Superman: Eyes Up Here!

After seemingly being locked in The Phantom Zone forever, James Gunn's fresh take on The Man of Steel is finally here. Was it worth the wait?

Superman flies again! James Gunn has brought his bright, good-natured mix of action, humour and life-lessons to the DC universe’s number one son.

It’s a film which is burdened by the vast weight of expectation. Ever since Gunn was tasked with reinventing the entire DC Cinematic Universe, the critics have been waiting, sarcasm guns cocked, ready to shoot him down as soon as he had the timerity to release his take on Supes.

Do We Need Another Superman?

Initially it felt too soon for a reboot, but then you think back and realise that the last time we saw the Boy Scout in Blue in any significant capacity was eight years ago, in the laughable (but not in a good way) Justice League.

Of course, that doesn’t feel like eight years, because it’s only four years since we had the damn thing released again in a bloated, self-indulgent (but, annoyingly, much better) four-hour cut.

And it’s only a couple of years if you count his cameos in Black Adam and The Flash. (I don’t).

So, Henry Cavill’s grim po-faced performances are still fresh in our minds.

But his assumption of the blue tights was terribly marred by the philosophical decisions made by Zach Snyder. He seems to feel that heroes have to suffer, be miserable and fail.

But why do superheroes have to be grim and gritty?

It’s All Frank Miller’s Fault

You see, Frank Miller has a lot to answer for. He took the superhero comic genre by the throat in the 1980s and shook all the complacency out of it. He made superheroes gritty. He made (particularly DC comics) psychologically complex. He (along with Alan Moore) saw superheroes as Nietzsche's Übermensch brought to life - having given the abyss a good looking at.

So, for almost 40 years, DC superheroes have been channelling film noir visuals and grungy 1970s detective-movie grit.

The comics by Miller and writers like Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, Grant Morrison and Mark Waid have influenced the Hollywood adaptations in various ways - making them equally dark and doom-laden - culminating in Zack Snyder's depressing, nihilistic series of cold and dispiriting Man of Steel films.

But that's not the Superman James Gunn loves. He looks back to the brighter, breezier, more colourful comics of writers like Carey Bates, Gardner Fox and Gerry Conway. Those were comics about hope and optimism.

Gunn rightly diagnosed that we - in 2025 - need some optimism. The news is bleak and apocalyptic - Superman shouldn’t be.

That's why the marketing strap-line for this film is simply: Look up!

It basically means: Chin up!

And that's a message that we should get from Superman - the belief that there is decency in the world, that there are people stronger than us who will protect us, not oppress us.

A Superman film should fill you with hope. Gunn gets that.

Superman Gets an Upgrade

Gunn has deftly woven a great fun film that rattles along at a cracking pace. There will be moments, possibly entire set-pieces, that you don’t like (I certainly had a few), but every sequence in this film is written, shot and cut so economically that it’s mere moments before you’re on to the next.

So, nothing sticks in the craw for any length of time.

Even given this pace, Gunn finds time to develop complex and likeable characters and deal lightly with some serious issues that resonate with the real world. All the while, he is never undermining the fantastic nature of the DC universe’s trademark craziness.

It’s quite a feat, and only achievable by someone who has a confident control of every part of the production process.

There has been a lot of discussion over the two loooooong years we’ve been waiting for this - as to David Corenswet’s fitness for the role.

A lot of fans have only ever known Henry Cavill’s Superman. Personally, I’m of the considered opinion that, despite being physically perfect for the role, he was hampered by terrible scripts and a sullen on-screen persona. Sadly, he never got a chance to show off his warmth and good humour.

Of course, many people who are as ancient as I am, saw Christopher Reeve don the tights back in 1978, and now struggle to think of anyone else in the role. Reeve was physically imposing, noble, modest, endearing and funny… He was Superman! How does anyone follow that?

Well, to my surprise and considerable delight, Corenswet wears all the expectation very lightly. He is confident, but fallible; impossibly strong, but gentle; superior, but conflicted. He doesn’t get to spend much screen-time as Clark, but when he does, he’s natural and believable, with his curly hair swept over his forehead. But when he slaps some product in his hair and steps into the tights - he shines!

Yes, he has that genetically-engineered bone-structure that Hollywood leading-men have. Yes, he is the spitting-image of Reeve. But those sharp blue eyes have a real intelligence and a great deal of empathy. He can do the drama, he can do the comedy. He can be the hero we need, and a total putz who can’t control his dog.

He’s perfect in the role.

And, not insignificantly, Corenswet is Jewish. As were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman. They were the children of immigrants and they made a hero who represented everything great about their adopted country.

That’s an important piece of subtext to bear in mind when thinking about the state of the real world into which Gunn has released his film.

Superman: Gods and Monsters

We begin with Joe Shuster's image of Superman breaking chains - reminding us of Supes’ roots - and then that turns into the classic 70s DC logo to the accompaniment of John Williams's 1978 Superman fanfare. Gunn is all-too aware of his history and he wants to channel as much of it as possible.

Then we get the sequence that was released as an early teaser scene, of Superman crash-landing - very much as he did back in 1938. We're told that he's just lost his first fight.

Krypto the dog turns up to drag Supes to the Fortress of Solitude - Gunn loves his dog and that feeds unfiltered into this script.

In the Fortress, there is a gaggle robots voiced in trademark whimsical style by genre movies’ voice actor of choice: Alan Tudyk. The robots give Supes some sun-bed treatment (conveniently reminding us that he is powered by sunlight) and off he goes back into the fray.

Gunn has dropped us into an ongoing situation. No faffing about with restating the origin story, no going back to the beginning, this is a world in which superheroes - here called ‘metahumans’ (a term coined back in the 80s by Keith Giffen) exist, are known about and are part of the political discourse.

Gunn doesn’t waste time telling us who everybody is. He knows we’re unlikely to be Superman-virgins, so just drops us in. In the case of the Justice Gang, we do need to figure out who they are as we go along. But giving them some exposition (always in the form of back-and-forth dialogue) is far easier than trying to shoe-horn everyone’s back story in there.

It's a fully realised world. And that's only right because everybody knows that this film is relaunching the DC Universe.

There's an awful lot of pressure on this one film. It needs to not only succeed in its own right, it needs to introduce a whole new world and a whole new way of seeing superhero films that can then run through the rest of the DCU, marking it as different from the DC that we had before, as well as distinct from the Marvel Universe.

There is a really interesting, almost throwaway notion that the people of Metropolis are so accustomed to massive monsters attacking their city, they barely notice any more. There's a dialogue-heavy scene between Clark and Lois, which is enlivened by the view through the window of The Justice Gang, in the distance, fighting a giant multi-dimensional ‘imp’ monster.

Both Lois and Clark are completely unconcerned by it. It’s a nice touch that this world is so bizarre, everyone just accepts that this shit happens all the time.

Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Appeal

Then we're introduced to Lex Luthor, played brilliantly by Nicholas Hoult. He's in the middle of a fight with Superman. Well, I say fight. Obviously he never gets his own hands dirty, he always uses others, manipulating them by remote control from his control centre.

He is the billionaire psychopath we all fear. In comics, supervillains tend to be super-intelligent and it's only their raging hubris that brings them down. In the real world, by contrast, our supervillains are dumb as soup, and their hubris goes unchecked.

See, Gunn isn't just channelling Superman's storied past. He's very aware of the present world in which we live, of the political discourse, of the way the media deals with red flag subjects, and the way that that is weaponised by certain parties.

Luthor represents this in the way that he refers to Superman simply as “the alien”. And he would have us believe that he considers Superman to be a threat because he is The Other, he is the alien. Classic right wing rhetoric, in other words.

Lex is trying to sell his rhetoric - and his metahuman weapons - to the Pentagon because what he's interested in is selling weapons. Or so it initially seems.

It turns out later that, just as with Gene Hackman’s memorable turn back in ’78, Luthor's actual interest is land. And, to get the land he wants, he needs to arrange a war.

Superman is a threat to his ambitions because countries don't buy weapons if they don't start wars, and they don't start wars if Superman's going to turn up to stop them. It's a clever way of wrapping the bizarro world of Superman around the real world that we live in today - the world of Putin and Trump and international arms deals.

This film barrels along faster than a speeding bullet - so, it’s not long, before we're introduced to The Justice Gang (name to be confirmed), who are another bunch of metahuman mercenaries paid for by a corporation - in this case, Lord Tech (the province of another billionaire weapons manufacturer - who makes a brief appearance later, played by Sean Gunn, James Gunn's brother and lucky mascot).

Luthor uses the media to turn public opinion against Supes. As we know, the great unsoaped and unwashed can be hypnotised by a few outrageous claims made on supposedly-reputable news channels - that has informed the politics of the last decade in both the UK and the US.

On the flipside of this, Lois later releases the truth about Lex’s schemes and the wise and level-headed people of Metropolis immediately switch their allegiance back to Superman. So that’s nice.

The human relationship between Lois and Clark is very down-to-earth (pun intended), and it's a nice counterbalance to all the mad, bizarre, colourful nonsense of the metahuman world.

It's a shame that their interaction is mostly expositional conversation, and we get a lot of telling, but not a lot of showing their relationship. But then this film is relatively short (by modern standards) at just over two hours, and the getting-to-know-you stuff would undoubtedly have been the first scenes to be cut to keep the running length down.

One of the problems that has been building up in recent superhero films is the need to fill them with a crowd of different heroes and villains, who inevitably have to jostle for screen-time.

Gunn keeps a handle on this by giving Luthor just two sidekicks - The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) and the mysterious, masked Ultraman, while Supes is aided and abetted by the three members of The Justice Gang - namely Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced).

Of these, Hawkgirl gets little to do, but Mister Terrific is… Terrific. And Fillion? He’s just Fillion!

Where’s the Dog?

Krypto the dog is given an awful lot of screen time, but it's to the film's credit they don't try to anthropomorphise him. He's very much a dog, just as dumb and just as destructive, but just as playful and loyal as a dog should be.

The Superman we get here, he really is the Boy Scout version of the character, in that he won't swear, he says things like “Good gosh” and, at one point, goes out of his way to save a squirrel. When there's a giant kaiju attacking, he desperately wants to capture it rather than kill it.

All life is sacred to him - and that’s why he is the binary opposite of Luthor. Only Luthor is sacred to Luthor.

Lois makes a similar point in that she questions everyone, because she's a journalist, while Clark trusts everyone.

Basically, no-one is as naïve nor as optimistic as the flying boy scout.

Even though Hoult has a real capacity for humour, his Luthor is deadly serious and his performance is genuinely chilling in its conviction. He kills in cold blood. He is unconerned at the thought of sacrificing the entirety of Metropolis to feed his raging ego.

Where Hackman played Lex for laughs, Spacey played him seriously, but his plan was nonsense. Jesse Eisenberg… No, I have no idea what he was trying to do… But he wasn’t scary. Hoult genuinely is.

This may be a reflection of the fact that, in the real world, sociopathic tech bros have taken control of the world and we are, at least passively, at their mercy. So, a character like Luthor is much more of a clear and present danger than ever before.

He bellows “Brain beats brawn!” He is convinced he is the superior being. That Galileo or Einstein are idiots compared to him. He really does feel that he is the ultimate human.

And yet he confesses that he is envious of Superman’s powers. It's interesting that billionaire supervillains are motivated by simple childish emotions, and that's definitely something that we can apply to the real world.

Possibly the only sequence that goes fully off the rails is where Supes has to save a CGI baby. They end up in some bizarre antimatter river - about to be sucked forever into a black hole - or something. The drama of this is somewhat undermined because the CGI baby is so obviously a CGI baby, meanwhile the CGI baby’s dad turns into a purple octopus. Y’know, as you do.

This kind of trippy shit was commonplace in those garish 60s DC comics Gunn is taking his cue from. It just makes you realise that there must have been some good shit being smoked in the DC offices back then.

Parents Don't Get to Choose Who Their Children Are.

Now, in the back end of act 2, we have the inevitable crisis of conscience sequence, where Clark goes home in order to recuperate and gaze wistfully at the sunset. We only get a couple of scenes with Ma and Pa Kent, but they’re sufficient to communicate the strength of their relationship and the positive influence they continue to have on him.

They represent the image America used to have of itself, where your value was index-linked to the sweat on your brow and the nature of your character and not by the place of your origin; as opposed to the entitled, class-ridden society that America presently is, where - if certain news channels are to be believed - it does matter where you're from, and it doesn't matter the nature of your character.

‘Daddy issues’ are a common motivator in Hollywood movies, and Gunn is no exception to this - fatherhood plays a major role in all three Guardians films, for example. Here, Clark struggles with the notion that his biological father (played briefly by Bradley Cooper, another Gunn alum) seemingly wanted him to conquer the human race, while his adopted dad taught him to care for them and protect them.

One short conversation on the porch and that moral dilemma is boxed off, so we can move on.

And so we're into the final act and Luthor has to create a (literal) Earth-shattering disaster so that all the metahumans can gather together to sort it out. Although the disaster is delayed until Metropolis has had time to be evacuated. That’s a move which clearly addresses one of the principal complaints about the latter scenes of Man of Steel - the staggering unseen death-toll. Hence why, in this film, when the buildings start falling, there’s no-one inside to worry about.

As in the closing moments of 1978’s Superman, the now fully revitalized moy in the red y-fronts takes on a massive crack that's opening up in the world. And unlike in 1978 when he just flew round the world backwards to reverse time - because clearly that's how time works - here he deals with a slightly smaller issue, one collapsing building at a time.

There’s a key moment in this - when Supes saves one solitary woman. Just one. Trapped in her car. And this is one of the few times they properly deploy John Williams' Superman fanfare - having saved it until the moment of maximum heroic impact. ANother moment is when an embattled child raises a Superman flag. I can't pretend that the hairs didn't go up on the back of my neck and I teared-up a little bit.

Saving one person hits home more successfully than saving entire solar systems, if played right!

One thing which, to my mind, was a plot-contrivance too far - was the Third Act Reveal (that moment when a good guy turns out to really be a badguy, or a character we thought was dead is revealed to still be alive).

Also, there’s a trope that is over-used in comic book adaptations - where they get the hero to fight an evil version of himself. It’s a scene we’ve seen many times from Superman III (in 1983) to The Flash (in 2023) by way of Spider-Man 3, Iron Man 1 and 2 and Logan.

Well, we get that here, too. But, even though I felt it was unnecessary and too familiar, it isn’t a plot device which occupies us for very long, before Gunn moves on. None of his set-pieces take too long, before the story rattles on to the next one.

You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly!

Even with the relative paucity of scenes where characters get to just show us their character, the film is far deeper than the Snyderverse version. The characters are far more human (ironic, I know, given Superman's alien status). The threats seem more real, the heroics more impressive.

I think part of the reason this is such a positive, upbeat film is that Gunn, unlike Snyder, has a positive attitude towards superheroes. Superman will always protect us, because he believes in our inherent decency.

Gunn realises that nowadays we need to be reminded of our own inherent decency.

So, James Gunn's Superman represents hope in the way that Siegel and Schuster's Superman represented hope.

And, let’s be honest, we want to believe a man can fly!

All images © Warner Brothers / DC Studios

Superman (2025)
Writer/Director: James Gunn
Dur: 129 mins
Cert: 12A / PG13