I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time

Recently (as of this posting) my wife and I got to see the latest SUPERMAN movie, in the theaters (as Rao the Sun God intended for it to be seen.) It was very satisfying seeing a good Superman movie, where the movie is good and Superman is good.

Before anyone decides to attack me for not respecting Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Henry Cavill’s portayal of Superman, please understand that I defended Man of Steel from what I felt was overly-harsh criticism when it came out. Don’t believe me? I have the receipts.

I will admit that I gave Snyder some unearned benefit of the doubt in my review of Man of Steel, and I’ve since walked some of that back (Batman v Superman pretty much retroactively ruined Man of Steel for me. And then the Zack Snyder cut of the Justice League did not do anything to redeem the Snyder Superman in my perception.) But I digress, I’m here to talk about James Gunn’s Superman.

The Non-Spoilery Review

I already said that I enjoyed it, so if you just were dying to know what I thought about it in general, now you know. I’m recommending it be seen, and I do recommend catching it in the theater if you can.

Time For Spoilers

Okay, here is where I’m going to talk about the movie (briefly) with mad abandon.

If you’re reading this section, you’ve already seen the movie, or you don’t care about knowing too much about it. I’ve tried to write a relatively terse recap since I don’t want to describe the movie in detail as much as set the stage for talking about it.

The movie starts out essentially with Superman receiving medical attention in his Fortress of Solitude, just after an off-screen fight with a super-powered adversary named the “Hammer of Boravia” ended poorly. Superman’s robotic attendants apply healthy (and health-bestowing) doses of solar radiation to the Last Son of Krypton while playing an incomplete message from his Kryptonian birthparents, Jor-El and Lara. These attractive aliens recorded a message for their son Kal-El (baby Superman – but you know that already) before rocketing him to Earth right before their planet exploded.

Superman flies back to Metropolis in a slightly sub-optimal state to re-engage in super fisticuffs with the Boravian malleus.

The Hammer of Boravia resists Superman’s best efforts. Superman is having a not so good day, and that’s before he and Lois Lane have a heated discussion about international relations.

Villianaire Lex Luthor initiates a cartoonish Kaiju-attack on Metropolis as a distraction which occupies Superman’s attention and the attention of a super-group arguably called the Justice Gang –

Hawkgirl: LOL, no.
Guy Gardner: LMAO, yes!

– long enough for Lex to invade the Fortress of Solitude. Lex and his super-powered henchpeople wreak havoc on robots, incapacitate/dognap Krypto the super-dog, and exfiltrate the message from Jor-El and Lara.

Lex launches an all-out media assault on Superman, with shocking details. The restored and complete message from Jor-El and Lara to Kal-El included an encouragement from his parents to conquer Earth when he gets the chance, to kill anyone who opposes him, and to get busy with a harem getting a lot of women into a motherly-state. Joe-El and Lara want a bunch of posthumous grandchildren as a means of restoring the Kryptonian race.

The public and the U.S. gov’t react poorly to these facts; Superman surrenders to government control in quasi-good faith – he’s hoping he’ll be taken to where Krypto is being held. He is! Lex takes Superman away to a pocket dimension where due process doesn’t reach and Lex has been stacking up (literally) his personal enemies and presumably anyone the government is allowing Lex to detain. Is a Republican in the White House? This seems bad.

Investigative reporter Lois Lane (aka Superman’s girlfriend – she knows he’s Clark Kent – you know that too), with help from Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen’s inexplicable charisma and the Justice Gang’s Mr. Terrific’s genius locate Superman, opens up a portal, and helps rescue him (and Metamorpho the Element Man) from the pocket dimension prison (a location that includes an anti-proton river and a black hole – the usual.)

Lois whisks Superman to the Kent family farm, where he gets a chance to recover and come to grips with the message from his birthparents, assisted in this processing by the folksy care of his Kansas parents.

There are two crises at hand: Lex is allowing a dimensional rip to threaten Metropolis (possibly the world…) as a strategy to draw Superman out into the open and into an ambush, while the belligerent country of Boravia (you remember the Hammer of Boravia) intends to invade its neighbor, Jarhanpur, for the second time. (Superman would be invested in this, since he stopped the first invasion weeks before the movie started, which kicked off the controversy in regards to Superman engaging in unilateral interventionism.)

The Boravian invasion is forestalled via intervention by the Justice Gang (and Metamorpho) while Superman defeats Lex’s superpowered muscle. Mister Terrific closes the rift using LexCorp equipment. Lex’s fate is sealed by Lois Lane’s efficiently-written exposé on Lex’s shady dealings in funding the Boravian invasion and his general un-American activities.

Lex: So I might have committed some light treason. So what?

With far-off borders secure, Lex in custody, and Metropolis rebuilding from Luthor’s dimensional tearing, Superman repairs his robots and Fortress, hands Krypto off to the doggo’s true owner – Rhaenyra Targaryen, and relaxes in his icy vacation home with home movies. Not with the hologram of Jor-El and Lara, but with filmed footage of his life as the adopted son of Ma and Pa Kent.

The End.

SUPERMAN: THE GOOD

There’s a tremendous amount of things to like about the movie, and I’ll just crank through the usuals in no particular order.

The Suit

Seeing him in the classic yellow-belted, red-briefed suit was refreshing. Yes yes, make your jokes about him wearing his underwear on the outside (he’s not, you clowns) but the creators of Superman knew what they were doing when they designed a costume based on the Circus Strongman archetype.

There’s going to be comparisons between this movie and previous Superman movies, it’s unavoidable. Getting back to the classic look was good after the Snyder Superman – not that I hated the suit, I just didn’t like the darker blue and prefer the lighter blues of classic Superman. But I can’t knock Snyder too much – the Superman costume in DC Comics at the time had changed with their short-lived New 52 format.

The Justice Gang

Director James Gunn has success in working with a large cast – please reference the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the one good Suicide Squad movie. His bringing in the Justice Gang (the working-title for their team) again demonstrated his ability to introduce characters without getting deep into exposition and to just let them roll and let the audience catch up. Despite there being other superheroes in the movie, it primarily remained a Superman movie.

The role of Mister Terrific could have easily been performed by Batman. They’re both smart, both rich, both tech savvy. Batman would have as easily defeated the Raptors and other LexCorp goons guarding the portal device on the beach near Metropolis. Would have just as smoothly fiddled with the portal controls to get Lois and him into the pocket dimension on a rescue attempt.

But having Batman in the movie would turn it into a Batman and Superman movie, a World’s Finest (that’s the name of a comic book often featuring Batman and Superman team-ups) movie, so having Mister Terrific doing support to Lois didn’t take the spotlight away from Superman. And Mister Terrific was … I’m sure there’s a good word for how exemplary he was.

I was pleased with Nathan Filion as Guy Gardner, nobody’s favorite Green Lantern. There are people in my life who were very annoyed by this character, and that just means that the casting/performance worked perfectly.

Person in my Life: But they could have done things differently, or not had him be so annoying –
Me: Sorry, I can’t hear you when you’re being wrong.
Guy Gardner: Well played.
Hawkgirl: I support this Person in your Life.

I did not believe that they were actually going to have Metamorpho in the movie, and yet they did, and he was a great addition.

Have I forgotten to mention Hawkgirl? Haven’t forgotten – I’ll bring her up eventually.

The Daily Planeteers

Likewise, the team at the Daily Planet were actually allowed to accomplish things in a meaningful way. (No, I’m not talking about Cat Grant and Steve Lombard, there was little call for lifestyle and sports reporting during the movie’s events.) Jimmy Olsen’s canonical unearned attractiveness (I’m serious, Jimmy always seemed to be involved with ladies well out of his league in the comics) was critical in getting information not just on Superman’s incarceration but also the evidence needed for Lois to craft a compelling Luthor-ruining exposé in lightning-speed.

Perry White: And I, like all experienced editors, knew when to let my people cook.
Me: Well done, chief.
Perry White: DON’T CALL ME CHIEF.

This all played out so much more coherently than the quasi-investigative plot given Lois Lane in Batman v Superman. You remember, where Superman saved Lois from some African village in a war-torn area, and later, Superman was wrongfully accused of wiping out that village. In hopes of finding him innocent, Lois did some digging around and discovered the villagers were killed via gunfire, and that the bullets used to wipe out the village were like really high-end ordinance – and that proved that Superman wasn’t involved.

At no time was there an argument focusing on how Superman didn’t need to use guns – no one was saying that obvious and exonerating fact. Only that the bullets weren’t normal as if that really mattered. It just made no sense why that seemed to make sense to Lois or was even all that exonerating.

Honestly, if Superman decided one day that guns were cool and that shooting people was a cool thing to do –

Jor-El: Go on, I’m listening.

– it seems more likely that he’d have the ability to make weird bullets if he wanted to, just as likely as him buying a bucket of conventional ammunition from Guns R Us for his hypothetical murderous needs. (Although if he made his own, maybe they’d be diamond-tipped or something.) But it doesn’t matter, Superman doesn’t run around shooting people. Or fly around shooting people. Not even Homelander in The Boys does that.

Anyway, good job, Lois and Jimmy. And Perry.

The Tone

One tends to think that a dark, brooding tone would be more at home in a Batman movie than a Superman movie, and one would be right. It is one of the reasons Man of Steel took heat.

There were definitely serious stakes in the movie, and Superman was having quite a few bad days. But other than one example (see next section) the tone had a certain light touch. Gunn is good with threading levity or the absurd in with the serious which prevented the movie from being too much of a downer.

Having Krypto was a bonus. What a good boy!

I felt it a refreshing change of pace from previous DC movies. (Some of those movies I liked, there’s room for more than one tone. Comics contain multitudes.)

SUPERMAN: THE BAD

There are few things that I didn’t like – the following Ugly section below after this one is reserved for maybe more controversial things that are good discussion points.

The Kaiju

The monster that attacked Metropolis just looked like a cartoon to me, and maybe that was the intent, to mitigate the property damage impact on us. But Starro the Conqueror looked somehow more realistic to me in the only good Suicide Squad movie, and was a similarly destructuve beast. Why do they look different to me? Feel free to tell me if the chubby dragon worked for you – overall it’s no big deal. I just felt like it could have been better. (Maybe Metamorpho’s baby also could have looked less like a cartoon…)

The Tone

Wait, wasn’t this in the Good section too? Yes, but hear me out. The tone in Superman was largely consistent, except for one scene, where Lex Luthor, in a bid to coerce Superman into revealing non-existent invasion plans, murders a Metropolis street vendor, Russian Roulette style. It is a shocking scene, made more so by death coming on the second bullet (the rule of threes would have conditioned us to expect it on the third attempt, so it happening on spin two took me off-guard.)

I don’t think it breaks the movie, and certainly it is not unexpected for Lex to be this ruthless and brutal and wrong-headed – but it still feels out of place, and mean-spirited in a movie where Superman saves a squirrel. One of my friends on BlueSky asserted that this will prevent him from taking his elementary school age son to see Superman, and that does feel like a shame. Could it have been done differently? Sure, but everything can always be done differently. Anyway, I just wish that it hadn’t happened that way.

Lex murders a dude in the Christopher Reeve Superman as well, but it just wasn’t as shocking a death. (Maybe I’m just not as edgy as I should be.)

Hawkgirl

Don’t misunderstand, I appreciate Isabela Merced and I like Hawkgirl in the comics and also in the movie. I just wanted a bit more of her. Of the Justice Gang, Mr. Terrific gets the most screen time, and Guy Gardner has an oversized presence due to his extra abrasive personality and the Green Lantern Power Ring Awesomeness. Hawkgirl in the movie is mostly defined by her irritation with Guy (relatable) which just makes her more secondary. I wish more had be done with her. (She does have a unique role that plays out in Boravia, but I’ll touch on that in the next section.

Ultraman

I didn’t hate this, that Lex had cloned Superman resulting in an imperfect duplicate and had been using him to pummel Superman about. It’s canonical in the comics that Lex had duplicated Superman before, but the clone/replicant/doppleganger is usually so bizarre, it’s referred to (often naming itself) as Bizarro.

Lex Luthor: What a bizarre turn of events!
Bizarro: Bizarre — oh — must not be me name.

(Bizarro tended to say the opposite of what he meant, reading Bizarro dialog tends to take some work.)

Ultraman usually refers to the evil Superman of Earth-3, where most of the Justice League have evil dopplegangers running the Crime Syndicate of America. On Earth-3, I assume that Kal-El got the full message from Jor-El and Lara and took it to heart.

Why is this bad? Look, it’s not really bad, but having Superman fight himself is kind of well-trod ground, explored in Superman 3 (which is probably best overlooked) and it led to a LOT of punching in the movie, which is possibly too reminiscent of the fight between Superman and Zod in Man of Steel (which is also best forgotten…) – had the Ultraman clone been explicitly revealed as Bizarro, maybe I would have been more forgiving.

Look, again this isn’t a big deal, but I wanted to bring it up, and not look like a total fanboy for this movie.

SUPERMAN: THE UGLY

These are things that I don’t necessarily think are bad, but are more worthy of discussion.

Jor-El the Viltrumite

Not everyone appreciated the twist that Superman’s Kryptonian dad was advocating for the conquest of Earth. I feel that this topic deserves its own blog post (I plan on it being the next one I write.) I’ll cover this topic there. Spoiler: I do not mind Jor-El being shadier than we normally see him.

(If you don’t know why I called this section Jor-El the Viltrumite, you should stop reading this and watch the first episode of INVINCIBLE on Amazon Prime. Watch the whole episode, particularly past the initial end-credits.)

Superman and Politics

This is not me saying I don’t want politics in my superhero movies. If that was true, I would have put it into the Bad section, and you would also be well-justified to never pay any attention to me again, because politics is throughout any art and pretending it’s not is very unserious. There are political situations throughout Superman that invite discussion and encourage interrogation.

The movie starts out with a political crisis having been brewing for weeks. Boravia (an ally of the US) had invaded neighboring Jarhanpur. Superman opposed this action, intervened and wrecked the Boravian tank forces, and threatened the Boravian leader. The invasion was called off.

These details were presented through the clever device of Lois Lane giving a hardball interview to frustrated boyfriend Clark Kent, being interviewed in his capacity as actually being Superman. (What, the glasses fooled you?)

It’s a complicated situation. Superman isn’t a nation-state, is acting against the interests of the country Clark Kent is a citizen in –

Wait, is Clark Kent a US citizen? No one knows that Clark is a refugee from destroyed Krypton, and I assume he was probably never naturalized. Or was he? What’s the law in regards to citizenship when a baby is found abandoned in Kansas, turned over to an orphanage by a lovely farming couple who then successfully put in to adopt the child? (That’s one of the Superman origin details that I consider canon, but if you believe Jonathan and Martha just found a kid and then falsely asserted that he was their biological child at the next family reunion, I won’t argue with you.)

– (back on track) the Boravians would have some international rights to press about Superman getting involved.

The US Government also would have some international rights to press about the Hammer of Boravia attacking Metropolis. That seems bad in regards to international relations. (Even though the Hammer is Ultraman in disguise, it would be hard for Boravia to disavow him acting as their representative.)

The Boravia/Jarhanpur conflict leaves itself open for comparisons to current geopolitical conflicts, which is like kicking the wasp nest when it comes to right wing commentary, decrying Superman for not being American enough. You know the kind of American superhero the ultra-conservatives like.

I remember Superman Returns, the calmest of Superman movies, being attacked by right wing nutjobs for the movie not yelling explicitly how specifically American he is. I guess he’s on someone’s list for deportation. Good luck on that.

Superman’s involvement in stopping Boravia was motivated largely by his empathy – the Boravian invasion seemed wrong, so he stopped it. He was frustrated with Lois confronting him with arguments likely held by the US State Department, who probably would have preferred Superman not to be engaging as a rogue actor. And it probably could lead to complicated discussions on what ethical decisions would Superman being making in regards to our real-world conflicts. (I will not follow up on that, just like the movie opted not to follow up on Lois’ questions.)

The Justice Gang’s intervention at the second invasion can probably get cover from Lois Lane’s expose – which pointed out that it was being orchestrated by now-disgraced Lex Luthor. But admittedly that all happened pretty fast, and the justifications would have to be ironed out over time and I’m sure Fox News would be making hay on it.

I’m not sure how the assassination of Vasil Ghurkos – Boravia’s leader – will be hand-waved away. Hawkgirl hunted him down, flew him to a great height, and then dropped him. That seems a bit extra-judicial (murdery) to me (and one of the reasons I think Hawkgirl was ill-served by the script.) Since we didn’t see Luthor’s Boravian flunky actually hit the Earth, my head-canon is that Hawkgirl swooped him up at the last second and flew him to the Hague to face some freshly-documented war crime charges.

Batman: I feel like Hawkgirl would have been infringing on my methods if she did that.
Mr. Terrific: You’re not in this movie, Batman.
Batman: OR AM I?

I’d rather see Ghurkos in prison, and even though he might deserve some time in Luthor’s pocket dimension cells, he probably should be put in humane incarceration.

Speaking of that – Luthor did not think through this whole transparent cube cells situation very well. Where do they go to the bathroom? How is feeding managed? Do they only have stools as furnishings? Is that floating barge, operated by the supervillain The Parasite a reasonable way to move prisoners about (since they have to be regularly taken to the latrine and the mess hall, I GUESS.)

The guy holding Metamorpho’s baby, to keep the Element Man in line – just what did he do to deserve this job? It’s as much a punishment being in that cube as it is for Lex’s previous girlfriend, stuck in the cell near Superman’s. Does that guy sleep? If he does, Metamorpho can just turn into helium – float from one cell to another and murder that guy and get his kid. Although, then he’d be stuck there because he can’t get his son out of the cell.

Lex Luthor: You’re over-thinking this. Just relax. The cruelty is the point.

Anyway, Lex’s black site detention area reminded me of how on The Flash tv show, the STAR Labs team would just incarcerate every supervillain that they encountered in these little chambers that wunderkind Cisco adapted as part of the reactor to be containment cells. Seems a bit extra-judicial and lack-of-due-process to me.

Hawkgirl: Everyone’s doing it.
Lex Luthor: If I’m going to jail, Grant Gustin has to be in jail as well.

Anyway, at the end of the movie, with the prisoners in Lex’s hellhole freed, I think that the US Gov’t should be less worried about the various metahumans acting more unilaterally, and more worried about congressional oversight because that prison cube stack was crazy, and some lawsuits are going to be inbound.

(Or maybe not, shenanigans seem to not stick in national politics nowadays.)

Super Wrap Up

Alright, I have to end this (although I’ll be working on In Defense of Jor-El soon) – but I did want to share a personal note.

In the movie, Lex’s dimensional tear is causing issues in Metropolis. Buildings are collapsing (thankfully, the city evacuated orderly beforehand.) On one of the bridges going out of town, a woman is in her car and she encounters some difficulties. She’s stuck on the bridge and a building is about to fall down and crush her and her car.

Superman stops the building long enough for the relieved woman to collect her wits, get her car moving, and drive to safety.

Years ago, my wife Lisa auditioned for that role of the woman in danger driving a car. (My wife acts locally, has been in some local commercials and various indie projects. She had a speaking role in a scene with Jared Harris in the movie Brave the Dark – I got to go to that movie’s premiere in Lancaster, Pennsvylvania.) Anyway, Lisa had been sent a scene to be shot as part of a self-tape audition (ever since COVID, almost everything is done via self-tapes.)

The audition directions required her to act as if she was driving, look concerned, and stated that a tree was about to fall on her car and she was to react – then be surprised that she wasn’t crushed and then she was to pretend to drive off with visible relief.

She didn’t get the part (Booooo OMG that would have been awesome) but it was still fun seeing that scene (with a building, not the tree as the audition implied – clearly to not give away real details) and imagining her in it.

SUPERMAN – a good movie and a fresh start for DC to make some more superhero movies. Hopefully to continue to make ones where Superman is not a jerk.

---

(Comments are always welcome. Super welcome! After suffering through this giant pile of words, you might not be that interested in any other of my movie-based posts, but I promise most are not as ponderously long as this one. How could they be? You can find them on my Movies page!)

Most photos are from Superman (2025). I have no claim on those. Same with the image of Homelander from The Boys on Amazon Prime.

Artwork featuring Superman (and Bizarro) are property of DC Comics.

I make no claims to the artwork, but some claims to the text. So there. 

© Patrick Sponaugle 2025 Some Rights Reserved