He’s tangled with power-hungry megalomaniacs, pissed-off Kryptonians and a pretty unflattering beard, but Superman’s latest challenge may well be his greatest yet.
Fast Facts about Superman
What: The Man of Steel faces a crisis of public confidence when arch enemy Lex Luthor sets out to crush him by staging a global conflict.
Starring: David Corenswet, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Brosnahan, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Edi Gathegi, Nathan Fillion, Anthony Carrigan, Isabela Merced
Director: James Gunn
Where: In cinemas now.
Likely to make you feel: #hope
Can the Man of Steel restore the lustre to Warner Bros.‘ comic-book arm DC Studios, following a decade of disastrous attempts to establish a cinematic universe?
As if to acknowledge the crisis, and the futility of yet another origin-story reboot, director and new DC honcho James Gunn — the man who managed to make Marvel fun with his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy — dunks us head-first into the middle of the action.
Incoming Superman (David Corenswet) crashes to earth in the snow surrounding his crystalline fortress, having just suffered his first defeat at the hands of an armoured brute known as the Hammer of Boravia — probably not the name his parents gave him, as one character later quips.
Fortunately for Supes, his caped canine Krypto — a mischievous fur-ball who all but steals the movie — is there to revive him, though it’s clear that all isn’t well in the world.
Krypto the Superdog was inspired by James Gunn’s dog Ozu, who he adopted shortly after starting to write Superman. (Supplied: Warner Bros.)
Turns out that Boravia is a fictional Eastern European nation waging war on its neighbour Jarhanpur, an invasion led by the bloated tyrant Ghurkos (Triangle of Sadness’s always enjoyable Zlatko Buric) but secretly masterminded by one Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).
High up in his Metropolis skyscraper with his army of goons, Lex — who Hoult plays like a petulant tech bro — is also cosying up to the US defence force, casting suspicion on his old foe in the hope of doing away with him entirely.
In a slice of real-life super-villainy, his preferred method is spreading misinformation about his „alien“ nemesis, shamelessly playing on the public’s fear of the other.
It’s certainly an ungainly set up for the narrative, with so many characters vying for our attention and plot threads flying this way and that. And that’s before we get to the thorny matter of the film’s geopolitics.
Nicholas Holt plays evil villain Lex Luthor but he originally auditioned for Superman according to director James Gunn. (Supplied: Warner Bros)
Though disguised as a vaguely Eastern European conflict standing in for Russia’s war on the Ukraine, the battle is mapped on screen in ways that look far more like the Middle East — with the US, and its tech-magnate villain, goosing an invasion of an oppressed territory that could be any number in the region.
That the film doesn’t have a clear point of view on all of this is no surprise, given Hollywood’s need to sell its product to the widest possible global audience, but especially when the action is crammed with what often feels like several different movies at once.
Gunn’s Superman sure feels like flipping through the pages of a comic strip. There are wacky new characters and action beats at every turn, and the story is filled with metahumans, shapeshifters, aliens and assorted other wacky critters — a long way from the square-jawed, classically composed Christopher Reeve incarnation of the late 70s, and especially the stentorian, straight-faced 2010s work of Zack Snyder.
Rachel Brosnahan told Collider that she never saw Lois Lane as a „damsel in distress“. (Supplied: Warner Bros)
When Superman takes on a chaotic kaiju stomping its way through the city, he’s joined by a trio of pulpy comic-book heroes — Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Hawkgirl (Dora’s Isabela Merced) and the amusingly cocksure Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) — who bill themselves as the Justice Gang.
The melee is an early highlight, closer to a Japanese TV series — or the giant starfish showdown in Gunn’s Suicide Squad — than anything we’ve seen in a Superman movie before.
Meanwhile, the movie races through its establishing scenes at the Daily Planet, where mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is already deep in love — and revealing his secret identity — with colleague Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan).
Guy Gardner (Nathen Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi) are just some of the fresh faces in Superman. (Supplied: Warner Bros)
It’s a nice twist that everyone at work finally recognises just how hot the bespectacled Kent is, and an even better one when dorky Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) turns out to be a smooth-talking lover-boy flirting with Luthor’s ditzy girlfriend Eve Teschmacher (a very funny Sara Sampaio, giving the movie’s finest two-legged performance).
With Gunn at the helm, this Superman is a lot lighter, and much more fun, than its grandiose predecessor, but it’s also in such a rush to advance multiple narratives and characters that it struggles to establish its own identity.
There’s little rhythm to the film, and not a lot of poetry; the fact that it leans heavily on John Williams’s Superman Theme does it few favours, serving only to remind the audience of Reeve’s soulful, romantic take on the character.
Portugese model Sara Sampaio offers comic relief as Luthor’s ditzy girlfriend. (Supplied: Warner Bros.)
From a certain perspective, Gunn has simply applied his Guardians formula to the Man of Steel: a cocktail of wisecracking banter, cartoonish violence and outsized sincerity that somehow doesn’t quite translate to America’s marquee superhero.
This Superman, we learn, is punk rock at heart — albeit punk rock that looks a whole lot like mid-aughts emo — and a hero whose hatred of oppression leads him to become the champion of the downtrodden hordes of Jarhanpur. All noble sentiments, of course, but what to make of scenes in which Middle Eastern-coded children chant Superman’s name as though he’s their only hope for salvation?
The film’s efforts to position the classic symbol of Truth, Justice and the American Way as a global avatar for humanity in crisis is certainly ambitious. It’s also a near-impossible task, given the character’s history and the $US225 million (pre marketing expenses) of corporate money invested in its success.
Director James Gunn said his Superman is „mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.“ (Supplied: Warner Bros)
It doesn’t help that Corenswet, who makes for a reasonably charming Clark Kent, doesn’t quite have the movie-star magnetism to fill the cape and boots — he’s more college football jock than intergalactic visitor, which appears to be very much by design.
Gunn’s cornball humanism is almost as awkward as the film’s Obama-era #hashtag jokes, especially when he decides to re-imagine the holographic message of Kal-el’s parents (played here in cameos by Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) for a finale that has all the poignancy of a Telstra commercial.
Given the character’s rocky journey over the past decade, it’s hard to know what audiences will make of this new Superman, although it’s fair to say that it clears the very low bar set by most of the recent comic-book movies.
One thing seems certain, however: we’re long overdue for some new big-screen heroes.
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