Superman: identity crises, fascist space holograms and a super furry animal

The Guardian

13 hours ago

James Gunn's Superman is a curious film: so earnest, so heartfelt, and so defiantly weird it sometimes feels less like a reboot of the world's most iconic superhero and more like an elaborate fan project. Most of us will be relieved we've said goodbye to the heavy metal space Jesus of the Zack Snyder years, and that Gunn has avoided paying too much retro cosplay tribute to the Christopher Reeve era. This is undeniably a Superman we've never seen before on the big screen: a Kal-El who's deeply human, flawed, and more likable for it.
The new Man of Steel, played with boyish charm and the right amount of golden retriever energy by David Corenswet, spends most of the movie juggling black holes, battling clone siblings, and dealing with the looming realisation that his space dad might have been one bad day away from full-blown genocide. And yet there's always the sneaking suspicion he would break off from all this in a second if you asked him to fix your router and play Enya until your existential dread subsides.
Here's a deep dive into the new movie's themes and revelations, as we all try to work out whether Gunn has reinvented the superhero film – or just lovingly detonated it.
We're used to Superman being first on to the scene. In Richard Donner's 1978 classic, Kal-El was greeted with wonder and open-mouthed awe by a terrestrial population who had never seen anything like him. But in the new DCU, we learn that superheroes have been around on this version of Earth for centuries. Superman isn't even the first of his kind in the modern era, and this completely recolours how people see him – presumably because, across those decades, the whole 'metahuman' thing must have had as many PR disasters as miracle saves.
Which brings us to the Justice Gang: Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern (Guy Gardner), Edi Gathegi's Mister Terrific, and Isabela Merced's Hawkgirl. We're never quite sure if they're supposed to be the good guys, or just government-licensed super-Narcs with branding. But their presence amplifies the sense that humanity has yet to get its collective head around these costumed anomalies. And who can blame them, when Gardner is a one-man HR complaint, Mister Terrific delivers every line like he's moderating his own Ted Talk, and Hawkgirl has all the enthusiasm of a substitute teacher on the last day of term?
There's clearly a fair amount of suspicion around superheroes – a tension that's exploited by the villainous Luthor to portray Superman as a ticking alien timebomb in a cape.
Did you buy the evil tech bro's raging hatred and distrust of the Man of Steel? This is one pillar of the Superman mythos that Gunn chose not to jettison, but I would have loved to know quite why Lex is so determined to take Kal-El down, especially when there are plenty of other metaheroes around to interrogate, sideline, or frame for an alien tech conspiracy of your own making. Is he just livid that Superman keeps saving people for free, completely devaluing the scalable, app-based rescue model Lex had soft-launched in beta? Does he secretly loathe the idea of a being who can fly, lift mountains and still doesn't own a single crypto wallet? Could it all boil down to the unbearable truth that Superman became Earth's most beloved figure without raising seed funding, writing a thought-leader thread, or launching a podcast?
Much has been made of erstwhile TV Superman Dean Cain's horrified reaction to Gunn imagining the last son of Krypton as the ultimate immigrant hero (even though this has been part of the superhero's identity since at least 1938). But if this version of Luthor really is supposed to be a cipher for Maga views on alien invaders, isn't he a strange one? He's certainly too polished and corporate to convincingly stand in for a movement that would more likely have live-streamed that bit where they storm the Fortress of Solitude.
It may still be year zero in the new DCU, but it's still a blessed relief that Gunn has avoided giving us portals to other dimensions, alternate timelines and cameos from moustachioed Supermen from Earth-47. This doesn't mean, however, that the comic-book weirdness hasn't been dialled up to 11, as we're still treated to a pocket universe, a dumb version of Supes who's controlled by Luthor with hi-tech drones and a manual for every single move ever seen in Mortal Kombat, and a guy (Metamorpho) who's capable of turning his own leg into Kryptonite in order to take down Kal-El.
This is big, bonkers sci-fi, but it's refreshingly self-contained and also a rare thing: a superhero film more interested in identity than interdimensional travel. No collapsing timelines, no digital resurrections, and no mid-credits cameos from Nicolas Cage in a wireframe suit. Just one Superman, one moral crisis, and one very complicated crystal palace full of daddy issues. Which brings us to …
Perhaps Gunn's bravest – and most controversial – move is to completely retcon the story of how Superman got to Earth in the first place. Rather than Jor-El and Lara lovingly placing the baby Kryptonian into a space capsule and sending him across the cosmos as a gift to humanity, it turns out they targeted our solar system so baby Supes could go full Zod the moment he grew up.
Suddenly, this is the comic-book movie reimagined as a sci-fi identity crisis – built out of grief, clones, and orphan guilt, then dunked in a vat of Kryptonian tech and fired out of a narrative T-shirt cannon. Rather than a Superman who descends from the heavens in slow motion to save the world with a glinting kiss curl, he's more like a farm boy in the throes of an existential meltdown, awkwardly squeezing into his dad's super-suit while discovering that his entire origin story might be a lie.
Worse still, he learns this in front of a watching world that's already crowned him as saviour, symbol, and all-purpose moral compass. In moments like these, it's as if Gunn has given us The Truman Show – if Truman could fly, shoot lasers, and was being emotionally micromanaged by a fascist space hologram. Is this the new DC big cheese making Superman's backstory more interesting? Or just seeing how many daddy issues he can cram into one cape?
Superman's best friend is an absolute scene-stealer, a brilliant mix of emotional support animal and furry missile. If anyone's going to get a spin-off in this brave new DC world, it's surely the laser-eyed pooch who could probably take out Darkseid if you gave him a chew toy and pointed him in the right direction. Later on in the movie, we find out he actually belongs to Kal-El's cousin Kara Zor-El, played by Milly Alcock, after she turns up to engage in some sarky super-banter with Superman. Apparently Kara's not around a lot because she prefers partying on planets where she can actually get drunk. This is definitely not your dad's Supergirl.
It's just one more element of Superman that made me think that, despite the tonal unevenness, the clone chaos and the occasional Kryptonian info-dump, I'm still genuinely intrigued to see where Gunn plans to take us next. Because even if it doesn't always fly straight, this is definitely a DC we've not seen before.
What did you think? Is this the rebirth Superman needed – or just an interstellar therapy session with a cape and a dog?