Y’know, anybody who had seen The Suicide Squad or the Peacemaker series that came out of it probably wouldn’t think that James Gunn was the right guy to direct Superman.
Because while Martin Scorsese may famously disdain superhero movies, James Gunn in his DC Comics productions was about as close as you can get to Martin Scorsese directing superhero movies, at least in terms of the F words equaling the body count. And DC had already done dark and adult Superman and the whole point of ending the “DC Extended Universe” was to break from all that.
But James Gunn’s productions also have real heart and a sense of humor, and one of the reasons to bring James Gunn in – actually as head developer for the whole new DC movie universe – was that he would bring a similar spirit to their movies and do for their characters what he did for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. And the new Superman movie definitely achieves that goal. It is an old-fashioned superhero story like they haven’t been making any more.
This movie fully embraces what one superhero game designer called “the lovely and the pointless” aspects of the genre – like, how Superman has a fortress in the (Ant)arctic full of Kryptonian tech but still works for a daily newspaper, and how he has a scruffy little dog with the same powers that he does (and we know this because the dog has the same cape) and we all just accept this.
It is said that because this movie starts in the middle of the action, it doesn’t have a Superman origin story. That is not quite true. Early on, details of Superman’s origins are revealed and they diverge significantly from the traditional story. I will not spoil the detail because a large part of the plot hinges on it. But Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) uses the scandal to manipulate Superman (David Corenswet) into turning himself into the government, and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) has to get to the bottom of all this, aided by sudden investigative journalist Jimmy Olsen (Skylar Gisondo) and the “Justice Gang” of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillon), Hawkgirl (Isabel Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) who is basically DC’s version of Doc Savage, or as one person put it, Lex Luthor’s Good Twin. The action is great, the production is great, and so are the performances, especially Fillion as asshole Guy Gardner, Hoult as an obsessive Luthor, and David Corenswet, whose Superman works precisely because he is a total square. I mean, this guy actually rescues a squirrel.
And now I should address the politics of all this. Which is weird, because other than one death and some obligatory PG swear words, this is a pretty wholesome movie. You would think it wouldn’t be offensive, and yet people read in controversies from current events, which is all the more odd given that most of the movie was produced before the last election. I guess certain people didn’t like the implication that if you send your personal enemies to a mass detention center in literal nowhere, you’re not the good guy.
And those same people act like Superman has suddenly become “woke.” Maybe they didn’t see the original Siegel-Schuster comics where Superman hammered a wife beater and stopped war profiteers. Neither this movie nor the Superman character in the movie are all that politically conscious, but it’s that very normalcy that seems to offend the anti-woke Right more than it does the self-conscious Left.
Indeed there’s a phrase that’s been going around since the premiere that is alluded to by Superman in one of his scenes with Lois: “Kindness is punk rock.” Of course I always thought punk rock was Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, so the opposite was the case. But look: Right now we have a whole country of professional Christians who are totally aghast at the prospect of Andrew Dice Clay as a stand-up comedian but absolutely adore Andrew Dice Clay as our president. If Dice were both corrupt and senile.
When everything in America is Opposite Day and thugs are our designated heroes, maybe the most punk rock thing you can do is to make a movie about a regular Middle American guy who loses his cool and makes mistakes sometimes, but puts one foot in front of the other every day and always tries to do the right thing.
Maybe James Gunn really was the right guy to direct Superman.
Well, I think so.