‘Superman’ is overcrowded, but nevertheless essential

James Gunn’s new reboot is the best post-Christopher Reeve big-screen take on Superman.

It took quite a few tries, but it looks like DC has finally come up with a take on one of its major characters that doesn’t add up to a crushing disappointment.

That’s the new Superman, which is both the debut of director James Gunn’s take on the character and the ushering in of a Gunn-supervised series of new superhero films. It might not go down as an all-time great entry in the genre, but Gunn and his collaborators have made some truly inspired choices, and the film avoids most of the major mistakes that have befallen superhero movies in the recent past, inside and outside the DC universe.

Sure, the plot is too overstuffed by about 50 percent, there are just a few too many characters, and the film offers about a dozen little ideas, rather than one big one.

But overall, I was impressed with Gunn’s take. It’s better than any of the films Zack Snyder made with the character — although I’m a hater of neither Man of Steel or the Snyder Cut of Justice League— while also breezing past Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, making it the best live-action Superman film since the Christopher Reeve era.

Gunn, of course, directed the Guardians of the Galaxy series for the MCU, and he proves a much better stylistic match, in making the Marvel-to-DC jump, than Joss Whedon did last decade. Sure, the tone is a bit lighter and more jokey than the Snyder films were, but that’s likely what was needed at this point.

The visuals are fantastic, making great use of a beautiful color palette. The film was shot mostly in and around Cleveland and Cincinnati, and while that might not be an intuitive stand-in for Metropolis, it never looks like the sort of CGI mush that was shot in a warehouse in Atlanta, like all the recent Marvel pictures did. It manages to have a third act, also, that isn’t completely incoherent.

There’s also a dog, named Krypto, which could have been maudlin and manipulative, but never is.

Also, Gunn’s script doesn’t bother with a Superman origin story, which, since we’ve seen it so many times already, is the right decision, although there is a surprising retcon of the usual story that the film does creative things with.

James Gunn was the right director, and David Corenswet — plucked from obscurity, like Reeve and so many other Supermen of the past — proves the right Clark Kent and Superman. He’s charismatic, commands the screen, and is a night-and-day difference from the brooding take Henry Cavill had. I expect him to continue to play this character for the next decade.

Rachel Brosnahan is the best Lois Lane since Margot Kidder, while Nicholas Hoult plays Lex Luthor as, essentially, Elon Musk, a power-mad tech entrepreneur, with his fingers in everything from war profiteering to Internet trolling, with the latter illustrated with a sublime sight gag involving monkeys. If you’ve seen The Great, you know that “smarmy villain” is what Hoult does best.

The film actually introduces some more obscure minor superheroes who actually make an impression, led by Edi Gathegi as wisecracking science guy Mister Terrific and Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl. I’m not sure if the idea is to later feature these characters in spinoffs, but I hope that eventually happens, especially with Mister Terrific.

The successful score is by John Murphy and David Fleming, incorporating John Williams’ famous score from the original Superman, and doing a much better job of fusing a new score with the Williams classic than the recent Jurassic Park sequel did.

I also liked how the film pulls Superman into the modern world, with references to how Clark Kent might handle social media and the like, although whoever called out the unethical behavior of all of the journalists in the movie had a good point.

I was on vacation the week of the movie’s release and didn’t see it early, so I was exposed to the discourse about Superman before I got to see the movie itself. To address the “controversies” about the film…

The thing about Superman being an “immigrant” has been a part of the character for as long as he’s existed, and the discourse about it now is more about an interview Gunn gave during the press tour than anything in the text of the film. If you’re mad about that, there’s probably something wrong with you.

Additionally, a lot of people seem to have concluded that a subplot in the film about the invasion of one fictional nation, Jarhanpur, by another, Boravia, is a clear Israel/Palestine allegory, and therefore the film is shockingly anti-Israel for a major Hollywood blockbuster. Some see this as a good thing, others… not so much.

Having now seen the film, I think this is… a bit overstated. It’s a fairly generic military conflict in which one side is the clear aggressor, but the film was being conceived when Russia/Ukraine, not Israel/Palestine, was in the news. And the evil Baravian leader speaks with a thick Eastern European accent and seems to have way more in common with Slobodan Milosevic than with Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin.

And while the citizens of Jarhanpur appear to look Middle Eastern and it’s the desert, we also learn the countries are in Eastern Europe (?), it doesn’t seem to be an ethnic or religious conflct, and what we learn about the actual motivations of the war have almost nothing to do with what’s going on in Israel/Palestine.

At any rate, after all those years of Shazams and Black Adams and the Snyder Wars and post-credit stingers with characters we will never see again, kudos to DC and James Gunn for getting this one mostly right.