Superman; fantasy, USA, 2025; D: James Gunn, S: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, María Gabriela de Faría, Zlatko Burić
Superman intervened by stopping the country of Boravia from invading the country of Jarhanpur. Since billionaire Lex Luthor has a secret pact with Boravia's dictator Ghurkos, since he plans to get a hold of half of Jarhanpur's land, Luthor starts a whole media smear campaign against Superman. In the meantime, Superman's real identity, Clark Kent, has troubles in his relationship with Lois Lane. When Superman is arrested by the US government and sent to a pocket universe, Luthor captures him thanks to alien Metamorpho who assembles Kryptonite, an element that weakens Superman. However, Metamorpho teams up with Superman, and thanks to Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, they manage to defeat Luthor and stop his pocket universe from deteriorating into a black hole.
James Gunn is the best director of superhero movies. While other directors limit their involvment to only one superhero, Gunn repeats this several times (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" trilogy, "The Suicide Squad"), but always stays faithful to his specific comic taste and wild, untramelled energy, which isn't "reigned in" even in those big budget mainstream productions which usually stray away from risky stuff. Congruent to the principle of "Chekhov's gun", almost all of little details play a role later on and deliver a pay-off (for instance, a random scene of assistant Eve doing a selfie of Superman being beaten up by an adversary in the background plays a role in the finale, when Eve sends all her private selfies to Jimmy Olsen, revealing Lex Luthor's plan), while Gunn inserts Superman in more complex and logical socio-political subtexts of modern times, expanding his role in the world (in a surprising twist, the hero stops an invasion of a (fictional) country from another country, Boravia, preventing a war), and even giving him a mini character-arc at the end (at the beginning, Superman was only ever watching video recordings of his biological parents from Krypton, but after a revelation, he watches video recording of his adoptive, Earth parents who raised him on a farm, signalling his shift from respect towards idealistic strength to respect towards imperfect humanity).
As opposed to other reboots or entries, "Superman's" origin story is luckily skipped here since everyone already knows his mythology, throwing the film in medias res, whereas all the situations and relations are eventually extrapolated and caught up by viewers along the run of the storyline. Besides several comical moments, some even staying true to the director's grotesque or black humor (Superman saves a squirrel from a monster's tail; Luthor imprisoning an ex-girlfriend because she wrote a negative blog about him; the citizens of the fictional country of Boravia speak in Croatian language (!); a villain getting eliminated by being dropped from a high altitude to the ground is followed by a match cut of an aspirin falling and dissolving into a glass of water...), Gunn is also able to craft a grandiose satire on these modern times: the story is basically about an illegal migrant who is arrested by a paramilitary and sent to an unknown, undisclosed detention center without any indictment or charges, tortured and abused, because an envious billionaire has such a fragile ego that the only thing he can counter his feeling of inferiority is to implement a social network media campaign that obfuscates everything and distorts reality to always present Superman in a negative light, and even collaborate with an enemy nation for personal benefits. That Gunn is able to make such subversive stories in big budget productions is astonishing. Some flaws are the undeveloped, unorganized finale; the underused Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Superman's unnecessary dog Krypto; and even some lack of character development or charm in Superman here and there. Still, "Superman" is one of the most refreshing superhero movies, offering a super-James Gunn with style.
Grade:+++