SUPERMAN Is Fearfully and Wonderfully Woke
five stars. 10/10 will see again
A blurb is generally not an intellectually serious thing. However, there are a few that have lodged in my head over the years for the way that they combine efficiency and accuracy. One of these is the comment from C.S. Lewis that used to sit on the back of the old paperback editions of Tolkien’s The Two Towers, where he says that it is “Good beyond hope.” I hear a certain weariness in those words, like Lewis, in his mid-50s — perhaps already realizing that his entanglement with Joy Davidman will involve more of him than he’d intended to put forward; perhaps mourning his gradual estrangement from Tolkien, or moved by Tolkien’s own disappointments that he’d glimpsed secondhand; or just battered down by life — really needed that book to be as good as it was. He had a lot riding on it.
I wish this weren’t true, because Superman is a corporate-owned mythology for children and I am a 47-year-old man, but I had a lot riding on Superman being good, and not just good but good in certain ways. Corporations will never be our allies, and this film is a corporate product, at least in the sense that it had to get through a corporation and that it had to be made by someone who already knows (after ten years with Marvel) how to self-censor, how to fulfill whatever creative goals he has in ways that won’t make the machine fire him. How to trap whatever spark he has.
And how much spark did James Gunn, the film’s director and writer, really have to begin with? He started out making intentionally tasteless films for Troma, and then broke out of that with Super, one of those Obama-era indie comedies where the whole style is sort of “I respect you, the audience, too much not to say slurs.” It’s a dark comedy about male rage and the desire to make something good out of that rage. It’s not a bad film, but it shows us that whatever was original and interesting about Gunn’s vision of the world is pretty far away from the wholesomeness and corniness that Superman exemplifies at his best. As for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, I have enjoyed them, and they have always left a weird taste in my mouth. The way they mingle sentimentality and Tarantino-esque ultra violence, always played for laughs, just feels like a sign of something bad and corrupt in the culture. The Suicide Squad (2021) was basically a Guardians of the Galaxy film; so were the follow-up TV shows Peacemaker and Gunn’s recent DC cartoon Creature Commandos.
Well, the man had a little more to him than his earlier work had disclosed. And you can do a lot within the confines of dipshit popular entertainment, of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. That’s always been the only real hope for a capital-intensive form of art like film or TV. (Godard switched to video for a reason!) Gunn’s Superman would have been delightful in any era, but right now it’s particularly moving. And a big part of the reason that it’s moving is that nobody writing this movie got the memo that it’s not 2020 anymore and that force and cruelty are the only real or admirable things in the universe. Without spoiling things in too much detail, I can basically summarize the plot of the film as follows: Peter Thiel (Lex Luthor) partners with the government to operate an interdimensional CECOT where people, including babies, are held forever without habeas corpus, just like the real CECOT. Thiel-Luthor also owns a Superman clone that he controls via radio in ways that cause him and his henchmen to strongly resemble gamers. So the villains are tech overlords, rich people, jailers, and gamers. Much of the film’s suspense depends on whether Superman, whose reputation is under a cloud because he is foreign-born, can escape from this prison, with the help of his black friend Mr. Terrific (who is the smartest man on Earth) (yes smarter than Batman and Lex Luthor), and his freakish-looking rock-faced friend Metamorpho, in time to stop Russia (“Boravia”), with whom we are suddenly newly allied, from invading Iran (“Jarhanpur”). His dad is fat and his mom talks with a Southern accent. They are white-trash coded and thoroughly good. The dumb bimbo character turns out to be a clever spy. And Hawkgirl is a Latina.
Also, his robots all keep reminding him that, being robots, they have no consciousness and no soul. This was such a nice touch. Suck it, Sam Altman.
None of this would particularly matter if the film weren’t fun to watch. It’s a fucking blast! Everybody has just enough personality to fill the moments they’re on screen, Corenswet is totally believable as a nice and somewhat impetuous guy who just wants to help people, the jokes mostly land. Some reviewers think the plot is too baroque. Guys, it’s a Superman film. It’s not hard to follow, I promise.
I realize that in appreciating the film’s politics as immediately and completely as I did, I risk being a little like the hypothetical person in that classic tweet who’s like “is the credit card company an ally?” Except, again, people make films, even films that are so dominated by convention as to feel like products, and this film can’t be accused of lacking personality. James Gunn’s love of little quips, of villains suddenly getting into meaningless arguments about quotidian pop-culture things or heroes suddenly getting weirdly hurt about trivial shit, is all over it, and so is his love of the bright and thickly populated universe of the Silver Age DC comics. We get Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, and Metamorpho as well as the douchiest Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, plus Krypto and even (briefly) Supergirl. He likes to have a lot going on in a panel. And he did it all in a comparatively crisp two hours and change. It also turns out that his values are not nearly as fucked up as you’d expect of a person in his position in the year 2025. He thinks kidnapping people is bad and that racism is stupid and that you shouldn’t be mean to people. Millions of voters haven’t got as far in learning the alphabet as that.
So no, it’s not the secret revolutionary message that’s going to scramble our brains and trigger us to rise up and fix everything. Wherever a bit of film sits on the vast continuum between “mostly conventional and pretty simple” and “innovative, complex, and eccentric,” between a TV commercial and a Godard film that looks like a TV commercial but doesn’t make any sense, no piece of film is going to be that. But it was moving to see openness, basic social trust, the desire to preserve human and even animal lives (at one point Superman rescues a squirrel!), and kindness presented in their true light, as things that are inherently greater (though in this world sometimes vulnerable to) than cleverness, calculation, hatred, lust for power, and envy. A childlike morality, I guess, but our culture has regressed to a state so much lower than such a morality that I can be grateful to see even these basic-ass virtues celebrated. It’s a good start.
To pick up from my newsletter the other day, this Superman is both Nice and Righteous. Forgive the earnest-posting but I fucking needed that in the worst way, and I think so do a lot of other people. We’d have to call such a movie good beyond hope.