Superman (2025): Truth, Justice and .. uh .. Kindness

by Len Weiler

The new reboot of the Superman franchise – called, simply enough, Superman – is a commercial success, with box office receipts pushing past $600 million, and likely at least as much in associated merch – t-shirts, capes, lunchboxes, backpacks, and the like. And it has just become available for home viewing, albeit at premium prices for the moment (see below). More importantly for moviegoers, it’s a pretty doggone good picture in the context of superhero films:  fun to watch, action packed, with high technical production values, excellent cinematography, and – increasingly unusual for the genre - an uplifting emphasis on positive values and the common good. Truth, Justice and the American Way indeed! More on this in a bit.  

The success of this Superman must be credited to James Gunn, the new co-director of DC Films, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers and a would-be competitor to Disney’s Marvel group.  Rather than the traditional “suit”, Gunn is a creator - he wrote and directed the picture, the first major production for DC since he took over.  Gunn has always had an affinity for comic book-style heroes, starting out largely as a scriptwriter, before crashing through to write and direct the mega-hits Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and its successful 2017 sequel. 

Superman, the character, dates all the way back to 1938 scooping his DC stable-mate Batman (who first appeared in 1939), as well as Captain Marvel (1940), Captain America (1941), Wonder Woman (1941), The Hulk and Spiderman (both 1962), among many others. His alter ego Clark Kent is along for the ride in the reboot (although not featured all that much in this iteration) along with most of his well-known supporting characters including (briefly, but importantly) his Kryptonic bio-parents Jor-el and Lara (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan), his adoptive parents Ma and Pa Kent (Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince), Clark’s editor Perry White (Wendell Pierce) and his colleague Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo). Even Superman’s dog, Krypto, is included!

Most of the above roles are minor players in the narrative, but Kent’s colleague and Superman’s romantic interest, Lois Lane, has a somewhat bigger part. Thankfully, she is played by the always excellent Rachel Brosnahan – who is, in my book, the best Lois since Margot Kidder paired up with Christopher Reeve in the quartet of movies beginning with Superman (1978) through Superman IV (1987). 

As to Superman himself, he is played by a relative-unknown:  32-year-old David Corenswet in his first big starring role.  Some say he looks a lot like Henry Cavill, the most recent actor to play Superman - in four films from Man of Steel (2013) to Zach Snyder’s Justice League (2021).  Maybe. He also looks, at times, a bit like the preeminent inhabitor of the role Christopher Reeve, while being much more expressive than Reeve. Corenswet is 6’ 4” tall, and (beefed up for the role) 240 pounds. He looks pretty good in cape and costume, and does a fine job as Superman. 

The villain of the piece is, as you may have already guessed,  Superman’s arch enemy, Lex Luthor. Luthor has been played by many notables in the past, including Gene Hackman, Kevin Spacey and Jesse Eisenberg. But Nicolas Hoult’s Luthor in this new Superman - resembling Spacey’s shaved-head version  but cooler and colder - might just be the best of the lot. As usual he has megalomaniacal plans to rule the world, in this case aided by very advanced tech, CGI-created monsters, and an evil but highly lucrative global conglomerate called LuthorCorp, based – like Superman himself – in the usually stateless metropolis – supposedly in Delaware this time around - called Metropolis.

Lex and LuthorCorp seem to have the upper hand over our hero as the film opens. Superman has singlehandedly just halted what he saw as a senseless war in Eastern Europe in order to save thousands of innocent lives.  But LuthorCorp masterminds a vast outrage campaign reframing this unilateral achievement as an unjustified, blatantly dangerous and illegal act of interference in a foreign conflict – done without notice to, unsanctioned by, and contrary to the foreign policy of the US government. Luthor further suggests that Superman, in fact, is pursuing his own evil agenda: He is not one of us - not even human - but an alien  who wants to subjugate humanity for his own ends, a despot in disguise who must be stopped.  Yikes! America’s hero has quickly become an untrustworthy pariah. 

That‘s the starting point. A nearly friendless Superman now must battle back somehow against what is set up to be near impossible odds - while also saving the world from the actual bad guys. Not only that, but he gets beaten in a fight – for the first time ever(?) - by an adversary with confounding super powers equal to his own. All kinds of challenges and adventures ensue, some in quite original, sci-fi surroundings on and off our planet. But the plot, while easy to follow, is too complicated to explain.

This being 2025, the charge of Superman being an alien - made by a power-obsessed bad guy - has been received as evidence of a woke agenda to the movie, as if the mention of a good guy being from another country – or in this case from another planet - is an automatic insult to right wing ideologies! At some point in the movie there are some brief scenes in a refugee camp – undoubtedly a political reference, says the right-wing blogosphere, to the terrible camps and prisons to which ICE detainees are being sent.  My goodness but the MAGA media is awfully touchy!  I’d say, if you automatically see a mere reference to someone being an immigrant as a political statement and/or depictions of (fictional) horrid prisons or refugee camps as criticism of your team’s actions and policies – maybe those policies actually deserve criticism.

All this carping by right-wing influencers, though, is a tempest in a teapot. As Gunn himself has said, “I think this is a movie about kindness, and that‘s something everyone can relate to.”  Especially when compared to the cynical (or just shallow) superhero fare we’ve been fed in recent years, a movie about a super-powered hero with heart, whose goal in life is to fight crime and save lives, seems to me to be a good thing. 

2 hours 9 minutes PG-13 (for violence, action and language)

Grade:  B+

Superman is still playing in theaters and also has just become available for home viewing on several platforms [including Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube] - at premium prices for now:  to rent from $19.99 - $24.99 or to purchase for $29.99. Eventually, it will be available to stream on HBO Max - likely sometime in October, although a date has not been announced.