Superman: Gunn’s Messy Movie Still Fairly Fun
There was not one moment I emotionally connected with Superman. From the jump the film throws some text on there letting us know that Superman has been around for a while. In fact, metahumans have been around for 300 years, according to the opening titles and apparently Superman is the only one that’s ever caused any problems with the government. Weird. Anyway, it starts with a long text crawl letting us know that metahumans and Superman are just around, and Superman may have just majorly stepped in it by stopping one country from invading another. This is a controversial move he’s made, and the world is holding its breath to see the aftermath.
While I admire James Gunn’s anti-origin story stance I do not feel that this film was super successful in this. While Superman is established there are a lot of weird language choices that make the timeline seem fuzzy and everyone speaks in expository chunks that are hard to listen to, especially in the first half. I did find myself wondering often if I’d rather see these chunks played out rather than just hear the characters talk about them. It also still dipped into a lot of origin story tropes which made it feel tonally all over the place.
None of this is the fault of the cast, however. David Corenswet is a good Superman — he’s strong but with a ton of tenderness and is brimming with sincerity. We barely see Clark, and the tone of those scenes often seem to be telegraphing “SEE CLARK IS ALSO A GOOD GUY HE’S SUPERMAN, GET IT?”. I’m not sure if this was meant to be ironic or if Gunn is actually worried we wouldn’t pick up on this. Rachel Brosnahan is new generation Lois Lane. She’s very capable, emotionally shut off and smacks of many of Gunn’s female writing trademarks (including two instances of Gunn’s ever popular women can’t drive joke). But the performance is really strong, with a lot of really raw emotion. Nicholas Hoult is having a great time as Lex Luthor and it permeates the whole film, although some of the story and character choices chafed me.
In fact, the whole cast is really good except that there are so many of them. This script is cluttered and there are arguably three plots going on with a bunch of character-specific threads and the character’s development suffers because of it. There are approximately 30 characters that have more than 5 lines even if they add nothing to the plot. While I don’t begrudge people the desire to see the Justice Gang or other silver age favorites I do wonder what they add to the film besides MacGuffins and fan service. I really wanted a movie about Superman, not a Metropolis version of Our Town. There is also a sequence involving one of these characters where the CGI and effects looked so terrible it was hard to watch. There are a lot of CGI fight scenes in this. It felt like they took up half the run time and they got old fast.
The abandoned choices were the thing that bothered me the most. When Superman is introduced the classic Williams scoring is used, when Luthor is introduced, it is a pulsing piece of electronic music, showcasing the contrast between the two. I was excited to hear this contrast continue, how they would interplay in shared scenes but Luthor’s electronic motif is discarded immediately thereafter. The tone of the film is interesting because a lot of the cynicism of the writing team does bleed in here, it just doesn’t really touch Superman himself which makes him feel very out of place at times. They have Krypto, which is exciting, but he’s very different from his comic counterpart which feels like an attempt to be subversive while still getting fan service points.
This probably sounds like I hated the movie, and I didn’t, not really. It was overstuffed, overloud, and over complicated but there were a lot of genuine moments I really enjoyed. There were some jokes that landed amongst all the misfires. It was nice to see Superman who felt like Superman. I just wish the movie had been about him and not the whole world he inhabits. It felt like a new cinematic universe launch first and foremost and a Superman movie second.
I give Superman (Warner Bros., DC Studios; PG-13; 2 hrs 9 mins) a tentative 3 out of 5.
