In one sense I can’t really spoil “Superman.” Even comic book agnostics already know the basic idea: A Kryptonian baby with incredible powers, sent to Earth by his parents ahead of his planet’s destruction, is raised by a pair of American farmers. By day, he’s the bespectacled journalist Clark Kent; by night, he’s — well, you know. That’s been the story since Action Comics No. 1 was published in 1938.
On the other hand, the ubiquity of those bare facts makes it extra easy to spoil this newest movie, a hard reboot for the character and his universe, because you’re probably going to the movies to see what they’ve done to the guy now, and the discovery is the fun part. “Superman” is the first film for DC Studios, of which Peter Safran and James Gunn are the chief executives. Elaborate histories of the byzantine path that got us here are available to you, should you be interested, but if you’re just a normie like me, the most important thing to recall is this: Gunn is probably best known for directing the three “Guardians of the Galaxy” films for Marvel and the 2021 DC film “The Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with the 2016 movie “Suicide Squad” — you see what I mean about byzantine).
Gunn tends to nail the right tone with superhero material: He mixes big-hearted themes with a dash of real-world allusions and a good-natured understanding that all of this should be treated as if it’s a bit silly because, let’s face it, it is. Guys in capes zooming around, humans with magical powers that let them make big punching fists out of matter and energy, tech billionaires consumed by envy who hang out in shadowy lairs trying to control the universe, I mean, come on.
Well, OK, maybe that last bit. And maybe a little more. Let’s not forget that Superman was created by two Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were keenly aware of rising antisemitism and Nazi oppression, as well as the despair of a people saddled with economic depression, looking for someone to save them. Superman took on corrupt politicians, unscrupulous businessmen and substandard housing conditions. And he was staunchly antifascist: In a noncanonical 1940 story titled “How Superman Would End the War,” Superman brought Hitler himself to justice.
So while staying true to Superman requires trotting out certain familiar plot elements — his birth parents, his adoptive parents, his susceptibility to Kryptonite, his big old crush on the scrappy lady reporter Lois Lane — it also means tapping into those ideological roots. He’s a metahuman, but he’s also a man who’s almost guilelessly attached to truth, justice and something called “the American way”: protecting the little guy, pummeling the baddies. Set that guy down in the 21st century, and things get complicated.
By all of these measures, Gunn’s charming take on the Superman myth succeeds — it even won over a particular superhero-weary critic. It’s a sincere but also goofy movie, with a few well-timed twists on the mythology and a couple of added characters (I won’t spoil it, I promise) who keep things light at just the right moments. Our new Superman/Clark Kent, David Corenswet, has muscular shoulders, a dimple in his cheek and a curl in the middle of his forehead, and most important, you believe him when he says he just loves people. He’s channeling a touch of the idealism of, say, the character Jimmy Stewart plays in Frank Capra’s 1939 film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” targeted for his rightdoing by self-interested powerful criminals but also unironically tearing up at idealistic displays of patriotism.
“Superman” is less about patriotism than humanism, about Superman’s deep belief that his job is to protect all the people of Earth. I don’t need to tell you that’s not always a popular position. So while he’s doing all the things Superman does — saving individuals, trying to save the world — he starts taking flak for it. Should he meddle in international affairs? What if he’s trying to save innocent lives? What if a particularly evil incarnation of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult, perfectly cast) goes on TV and says blatantly false things about him, and every media outlet picks up the story as if it’s real, and everyone just believes the misinformation?
Perhaps you can see where this is going. “Superman” is carefully constructed, with just enough plausible deniability that it’s not technically about anything in our real world. But it also has masked bad guys with guns dragging random people away to be imprisoned in cages where nobody can find them. It has an authoritarian, invasion-happy leader of a vaguely Cyrillic country who hangs a propagandistic portrait of himself astride a horse on his wall and gives entirely fabricated statements at news conferences. It has Luthor, who believes himself to be a genius and yet is jealous beyond measure of anyone who makes him feel weak. There’s more, but you’ll have to find it out for yourself.
In this way, “Superman” is reminiscent of “Iron Man,” the 2008 film that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s hard to remember this, now that the M.C.U. has resorted to the most bland political feints imaginable. But “Iron Man,” which explicitly set part of its narrative in Afghanistan, felt like it had a few ideas knocking around in its head about the responsibility that someone wealthy and powerful might owe to all humanity, not just to himself and his fortune. Similarly, this film is thinking about the difference between public service and power-mongering, about what freedom actually means and about who the real heroes on Earth are.
Also like “Iron Man,” “Superman” — in the now time-honored tradition of Hollywood franchises — is setting up a series of films that are en route. I’ll be impressed if they manage to keep up with the subtle but pointed digs and maintain a political compass that’s pointed true north. But as both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.
Among them are the “Justice Gang,” made up of Guy Gardner a.k.a. the Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion, in a truly incredible haircut), Rex Mason a.k.a. Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) and Kendra Saunders a.k.a. Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). They’re a group of metahumans who are backed by a billionaire, which is a weird and interesting thing to explore. Over at The Daily Planet, the paper where Clark Kent works, Perry White (Wendell Pierce) is editor in chief, and Clark’s colleagues include Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), Cat Grant (Mikaela Hoover), Steve Lombard (Beck Bennett) and Ron Troupe (Christopher McDonald).
And most of all there’s Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane, a woman who doesn’t really need saving, who is preternaturally calm in the face of breaking news and knows, contra most female reporters in the movies, how to actually grill a source regardless of her personal feelings about the story. So maybe this “Superman” is set in the real world after all.
Superman
Rated PG-13 for some bad words, scary evil bad guys and one particularly jarring execution-style killing. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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