Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?
James Gunn's latest Superman movie is a travesty of misunderstanding
As it turned out, the dog was fine.
James Gunn loves to use animals to play with emotions, particularly computer generated animals who are easier to control. There are a bevy of animals in his SUPERMAN movie, including numerous dogs, cats, cows, a little squirrel Superman saves at one point, a turtle an old lady holds as she boards a bus out of Metropolis to escape a rift across universes which makes no real world or dramatic sense and has a bevy of CGI cubes that look like they were ported over from Minecraft. Krypto is the least of the problems.
Gunn seems far more comfortable with animals than people, even alien people. He particularly seems to have serious daddy issues, which directly echo the Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2: In Gunn’s retelling, Superman was sent from Krypton not to be an ideal to strive toward, but to dominate the Earth, to rule over its people, and to procreate to restore the genetic line of his elite alien family bloodline. Why is a director so comfortable just lazily ripping one villain’s motives from his own movie and placing it incongruously onto another father figure? Unclear.
What is clear is that Gunn has no more respect for Ma and Pa Kent than he does for Jor-El. Rather than being strong upstanding moral avatars of American pride and grounded purpose — Hank Hills of the Midwest — the Kents are transformed into ignorant schlubs, whose primary message to Clark in a moment of personal crisis is to just be himself, even if that means being a weakling. Clark takes this message to heart in the climax of the movie by lecturing Lex Luthor on why being a wuss is his greatest strength, in a scene with all the stakes of an after school special.
This movie absolutely, totally sucks. The CGI sucks. The writing sucks. The cast, which is for the most part much higher quality than the material, sucks. There’s a blatant anti-Semitic trope figure who Hawkgirl just straight up murders without compunction. There’s a bunch of quippy Nathan Fillion dialogue which generated more murmurs than laughs. There’s a computer generated baby who becomes a pivotal plot point who creates no stakes. Lex spouts action moves like a spastic competitive gamer and his overall giant plan makes no sense. His media manipulation conspiracy is pointless. He literally employs monkeys writing tweets. People stand around looking at Kaiju and falling buildings and behaving as if they’re just NPCs in a bad video game. The main political plot point is a war that seems to take place on a battlefield the size of a minor college football stadium. The flight sequences look like crap. Alan Tudyk, having portrayed one of the most moving androids in recent memory, inspires no emotions whatsoever as a key robot here. The chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan is nonexistent — Jimmy Olsen gets a better relationship. And of course the suit just looks terrible, especially in daylight.
I’ve seen a lot of superhero movies, and this one — given the level of investment involved, the promotional push, the iconic nature of the character and the importance to the future of DC and Warner Bros. — is by far the worst. I would have left the theater if I hadn’t gone with a friend. There are minor Marvel entries with more to their credit than this. It doesn’t even manage to be fun.
David Mamet understood Superman as a fable “not of strength, but of disintegration”:
“Superman's two personalities can be integrated only in one thing: only in death. Only Kryptonite cuts through the disguises of both wimp and hero, and affects the man below the disguises. And what is Kryptonite? Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home.
“It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman's life. The possibility that the shards of that destroyed home might surface prevents him from being intimate — they prevent him from sharing the knowledge that the wimp and the hero are one. The fear of his childhood home prevents him from having pleasure. He fears that to reveal his weakness, and confusion, is, perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, to receive death from the person who received that information...
“Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home — it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.”
James Gunn doesn’t give a crap about any of that. He just wants to play with his CGI animals and play Iggy Pop.