Whatever you think of the film’s quality, it’s important for several reasons that writer/director James Gunn’s new Superman is doing well at the box office. Mainly, Warner Bros. is deeply in debt and needed to prove that one of its signature pieces of intellectual property could still prevail in the marketplace, especially a piece of I.P. meant to function as a gateway to numerous other DC Comics characters and future stories.
While plenty of us have looked with worry at Marvel’s spotty quality record over the past few years, DC has been such a train wreck that few even bother to remember or talk about its depressing films: Does anyone recall Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), which after its release was futilely retitled Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey in an effort to remind people it contained at least one popular character? (I feel sorry for Margot Robbie, who’s done a fine job playing that character in three flawed films.) Did anyone besides egomaniacal star Dwayne Johnson love Black Adam? Did anyone see Shazam! Fury of the Gods? Can anyone really explain why after months of public discussion about Flash actor Ezra Miller being trans, insane, and prone to petty crime, the movie’s sole nod to political and social relevance was suddenly declaring Flash to be Latino after several films and several decades suggesting nothing of the sort?
I ask all this as someone who saw these bad movies, was rooting for them, and even wrote a few DC comics issues many years ago.
So, there was reason to worry that this Superman would fail too and take Warner Bros. down with it. Even now, there are rumors that the whole shaky media conglomerate might get sold to Sony, which would likely have the interesting bank-shot side effect (given some antitrust and old Marvel-bankruptcy stipulations) of causing Sony to give Spider-Man back to Marvel, who could then use the character and his foes as they please without having to worry about being undermined by Sony’s absurd periodic attempts to turn minor Spider-Man side characters (Morbius? Madame Web? Kraven?) into self-sustaining franchises.
If Superman had been completely awful, then, it might’ve been something of a relief, mercifully ending for a time both the attempts to make DC movies and the attempts to make Spider-Man spinoff-character movies. Then we could focus on just worrying about whether Marvel Studios proper (Avengers, etc.) can recover its mojo, a slightly more plausible prospect.
My movie critic friend Kyle Smith says as part of his negative reaction to Superman that “superhero fatigue is real,” but that’s unfair to superheroes. Audiences merely have crap fatigue, and if DC and Marvel make good movies, which shouldn’t be that difficult, superheroes will continue to be the financial and cultural juggernaut we all assumed them to be less than a decade ago.
Gunn, who’s now head of DC in much the way Kevin Feige is head of Marvel, has decided to try solving these problems just by being James Gunn, which means creating a very silly and frenetic movie, not so unlike his Guardians of the Galaxy movies back at Marvel, in which few plot developments have great dramatic weight, many happen only to provide a few minutes of slapstick, and Gunn’s love of obscure and nerdy bits of lore—such as Superman’s loyal, super-strong dog Krypto—veers between making the long-term fan feel delighted and making the fan feel queasy from the embarrassing goofiness of it all. Sometimes it works.
Some right-wing critics online who decided they hated the movie even before it came out—claiming Luthor would be a heavy-handed Trump analogue and Superman virtuous primarily by dint of being an immigrant (from space)—were overreaching on this one. Goofy it may be, but it’s not very political, no more so than any mid-century comic with an evil industrialist in it. Lex Luthor yelling here that he’s frankly motivated by envy might be the simplest and most convincing explanation of his thinking yet brought to the big screen. Superman staying nice but finding it tempting to get angry feels as authentic as did Christopher Reeve’s mildly sarcastic remarks about Gene Hackman’s Lex over 40 years ago.
More troubling and more modern are a few little nihilistic touches such as Supergirl showing up for a cameo for just a few seconds to reveal that she’s the drunken, irresponsible cause of Krypto’s “behavioral problems”—and to casually call Superman a “bitch” while she’s at it—a crass take on the character inspired by the comics writing of former CIA interrogator Tom King, who frequently depicts superficially rosy or heroic characters as secretly plagued by depression or by remorse for horrific past crimes such as murder. DC may be headed in a direction far more “dark” than the hue of Batman’s cape if King’s template is to be the road forward.
Gunn’s frivolity is of a throw-it-all-in nature that can be fun or can lead to reckless boundary-crossing of the sort that results in, well, him having been fired from Marvel/Disney for a few years for casually exchanging jokey online messages with a pedophile, or at least results in transgressive gross-out movies in the Troma Studios style. Tolerance has limits. And there really is a strange cultural/institutional effort afoot to make us think everything must have a degrading, trauma-inducing underbelly for it to be legitimate, as if all roads naturally lead to a casting couch, psychiatrist’s couch, or CIA black site eventually. Gunn juggles all that and Superman’s Kansas nice-guy attitude simultaneously, and he seems to be pulling it off here, but one is hesitant to trust fully.
My main reaction to Superman, though—me being an undeniable case of a fiftysomething male still caring about the fiction franchises of his childhood, which some would consider psychologically dubious in itself—is that the movie is too bonkers and its transitions too jarring for it to gel into a conventionally good movie. It’s the sort of film that seems knowingly to tweak Zack Snyder’s violent Man of Steel take on Superman from a decade ago one minute and then casually toss in dead-serious collapsing skyscrapers aplenty without regard for rescue efforts or repercussions the next. We’ve gone from Kal-El as god to LOL nothing matters, even if there’s some sunshine mixed in. (And as we see early on, sunshine can bring power or pain or both at the same time, if you’re a Kryptonian.)
Still, I felt much the same way about the flat, emotionless, videogame-like quality of the CGI-heavy battles in the Star Wars prequels a generation ago, and that didn’t stop the movies from making billions. I was genuinely happy for the ADHD-addled youths who seemed to be enjoying those movies even if I was no longer one of them, and I’ll be pleased if the Gunn approach rescues the DC stable of characters from potential oblivion for another decade or so—at least until the characters all start going public domain and the masses and indie creators can decide much more directly and unpredictably where these stories are headed.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.