In the Flesh: Superman (2025)

Right out of the gate, James Gunn’s reimagining of DC’s iconic Superman (David Corenswet) is big and bold, full of bright colors and frenetic action. The villains are repulsive, self-aggrandizing assholes, the heroes are goofy and sincere, there are hover pods and lasers and women made of nanites and hard-charging reporters and superheroes battling dimensional imps drifting through the backgrounds of quiet shots. It’s a living world with more going on than we have time to see, a world where wonders like a pocket dimension are put to uses as venal and petty as locking up one’s ex-girlfriends and destinies as grandiose as the colonization and forced breeding of an entire planet are turned from in favor of quiet decency. This clever juxtaposition between Superman and his nemesis, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), is the dramatic axis around which the film’s analysis of power revolves. What do we do with access to authority, however we come by it, and what does that say about us?

It’s Pruitt Taylor Vince as Jon Kent who cuts right to the quick of things, providing a salt of the earth foil to Lois Lane’s (Rachel Brosnahan) journalistic doggedness. As his adopted son sits beside him in front of the family home, grappling with the truth that his birth parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) intended for him to rule the Earth and sire a genetic dynasty, Jon says, “Well, I'd say what you wanted that message to mean says a whole lot more about you than what anyone meant for it to mean.” Immigrant or native, we are what we do, not where we come from or who our parents want us to be. It’s a gentle scene, and Vince handles it with such clear depth of feeling that it’s hard not to get choked up yourself. On the other side of the issue you have men like Luthor and the Trumpian/Putinesque Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić), frantically trying to pummel the world into a reflection of their own jealous anxieties and petty ambitions and lashing out with hysterical violence whenever it resists. 

It’s interesting that beneath Gunn’s colorfully earnest aesthetic approach to Krpyton’s last son is a film as intellectually and morally complex as Snyder’s grimly self-serious Man of Steel thought it was, mature enough to leave questions unanswered, clear-eyed enough to answer others with decisive, righteous force. Lois is right to question Superman’s cavalier approach to stopping a war. Superman was right to stop it. Kind-hearted American decency and hospitality are better than elitist natalist paranoia and kleptocracy. The greed and violence of madmen like Putin, Trump, Musk, and Netanyahu are as squarely evil and inhuman as the fight against them is morally right. It isn’t Snyder’s risible decision to have his Superman snap an enemy’s neck that speaks to the character’s place in a world overrun by senseless violence; it’s Gunn’s to make him a man who knows right from wrong.