Superman
starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Nicholas Hoult
directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy [all volumes], Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad)
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THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILER WARNING WOULD NORMALLY GO. But this is a 100 year old story, what am I going to spoil for you at this point? OH MY GOD, HE CAN FLY?! Get over yourselves
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There was a time when I used to collect comic books. Luckily for me, that was back when your hobbies defined not only your entire personality but also carried with them a certain amount of social determinism. What you consumed and how you consumed it still had weight, it was related still to your choices, your discernment, where the things you curated by exclusion (comics? yes. organized sports? yuck, no) ended up sorting and excluding you from certain life paths at the exact same time. That's right, I collected comics back when meant something, primarily that you were several years away from the possibility of getting laid.
Speaking of that, let's just get this out of the way, so you know: this Superman fucks. They don't show it or anything (though we're all still curious about the logistics, or at least we have been for at least 56 years), and they even show it less than did back in Superman II with that weird silver beanbag thing, but as movies have become more and more sexless in the 21st century, explicitly (no pun intended) pushed aside by more action and quippy dialogue in the now-ubiquitous Comic Book IP Cinematic Universii peopled entirely by de-genital-ed men and women who spend a lot of time really violently working through a lot of pent-up pent-up-ed-ness by punching through whole buildings and shit, it's established very clearly that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are definitely smashing. On the scale of things about the re-emergence of this beloved cultural icon to concern ourselves with, should this be the first thing, straight out of the gate? Well, name a more important one, I'll wait.
That's what I thought.
Here's the point I'm making:* the hardest thing to do with Superman is to make him a person in a world and not a weird, stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. The challenge of Superman is a problem of scale. How do you bring a demigod down onto the plane of squishy, puny mortals? Of course there's a way to make a good and decent Superman movie that explores his otherness, but that's only really been tried in earnest once, by Bryan Singer, and what you got is a final shot of Superman creeping on his ex and her happy family from afar, like a lion pondering a frolicking clutch of baby gazelles. Yes, they took pains to establish that that Superman fucked as well, even producing a child, but it was way before the story started and in the end you couldn't help but feel like it had been an experiment or maybe an accident. Also that had Kevin Spacey in it, so the whole thing had the ick on it in retrospect.
And I did like Henry Cavill in the role. He was purpose-built from scratch to wear the suit, but Zack Snyder's default mode is stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. I have inexplicably seen almost every piece he's created, none of which are ultimately necessary but even the really unnecessary ones I've seen, and he has yet to actually produce a piece with a signal recognizable human character.
Shout out to local Inland Empire homie Tyler Hoechlin doing his dang best on TV, but cinematically, it's been a lot of misses. The closer we've tried to get to movie Superman, the farther and farther he's drifted away from us, arguably since Richard Donner got replaced most of the way through directing Superman II. It's like we are the comic book collectors and the character is all the girls I knew in high school: aloof, inaccessible, inscrutable, and SUPER busy on--sorry, what night did you say again?--yes, that night.
I never collected any of the Superman titles directly, but for some reason or another, this character in film has always been important to me. Probably because early-days HBO showed Superman II on a goddamned loop with, like, Beastmaster and 9 to 5 and a few others. I can't tell you why I'm less emotionally invested in subsequent expansions of the Beastmaster cinematic representations, but the first Superman I knew was Movie Superman. That's where he fits. That's what I want.
If you've read any other reviews, it won't surprise you to know this is... really good. I'm relieved as much as I am happy about it. I'll say if I have to critique anything, it's that James Gunn understands the Superman Problem exactly the same way I do and makes that the center of the entire film, scene after scene, in every interaction with every character. The grand denouement follows a thunking, heavy re-set of Superman Is An Earth Person Too involving his excellent human adoptive parents, crescendo-ing into him literally screaming this at the antagonist.
All of this comes out in a very human performance by David Corenswet, more grounded by his use of the word "dude" in a few select scenes than by any philosophical soliloquy. The line between Superman and Clark Kent is kept deliberately wobbly to the point of almost not existing (Clark playing Clark where not everyone knows he's Superman exists for exactly one scene). He doesn't change who he is, he just has magic glasses (seriously) so people can't tell. Superman is a great big goob, un-self-consciously uncool in a way that makes him cool again. He definitely could have gotten away with collecting comic books in the 1990s.
Hoult's Lex Luthor is... trickier. I'll be honest, I don't know what I want from my Lex Luthor anymore. We've had goofy schemer (Gene Hackman), boring bumbling dumb creep (Kevin Spacey) and guy-in-manic-episode (Jesse Eisenberg). This is a better, larger, scarier version. He's obviously and overwhelmingly a mad scientist, he has the quiet bitterness and rage you want, the Javert-ian obsessiveness, acts of wanton and outright, unmistakeable malice. He's cool without trying, even though he's trying so hard, which is a weird space to be in. At the end, I think he gets a bit too much of a comeuppance as I think I like my Lex a little oilier, a little better at hiding the raging monster from the public, but for what they were going for here (Superman is more humane and thus more human than the Earthborn Lex), it worked. And I don't think the performance of Nicholas Hoult can be faulted in any respect.
As for who carries this thing, it's Hoult or Edi Gathegi. Corenswet is up there the most (literally! Two separate roles!) and he holds both the screen and the emotional center of the story, but he does get upstaged a tiny bit by The Theme (the stuff I said before about Superman being "human"). Gathegi just sneaks out from behind a flashy and funny part by Nathan Fillion (Isabela Merced is grossly under-used) and makes a supporting role a co-starring one every time he's on screen.
Also the CG dog is good.
If you saw any Guardians of the Galaxy, you know James Gunn does fun and funny and joy and sentiment, visually and story-wise, and that happens here in a long overdue counterweight to the infestation of grimdark that has lingered on DC properties since 1989 Batman gloomed it up to fight the lingering image of 1966 TV goofin' that was the Adam West Batman. Comic books are basically science fiction. The stories only need to be "grounded" if you lack the confidence to try. This is bright. It does its share of goofin'. And all to entertaining effect. If I would have ever read any Superman comics when I was a kid, I would have been just as satisfied.
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*100% meant to make it and am definitely not now improvising to cover. This is in print, so there's no way for you to prove any lack of pre-meditation, sorry. Except maybe my entire previous body of work, yes, that may give something away...
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