Recent Movie: Superman

James Gunn's Superman begins in its second act. Halfway through that act, in fact, with Superman (David Corenswet), having just been trounced by an opponent, taking a breather to recharge his strength in the Fortress of Solitude, and then rejoining the fray in Metropolis. In quick succession over the next few scenes, we learn: that Superman has been active on Earth for several years; that his triumphant opponent is the representative superhero of Boravia, a cod-post-Soviet nation angry over Superman's unilateral decision to prevent them from invading their neighbor Jarhanpur, a cod-Middle-Eastern nation; that the person actually pulling the strings—literally, he calls out alphanumerically-coded plays to the Boravian superhero (who, it turns out, is not actually Boravian) like an overinvolved football coach—is Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult); that the US government, angry over Superman's interference with their Boravian allies, has given Luthor at least its tacit approval to take Superman down; and that Clark Kent is a respected reporter at the Daily Planet and has been romantically involved with his colleague, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), for several months. Oh, and that Superman has a superpowered dog named Krypto who is spectacularly poorly trained.

With three cinematic Supermen appearing on our screens in the last nineteen years, not to mention multiple takes on the character on TV, in animation, and of course in the comics, there's some logic to this decision by Gunn—who also wrote the film's screenplay—to forgo much of his story's setup. It avoids what by now feels almost like boilerplate, introductions to characters and situations we know well. It leaves Gunn space to write a more involved story, featuring pocket universes, interdimensional prisons, solicitous robots, and multiple supervillains and superheroes, in which a giant lizard attack on Metropolis is but an aside from the plot proper, while still keeping the runtime to just over two hours. And by forcing the audience to scramble to catch up to, and then keep up with, the barreling plot, it creates a buffer of good will for a character who often comes off as reactive and un-strategic.

It's an approach that allows the film to cut straight to its best scene, in which Clark and Lois, in the guise of her interviewing Superman for the Planet, end up in an increasingly fraught argument over his decisions. Yes, Lois says, she sympathizes with Clark's anger over an unnecessary, illegal war, and his desire to save lives. But does he really feel that the decision was his to make? Does he truly not understand why it might bother people to hear that he abducted a democratically elected leader and terrorized him into standing down his army? Clark's reaction—that for all the logic of Lois's arguments, people were going to die and he had to stop it—is also our first sense of how this Superman stands apart from his many predecessors. He isn't naive about the world, or an ethereal Jesus figure who refuses to acknowledge its realities. Nor is he an embittered nihilist, whose reaction to criticism is to declare humanity unworthy of his gifts. This Superman is a bit of a hothead, someone with good, sympathetic impulses whose consequences he often doesn't know how to deal with.

Another thing that comes through in this scene is how much Superman, without ever announcing its intent to do so, is in conversation with Zack Snyder's much-derided Man of Steel. Or perhaps I should say "in rebuke of". So many of the ideas that arise in the film's first half have direct parallels in Snyder's movie: is Superman a de facto world policeman? should governments seek to control him? should people fear him? Despite the ongoing insistence of Snyder fanboys, Man of Steel never actually found anything interesting or insightful to say about these questions. Superman, without a fraction of the earlier film's self-importance, does. It recognizes that these are complex questions about which reasonable people can and probably would disagree. That you can want Superman to step in and resolve geopolitical conflicts while still realizing what a horribly slippery slope that might be. And it does this without calling attention to itself, without any TV talking heads or man on the street interviews, at the same time as it advances a truly breakneck plot full of objectively silly touches such as Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern, sporting an awful bowl cut, insisting that his fledgling superhero organization should be known as the Justice Gang.

When Luthor infiltrates the Fortress of Solitude at the film's midpoint, he discovers a message from Superman's parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) that has inspired his heroism and sense of service. Unbeknownst to Superman, the message has a second half, which Luthor broadcasts to the world. In it, Lara and Jor-El urge their son to conquer the Earth and subjugate humanity. The immediate shift in public opinion against Superman is familiar not just from Man of Steel but from many other self-serious superhero movies, but instead of using this turn of plot to paint its hero as a put-upon Christ figure, Superman leaves us space to understand where people are coming from. We've all seen The Boys, and while it might be unfair to judge an ordinary person on the beliefs of parents who didn't even raise them, the calculation changes when that person has the power of a god. Gunn's script, without downplaying how unfair this reaction is, also makes us realize that we might feel the same if we lived in the film's world.

The rest of the movie is a rollercoaster of plot, in which Superman is imprisoned by the government (who promptly hand him over to Luthor), Lois and the Justice Gang try to find him, and a danger to the planet (read, the city of Metropolis) builds. That Gunn so fastidiously focuses on both the evacuation of the city and Superman's efforts to save citizens as they escape might be taken as yet another dig at Man of Steel, except that that film's utter indifference to civilian body count has been so traumatizing to the entire genre that every superhero movie since 2013—including Snyder's own sequel—has been absolutely fanatical about making it clear that their hero will not let you die in a pile of rubble if they can in any way prevent it.

It's in this half of the movie, however, that the choice to just dive into the story and forgo any sort of preamble starts to prove a bit wobbly. Even in the rush of breakneck, zany plot, it becomes increasingly clear that there's a lot of emotional scaffolding missing from Gunn's story. That, for all that he's gesturing at the things we know and love about the characters, the specificity that would make these versions of them his own is missing. Hoult is excellent as Luthor, making a character who might have been just another of Hollywood's evil tech billionaires genuinely scary but also oddly funny. But it's precisely the excellence of that performance that makes you wish there had been a few quiet moments with him to just get a sense of him as a person. Brosnahan gets even less of a chance to show off. She's tough and no-nonsense, as any Lois Lane should be, but when it comes to offering a unique spin on the character she ends up saddled with awkward expository lines like "I'm just a punk rock kid from Bakerline". Which tells us very little, since we don't know what Bakerline is, and "punk rock kid" serves mainly as a reminder that this thirty-year-old female character was written by a fifty-year-old man.

This is not a problem that skips Superman himself, unfortunately. The film furnishes its hero with an array of problems. He has to reconcile the fact that the narrative around which he has built his entire identity has been a lie. To prove to the world that he is who he claims to be. And to defeat Luthor's vast array of futuristic technology, armor-clad mercenaries, and pet supervillains. But it's the first of these challenges that will define the character and his arc over the course of the movie, and, perhaps because Gunn's script is so focused on denouncing Snyder, on telling us what his Superman is not, it doesn't quite manage to sell this realignment of his identity. Clark gets a moving scene with his father (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who reminds him that it's up to him to choose who he is (once again, the film quietly but quite pointedly rebukes Man of Steel). And he gets a speech to Luthor in which he affirms his humanity—including the parts of it that are messy and prone to mistakes. But to me, neither of these scenes landed. They affirm the things I think Superman should believe in and stand for, but in themselves they are not enough to build an actual person to hold those beliefs.

(Part of the problem is that, despite freeing up a lot of storytelling space by ejecting the film's first act, Gunn then turns around and spends a large chunk of its back half developing secondary characters, chiefly the future Justice League. This results in some enjoyable scenes—Edi Gathegi's Mr. Terrific has been rightly singled out as one of the film's best aspects, and Isabela Merced rather delightfully plays Hawkgirl as an unimpressed zoomer. But it's a problem, I think, when your best action scene—in which Terrific calmly dispatches a troupe of Luthor's mercenaries, as seen from the terrified point of view of Lois, whom he has stashed in a force field in the middle of the battlefield—does not feature your title character at all.)

The reason that Superman works—the reason that all superheroes work, really, but specifically the reason that a man with godlike powers becomes Superman and not Homelander—is that he loves people. This is what Zack Snyder missed, and what James Gunn spends his movie quietly rebuking him for—and sometimes, not so quietly, as when he has Lois openly say to Clark that the thing she both admires and doesn't understand about him is his capacity to love everyone he meets. But there's a difference between telling and showing, and this trait, in particular, is one that any depiction of Superman has to make us feel. Gunn's Superman does a lot of things right, and sets up avenues of character and story that might pay off in future movies and TV shows. But when it comes to Superman himself, it spends more time promising than delivering.