Half a Century with Superman: Josh talks about the 2025 Superman

I saw Superman last week with the family and liked it.

But then, I liked Man of Steel for what it was. One of the things I enjoy about Superman as a property is how it tends to bring out the best in me. I can appreciate the stuff each interpretation does well and love it for that individual expression. Heck, I even liked (parts of) Superman Returns. There was that part where he lifted that heavy thing. And then, a little bit later, he lifted something slightly heavier. (And also, Brandon Routh was a great Superman and a great Clark, the scene with the piano was tense and great, it clearly loved the first two movies and you could see flashes of brilliance with what it was trying to do.)

The very first comic book I remember reading was a supermarket checkout aisle digest collection of the Legion of Super-Heroes. If you're not familiar, it's the adventures of Superboy with other teenage superheroes, a thousand years in the future. I worked at a comic book store before the internet was widely available, so instead of looking my phone all day, I read comics all day. I'm well-acquainted with Superman and have been all my life, is what I'm saying. So I was well-positioned to recognize the broad strokes of the movie as they unfolded. (That's certainly not a dig against it. If a well-informed and highly motivated viewer can spot the beats of your movie, well that's a feature, not a bug. It means it's been structured well.)

I would say that it's impossible to tell a completely original story about Superman after nearly 100 years of continuous publication, except Superman Smashes the Klan did it in 2019.

This has probably replaced All-Star Superman as my favorite Superman story.

We're going to get into spoilers about now, so beware.

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"Bewarb?"

Good stuff:

Outstanding supporting cast. Nicholas Hoult,  Rachel Brosnahan, and Skyler Gisondo were born to play their roles. I saw David Corenswet in the Politician years ago, and while I hated it, I had the same thought everybody did on seeing it, "Holy shit, this guy needs to play Superman!"

It had humor. After the movie, I went online (as one does) and saw that Luthor's sidekick Otis was credited as Otis Berg. That's actually hilarious.

It wasn't embarrassed about about being a comic book movie. I love the X-Men movies of the 90s, but it started the "mature" trend of sneering at the source material that it believes the audience has outgrown (or should have).

I overall liked the movie, and I didn't want to open up with critiques, so I'm going to try the compliment sandwich format here. Good-bad-good.  Taking a break.

Some bad stuff (or at least stuff I didn't like):

As much as I enjoyed seeing Clementine Pennyfeather,

You're new. Not much of a rind on you.

and this is a personal issue, but I don't like Superman's space mom and dad being evil. And maybe we'll get a qualifier or additional context, but it rubs me the wrong way.

I see the Kents as his parents, and, along with his Lois, the most important people in his world. Lara and Jor-El are an important part of his backstory, but not his parents in the way the Kents are. I think this is an especially egregious misstep particularly since the narrative leaned heavily into the immigrant angle. I believe that they are people who deeply loved their son and sacrificed to give him a better life they would not live to see.

 

Instead, the subtext is that Superman is one of the only good ones, the extraordinary member of an outsider group that is otherwise universally bad.

And speaking of his parents....I'll buy that some kind of handwavy nanotechnology super-nonsense allowed the Engineer to decode/repair the message. I'm suspending my disbelief, but it's there. She's a polymath. She does both hacking and handstands. If it's so easy that puny, incompatible Earth science fixes it in about ten seconds, then maybe Clark could have had his robots look into at some point over the past two decades.

That's not the part that bothers me, though. Translation is hard. Languages are not a cipher where one word in English corresponds to a one word in another language. When translating something you have to keep in mind the context and the intention. For an earlier post, I looked into Baudelaire's poetry. He did most of his writing from the 1840s-1860s, so the language hasn't changed monumentally in that time, and English borrowed a lot from French. But as you can see from this link, there are a number of very different translations of his work. And these are from experts who have had all the time they needed to explore it and I think it's fair to say we have a much better understanding of French than we do of Kryptonian.

I get what they're trying for, but that very quick, absolutely universal acceptance of the authenticity of the message is another weak point. Experts take a long time to validate something unusual and this seemed to have been completed in hours. Quickly enough that none of Mister Terrific's pals who did the investigating thought to reach out to him. Yeah, it's a picayune complaint in a movie about flying aliens, pocket universe gulags and super-powered dogs, but it's another thing that bothers me. 

I don't like a reckless Superman. I loved Grant Morrison's angry young man interpretation 

With his working class ties and his radical plans...

but in the movie, it just seemed like he didn't think through the consequences of his actions. I like a Superman who will take a principled stand even though he knows there will be consequences, not one caught unawares by the entirely predictable blowback from his actions.

I want a Superman who stands up for the weak and knows and accepts that there are sometimes consequences for it. (Fortunately, we get him later in the movie)

Ugh, this negative part is getting bigger than I had hoped. One more thing. The ending speech was a little flabby. "I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength."

It was fine. 

You said it, Mister Fantastic!

And sometimes good enough is good enough, but not at the climax of the movie. It wasn't the best version of itself. 

Okay, back to stuff I like. I already mentioned Jimmy and Lois. But they were just so good. They were the best versions of themselves. I liked her understated purple color scheme, hearkening back the S:TAS. They were great together and great on their own or with others. 

The movie had a lot of heart. His parents, the Kents, were perfect too. In a lot of ways, the Kents are the bellwether for how a Superman adaptation is going to be. Small role, big impact.

I love the janky secondary level of the Superman mythology that's usually too weird to include, like the Bottle City of Kandor or Krypto. I'm glad that he's there. I'm even happier about the real world consequences of his presence, that shelter dog adoptions have surged. 

He also leads to the best exchange in the movie.

Superman: I'm gonna turn myself in. Maybe they'll take me wherever they took the dog.

Lois Lane: It's just a dog.

Superman: I know, and he's not even a very good one. But he's alone... and probably scared.

Percy said that felt like a line I would write and I wish I had. There is so much of Superman in that line. 

It was good. It wasn't perfect. But maybe that's what I need to take from the movie. Things don't need to be perfect.