Superman is a manifesto for a franchise. It had no other choice but to be. The weight of expectation is so heavy at this point that even the audience might feel a little tension in their shoulders as they shuffle in to take their seats. Superman needs to save the comic book genre from itself; from box office flop after box office flop. Superman needs to do right by one of pop culture’s greatest heroes. Superman needs to provide DC with a fresh start, a universe co-headed by its director James Gunn (previously behind the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and 2021’s The Suicide Squad). Superman needs to pacify the internet horde still convinced the character’s previous guardian, Zack Snyder, was betrayed by maleficent conspirators and not simply the ebb and flow of the industry.
God, it’s exhausting even to think about. But every spinning plate here – and this is a dense, busy film – has been carefully balanced on the fingers of America’s favourite caped Boy Scout, with his matinee idol grin and heart as big as a blue whale. Above all, Gunn’s Superman understands exactly how this character and this world should make us feel, that there’s always pride to be found in hope, however naive its pursuit might feel on a planet that kills empathy on the regular.
While one hand manoeuvres the chess pieces for Gunn’s rebooted vision of the DC universe, the other hand steadily draws focus back to its central notion of what it means to be a hero in a system run on vested interests. And it serves both aims to, essentially, drop audiences into what feels like the middle of a Superman film, even if the effect is a little disorientating at first: Superman (David Corenswet) is known to this world, already comfortably saving lives and typing lines as his secret alias Clark Kent, journalist for the Daily Planet. He’s three months into a relationship with fellow reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who’s all clued up on the fact he’s actually from the planet Krypton. His arch-nemesis, CEO Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), is already seething from the sidelines.
We’ve also been spared about a decade of dreary origin stories for the Justice Gang, Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi, who nicely styles out the character’s cool-headed reserve), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). They’re already operating here as corporate-sponsored heroes, backed by Sean Gunn’s Maxwell Lord. Superman, meanwhile, is fresh from stopping a US-backed imperialist power, Boravia, from invading the country of Jarhanpur. He did it without a single casualty. In his books, that’s a job well done. Only, he didn’t play by the rules of politics. The internet’s started to turn on him, with his status as an alien (or immigrant, technically) weaponised as a source of fear and suspicion.
Gunn’s script, in this respect, is making the best use of the genre as a vast, ideological playground. In this Metropolis, as in all good Metropolises, we can test out our collective values and question how they’ve been constructed. And there’s an added emotional clarity to the central trio of performances, which both exist in conversation with and are distinct from how the roles were played by Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, and Gene Hackman in Richard Donner’s 1978 film. Corenswet, who’s such a natural fit for the part that it’s a little scary, lends him an endearing, almost childlike restlessness; Brosnahan pushes Lois’s internal conflict between love and journalistic duty; Hoult goes for spittle-flecked insecurity.
Superman is conscious enough of its own history to work in elements of John Williams’s 1978 theme. But this is, distinctly, still a James Gunn film in a genre where authorial voice is vanishingly hard to find. He shows a little more restraint with the needle drops here, though his regular cinematographer Henry Braham still approaches action with 360-degree fluidity. There’s once more that silly, absurdist humour, and a fondness for creatures great and small (Krypto, the superpowered canine, has a surprisingly prominent role, and acts exactly as a mischievous canine should). As a manifesto, it’s all pretty convincing.
Dir: James Gunn. Starring: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced. Cert 12A, 130 minutes.
‘Superman’ is in cinemas from 11 July
