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Movie review: Superman [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-20

Billionaires are destroying the world. Left unchecked, they will wreck this planet to a point where even they can’t escape the consequences of the damage they’ve caused. This is a point that is briefly touched upon in the new Superman movie, simply titled Superman, written and directed by James Gunn, starring David Corenswet as Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent.

Superman has not “gone woke.” The new movie works perfectly well as escapist entertainment, if that’s how you want to take it. Since you’re reading this review on Daily Kos, however, you’re probably expecting this review to analyze the movie with an eye to what it says about politics, morality, socioeconomics and such.

KeithDB’s review mentions the movie’s critique of billionaires like Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) but neglects to mention the Boravian invasion of Jarhanpur. At first I thought Boravia stood for Russia and Jarhanpur for Ukraine, but almost all other commentators seem to agree it’s about Israel and Palestine.

In my reviews I like to give a fairly detailed recap of Act I of the movie. Superman starts with a text prologue that is weirdly obsessed with the number 3 and gradually shortening units of time. If this pays off later in the movie, I must’ve missed in the three minutes that I went to go get popcorn and pop.

Superman has just been defeated and pounded away to Antarctica. That’s where his Fortress of Solitude is located. I thought it was in the Arctic? I’m perfectly willing to believe that Superman has moved it. This is not a point to get hung up on, as there is a far worse disruption to the suspension of disbelief later on in this movie.

Anyway, Superman summons Krypto the Superdog to tow him the rest of the way to the Fortress of Solitude. The credits on IMDb list stuntwoman Tori Pratt as a stunt double for the superdog. Not sure if there was an actual dog on the cast, but if there wasn’t that makes it much easier to believe the assertion that “no animals were harmed.”

A supervillain called “the Engineer” (María Gabriela de Faría) has followed Superman to Antarctica and relays the location of the Fortress of Solitude to Lex Luthor. In the fortress, numbered robots help Superman heal by focusing solar light on him as he listens to a message from his biological parents on loop.

A slight change to Superman’s backstory is far more consequential than moving the Fortress of Solitude to Antarctica: Kal-El’s biological parents sent him to Earth with a message, just as we’ve seen in an earlier movie with Marlon Brando as Jor-El, but the message was corrupted and the son has only heard half of it.

Kal-El believes he was sent to Earth to help the planet’s peoples, not rule over them. But Lex Luthor hopes to find evidence in the Fortress of Solitude that Superman is on a mission to conquer Earth, and he does find that evidence. James Gunn has emphasized that Lex Luthor does not alter the message in any way other than translating it from the Kryptonian language to the languages of Earth.

Even with his good intentions based on his understanding of Jor-El’s message, Superman can’t escape criticism. He’ll be damned if he stays out of the Boravia and Jarhanpur conflict, and damned if he gets involved. He decides to get involved and help the people of Jarhanpur, who are as outmatched by the Boravians as the Ewoks are outmatched by the Empire. If God won’t intervene to help Jarhanpur, then maybe Superman is the next best hope.

A powerful being calling himself “the Hammer of Boravia” has shown up in Metropolis to confront Superman. It would be a spoiler to tell you who plays that powerful being. Whoever this Hammer of Boravia is, he seems to be in league with Lex Luthor.

Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego, is a reporter at the Daily Planet who improbably gets lots of interviews with Superman. Clark Kent has been dating Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) for a few months and has trusted her with his secret identity. Lois asks Clark for an interview with Superman and he agrees, but it doesn’t go well, and he walks out (now I can’t remember if that was literal or if he actually flew out her apartment window).

Lex Luthor convinces American government officials to arrest Superman and turn him over to the tender mercies of Lex Luthor’s company Planet Watch. Superman agrees to turn himself in, and winds up in a secret gulag in a pocket universe.

As you already well know, managing a pocket universe runs the risk of tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum of our universe and maybe destroying Earth. It wouldn’t be a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie without putting all of Earth in danger. Oops, this is DC, not Marvel.

Given the danger a pocket universe poses for the very existence of our universe, Lex Luthor is not to be trusted with a pocket universe. Would you trust Elon Musk with a pocket universe, given what a wonderful job he’s done with SpaceX?

I suspect an early draft of the screenplay drew more parallels between Lex Luthor and Elon Musk. Like that maybe Lex Luthor’s automotive company has released an ugly car, and the cad has lost track of how many ex-girlfriends and children he has.

Lex Luthor’s current girlfriend is Eve Tessmacher (Sara Sampaio), a seemingly airheaded blonde constantly taking selfies. Don’t write her off, though. Through her connection to her ex-boyfriend, Daily Planet reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), who has unflatteringly nicknamed her “Mutant Toes,” she turns out to be key to solving the concurrent crises.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the crisis with the colliding universes gets resolved, but maybe it’s a spoiler to tell you that it gets resolved in a ridiculous way that will have Star Trek fans lecturing James Gunn on theoretical physics. I actually don’t know how to repair an intrusion of a pocket universe, but I say with complete confidence that the answer is not what we see in this movie.

Gunn thought of enough conflicts to put on Superman and fill out a 2-hour movie (total running time is 2 hours and 9 minutes) that expecting the superhero to solve a space-time continuum conundrum in a matter of minutes while also dealing with everything else is way too much.

I recommend staying for the post-credits scene, it might give you a chuckle. I can’t tell you whether or not it sets up future DC movies because I don’t actually know.

Wendell Pierce

Wendell Pierce, who plays Captain Wagner on Elsbeth, feels very right to me as Daily Planet Editor-in-Chief Perry White, though I’m sure racists will complain that Perry should be white, because it’s canon and not because they’re racists. Saturday Night Live alum Beck Bennett is hilarious as Steve Lombard. Steve who? I had to look him up, he has appeared in the comic books.

The soundtrack music is good but I wish John Williams’s classic theme had been played much clearer a few times. When that unforgettable melody does appear, its presentation is altered so much that it’s hard to recognize, almost as if the composers and orchestrators were worried about copyright infringement.

Superman is rated PG-13 “for violence, action and language.” Most of the violence in this movie is your typical action movie in which a lot of foot soldiers are summarily dispatched. But there is one death that hits really hard. And in Act III, James Gunn figures out a way to make us worry that Superman could actually die.

There is also profanity, or almost profanity, in Spanish. Not sure if there’s any profanity in the Boravian language, which might just be Serbo-Croat with a lot more English loanwords.

I give Superman (2025) ★★★★☆. Apparently, that’s the same star rating anti-woke critic James Carrick gave this movie, but I can’t read his review because that’s an exclusive for Worth It or Woke members. I assure you that Carrick and I have come to the same star rating from different angles. And I think this confirms my assertion that Superman works as purely escapist entertainment.

But if you’re still thinking about this movie after your popcorn bucket is empty and the end credits have rolled, I think you’ll agree that this movie affirms these core values of Superman: immigration is good, billionaires are bad, and one nation oppressing another is also bad.

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