We all know the worst aspects of comic-book movies (they can be overblown, convoluted, dunked in CGI bombast…did I mention overblown?). But here’s the most ironic aspect of comic-book movies: Most of them aren’t actually very much like comic books. In the comics, superhero feats had to be showcased one grimy frame at a time, and that put a limit on how relentlessly physical the stories could be. They were serial soap operas, journeys more complex and interior than the stories of most comic-book-movie heroes.
That’s where “Superman,” James Gunn’s exuberant and popping reboot, makes a very smart play. Gunn, the bountiful blockbuster craftsman of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, wrote and directed “Superman,” which is the first cinematic missile launched by Warner Bros.’ all-new DC Universe (of which Gunn is also the executive overseer). Gunn knows that the world has grown weary of comic-book film culture, and in the new “Superman” he’s out to reset not just one studio’s fortunes but the very idea of what a comic-book movie is.
In certain ways, the film fits snugly into familiar tropes. The opening credits revive the laser block lettering of the 1978 “Superman,” and the soundtrack incorporates John Williams’ iconic theme music. The movie has pummeling battles, giant plushy troll monsters, characters hurtling through space, and a general air of ballistic wizardry. “Superman,” however, is also dedicated to treating the Man of Steel as what he was in the comics and the first two Christopher Reeve films: a majestic force of good, yet one who’s stalwart but vulnerable, superhuman but touchingly humane, alive with internal struggle. The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.
Any actor taking on this role has to become a dashing hunk of clear-eyed, “all-American” jock-god nobility. But the key to a good Superman performance is what bubbles up from the actor’s soul to lend that valor a playful, haunted undertow. Christopher Reeve, in the most perfect superhero performance of all time, had that quality in superabundance; Henry Cavill did not. And David Corenswet? In Gunn’s Superman, he has enough of it to lure us in. His urgent, slightly puppyish, wavy-haired Superman radiates a joy in what he’s doing, but he’s far from invincible. The film opens with his bruised and bloody body flung down in the Arctic near the Fortress of Solitude, where he has retreated after losing a fight for the first time. The exertions of Krypto, his loyal but reckless dog, only add insult to injury.
We’re cued to see that “Superman” is going to knock Superman around a bit. The roughing continues in the shabby apartment of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), the reporter for the Daily Planet who is dating her fellow newsman Clark Kent on the sly. She chides Clark for his cozy habit of “interviewing” Superman, and when Clark agrees to submit to an interview with Lois, she assaults him with tough questions about the ethics of being Superman. The way Corenswet and Brosnahan interlock egos makes for a riveting encounter, even if the line about Superman’s goodness being “punk rock” is a bit cringe.
Working in a jam-packed effusive way, Gunn doesn’t rehash Superman’s backstory (though there’s a moving moment with his adoptive father, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince), and he enmeshes the character in more global complication than we’re used to. Superman’s nemesis, Lex Luthor, played with quicksilver menace by Nicholas Hoult, is now a fascist tech billionaire — the CEO of LutherCorp — who has his tentacles everywhere: in industry, the U.S. government, and foreign nations. Early on, Superman tries to stave off the invasion of Jorharpur by Boravia, an Eastern European country presided over by a frizzy-haired autocrat (Zlatco Burić) who’s a tool of Luthor. Superman will go anywhere to save humans from injustice, but here it feels like he’s in over his perfectly coiffed head.
Though still the rock star of superheroes, Superman is now competing with other “metahumans,” notably the Justice Gang, whose members include Nathan Fillion’s combative Green Lantern, Isabel Merced’s razor-disc-tossing Hawkgirl, and Edi Gathegi’s furious and merciless Mister Terrific. There’s also a conspiracy that catches fire on social media to make Superman look like a poseur. A hologram of his late parents, Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan), instructed him to help the people of Earth — but Luthor, after sneaking into the Fortress of Solitude, publicizes the other, glitchy half of the hologram as an exhortation to Superman to lord it over the human race. It turns out that that message is not a fake. This implants a fascinating and resonant conflict in the heart of our hero: What’s his true mission, his driving identity?
That’s a quandary that Corenswet, face caught between a grin and a wince of pain, brings to life. For a good part of the movie, Superman is up against it, trapped in the “pocket universe” that Luthor has constructed as a sci-fi portal version of a penal colony, full of glass incarceration cubes. Superman is trapped there by Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), who sports a hand of Krypton crystals. Throw in a quartet of R2-D2-like Superman automatons, a split down the middle of Gotham City (one of those geologic rifts that was more fun in “The Lego Batman Movie”), and Jimmy Olsen’s affair with Luthor’s mutant-toed Kardashianesque girlfriend, and you’ve got a movie frenetic enough to make “Guardians of the Galaxy” seem depressed.
The super-busy quality of “Superman” works for it and, at times, against it. The movie rarely slows down long enough to allow its characters to meditate on their shifting realities. That’s one reason it falls short of the top tier of superhero cinema (“The Dark Knight,” “Superman II,” “The Batman,” “Guardians”). I’d characterize the film as next-level good (a roster that includes “Iron Man,” “Thor,” “Batman Begins,” “Captain America,” and the hugely underrated “Iron Man 3”). Yet watching “Superman,” we register the layered quality of the conflicts, and we’re drawn right inside them. Gunn constructs an intricate game of a superhero saga that’s arresting and touching, and occasionally exhausting, in equal measure. Audiences should flock to it, though a question still hovers over the larger DC Universe: Even if you build it this well, will they come?
Leave a Reply