the scenes in which Superman/Clark visits his loving adoptive parents on their Kansas farm. Though this $225million tentpole was obviously conceived long before Zohran Mamdani’s underdog victory, its conviction that being a genuinely decent person constitutes a political stance in itself reminded me of the cautious optimism that his ascent has enabled among many battle-worn residents of my own real-life Metropolis: What if, instead of forever grittily rebooting the same stories, we let ourselves hope for something different and good?

Now that James Gunn, along with producer Peter Safran, has been made the co-CEO of the DC cinematic universe, maybe that comic-book brand, which has long lagged far behind Marvel when it comes to making blockbusters that capture the public zeitgeist, will emerge as a creative and box-office contender. But even if this Superman remains an anomaly in the superhero-movie cosmos, the discovery of the winningly un-macho David Corenswet—without a doubt the best Superman since Christopher Reeve, who like Corenswet was a hunky Juilliard graduate with a bashful, dimpled smile—is enough to lift this new version of the long-beloved character into the sky.