Superman (2025) is a fun and wholesome movie that’s best enjoyed on the big screen. Despite some issues with pacing and a few unfortunate content choices, actual comic book readers and fans of DC’s more fantastic feel will find James Gunn’s first entry in the new DCU a welcome escape from the grim-dark deconstructions of Zack Snyder and the sprawling fizzle of the recent MCU. What they will not find—contrary to certain online trolls with axes to grind—is a Superman who is either weak or “woke.” Instead, Gunn offers us a classic portrayal of a hero whose idealism, for better or worse, refuses to sacrifice personal morality to “political realities.”
Writer-director James Gunn drops us straight into the action, employing a Star Wars-like film crawl to establish the rules of this different Earth with its alternative geography and history, including the centuries-old presence of metahumans. Importantly, we learn that Superman is the greatest of these beings, and that he has never lost a battle—until now. Very much like a comic book, the story begins in media res and expects the audience to keep up. Like the ’90s Superman and Batman cartoons and markedly unlike most comic-book films to date, Gunn grounds this fairy tale in its own world rather than in ours, yet he does so with an eye towards what remains constant in any possible universe: goodness, truth, and beauty.
Juilliard-trained actor David Corenswet plays a consummately good Superman. While Superman films have generally featured actors who looked the part, Corenswet exudes a unique innocence, sincerity, and kindness that even the good guys in his own world find a bit corny and naïve. As the MCU was careful to ground the powers of its own moral center, Captain America, in more fundamental virtues, Gunn likewise goes out of his way to give us a Superman whose disinterested personal goodness makes him worthy of his physical gifts so that he can be a gift to the whole human race. This goodness rubs off on everyone Superman encounters, bringing the best out of more jaded good guys while driving Lex Luthor further into his own evil ways. Gunn’s Superman is a cheerful sign of contradiction.
The script surrounds DC’s main man with a cast of players who are interesting in their own right, but who also help to define the film’s protagonist. Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane recalls the plucky confidence and professional determination of her namesake from the old Max Fleischer cartoons, but Brosnahan adds a dash of worldly-wise skepticism, which sets her in tension with Clark/Superman’s uncomplicated do-goodery. (Doesn’t he realize that he can’t just swoop in and stop a war?!) Nicholas Hoult plays Luthor as a modern Pelagian, a self-made tech-genius for whom every virtue and skill ought, by right, to be the product of planning and technique, and who therefore can only seethe with envy at Superman’s gratuitous qualities. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is a smart-alec Green Lantern familiar to comic book readers, while Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific suffers no fools while stealing most of his scenes. Jimmy Olsen is perfectly cast, and even Krypto the superdog works well in this film, with its full embrace of DC’s fantastic qualities. Far from over-stuffing the film or detracting from Superman, I felt that each of these characters served the story and aided, by contrast, in the characterization of its titular character.
This is not the realistic world of Nolan’s Batman Trilogy, the grim-dark elseworld style of Zack Snyder’s films, nor even the semi-grounded world of the MCU. Each of those film universes takes, with varying degrees, a more sci-fi approach to superheroes, one which starts with the question, “What if?” Nolan: What if Batman really existed and there was a plausible reason for all his skills and tech? Snyder: What if invulnerable, god-like entities really graced our gray and pock-marked world? Even the MCU tries to provide at least a veneer of this-world plausibility for its “enhanced” individuals, going so far as to have characters make jokes at their own expense as if to apologize to filmgoers for such indulgences as magical hammers and shields that return to their thrower. But in comics, DC has always been more consciously fantastic, and has therefore leaned more deliberately into fantasy rules than those of science fiction. If Marvel is (generally) sci-fi fantasy, DC tends toward fantasy sci-fi. The difference is subtle, but Gunn understands it.
Myths, fairy tales, and the DC universe do not start so much with a “What if?” but a “What then?” Granted that there are godlike beings, magical entities, ridiculous science gizmos, mad scientists, and eighty-story monsters—what then? To paraphrase Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland,” a fairy tale does not confuse real necessities—moral and logical universals—with the necessities of this present, contingent order. He remarks that “Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command—which might have come out of Brixton—that she should be back by twelve” (Orthodoxy, ch. 4). Thus, Gunn grounds fantastic characters in their own fantastic Earth, which is not our Earth, though it mirrors it in some respects. Most movie-goers have embraced the film’s cheerful, almost corny escapism, though a small, serious minority does not seem to be in on the joke. Perhaps because it comes at their expense.
Yet Superman is not all spectacle and fun. The film’s central theme is the power of love and the dignity of the human person. In what I consider to be the essential moment in the story, Clark and Lois have a heart-to-heart while Green Lantern, Mr. Terrific, and Hawkgirl can be seen fighting a ridiculous interdimensional imp in the background. Channeling the viewer’s thoughts, Lois keeps looking nervously out the window, but Clark, judging the others can handle it, has weightier things on his mind. The two of them could not be more different—or complementary. Clark is the wide-eyed idealist who sees good in everyone. Lois is the politically aware journalist who takes everything seriously, even her music. In a very James Gunn moment, as the conversation meanders, she has reason to distinguish “real” punk rock from a mere pop-punk à la Mighty Bosstones (a fictional band called the Mighty Crabjoys). Clark, the consummate normie, sheepishly defends his favorite band, but then drops a line that summarizes his whole philosophy. “Maybe that,” —recognizing the dignity and wonder of each human being—“is the real punk rock.” Only James Gunn could craft a character moment so simultaneously zany and meaningful, but Clark’s sentiment refutes the silliest charges against the film: that there is too much humor, that the film is politically “woke,” and that Gunn’s Superman is weak.
There is certainly humor in the film, but most of it enriches either the characters or the setting. Gunn showed a lot of restraint here compared to the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, and the humor seemed to this reviewer to complement the film’s earnest tone. While we concede that even a charitable moviegoer may find the film’s tone not to his taste, other charges have been flung at Superman that have little basis in reality. For example, in this film Superman shows compassion toward all life, even animal life, and even the lives of his enemies. This, according to certain political vloggers, proves that the film is politically hard-left. Likewise, in this story—as in numerous comic books throughout the decades—Superman intervenes to stop a particularly one-sided war. According to certain pundits, this action shows that Superman is an anti-Israel activist, even though the countries in question are fictional, and even though Gunn is on record stating that this part of the script was in place before the current outbreak in hostilities.
It’s also worth mentioning that upon being accosted by a film journalist known for stirring up controversy, Gunn, obviously treading carefully, conceded that Superman is a kind of immigrant. And while there is no doubt that Gunn’s sail flaps in sympathy with the general Hollywood winds, for the interview in question both he and Nathan Fillion (Guy Gardner) were visibly uncomfortable, with Fillion even adding, “It’s just a movie, man.” These comments were blown out of proportion by online outrage farmers, whom Gunn nevertheless both presciently and hilariously anticipated in one of the movie’s zanier moments. The truth is that this film really argues against “wokeness,” against the idea that power relations rather than personal relationships define the human landscape.
As previously mentioned, Superman’s real power is his personal goodness. Human relationships, along with personal choices, made him the man fit to wear the cape. Gunn even makes a rather daring change to Superman canon to drive home the point that Clark’s human mother and father played the pivotal role in setting him on the path of virtue. That certain online political commentators feel positive disdain for this version of Superman, a disdain paralleling Lex Luthor’s, and that these same commentators read their own interests into the vaguely Eastern-European and entirely mythical country of Boravia says, perhaps, more about them than it does about this film. Yes, man is a political animal in the sense that he is a relational animal that must form communities and polities. But for Gunn’s Superman, persons and human relationships are more important than the state. That’s a conservative position—at least it used to be. As for the charge that this Superman is less “manly” than Henry Cavill’s stoic God-man, I answer that throwing one’s weight around is not manliness, indifference to destruction is not strength, and virtue, though it must be chosen and practiced, is always a gift from above, a cause for gratitude, not pride. That Corenswet’s Superman struggles (and succeeds) while catching falling buildings and hundred-ton kaiju rather than permit the collateral squashing of the insect-like masses proves, according to certain critics, that he’s a wimpy soy-boy. Funny, I thought it proved that he was Superman!
In sum, Superman (2025) is neither a political movie nor a revisionist reduction. It’s a classic American fairy tale that holds up a mirror to timeless personal realities. Gunn’s genius is shown in making his protagonist a kind of Rorschach test, a sign of contradiction in a cynical world. Indeed, I find it striking that Gunn, unlike Donner, Singer, Snyder, or the comics (with the ’90s death and later “resurrection” of Superman) never visually references the Superman-as-Christ trope. And yet his Superman is by far the most Christ-like we’ve seen on screen. My own children—normal people who read comic books, watch cartoons, and who’ve yet to acquire that sophistication that sees agendas under every upturned rock—loved the movie, as did the multi-generational crowd with whom we attended it.
Even so, there are a few legitimate content concerns. Christ’s name is abused once, and characters drop a number of minor four-letter words. Clark and Lois are not living together, but one gets the sense that they’re more than “dating.” An innocent man is shot point blank in the head with a revolver, and there is a reference to “sexy selfies,” though the photos are just glamour shots that serve as misdirection in the narrative (pardon the minor spoiler). Still, there was far less swearing and objectionable material than in most MCU films, and the film’s overall wholesomeness overcame, for me, these defects. I was able to bring my eight-year-old by employing one strategic covering of the ears, and one of the eyes. For parents and older children who can wade through or work around the above caveats, this film is worth seeing in the theater. The plot also moves too quickly in places, though this did not detract from my family’s positive experience. Finally, viewers who dislike comic books as a medium, fantasy as a genre, or who can only appreciate comic movies that attempt to ground the characters in realism will likely find this film not to their taste. Superman is neither realistic, nor is it an origin story. It makes no apologies for what it is: an earnest, moving, zany, beautiful film. For fans of the wonderful, things are looking up.