Maybe if we gave him a cute dog, that would help?
Superman has had a rough 21st century. We used to think he was the only superhero that mattered. Back in 1992, I read part of The Death of Superman and thought, Wow. This is some mega weird stuff. Can this possibly be earned? I tried reading it cold, but the sheer pileup of details left me bewildered. Halfway through, I admitted, “This sure is cool,” then shut the comic and never returned.
Watching James Gunn’s Superman (2025) gave me that same feeling. His approach is to skip the backstory, skip the origin, and just plunge us in. Suddenly there’s a Superdog, robots in the Fortress of Solitude, an unusually honest relationship with Lois Lane, and even Supergirl flying in. The villains aren’t streamlined either.
What has always made sense to me about Superman is simple: Clark Kent came from Krypton, which made him invulnerable on Earth, and he could fly because of the gravity difference. Mythic, clean, logical. Now here comes a villain whose hand turns into a spinning buzzsaw. Who is she? Does this character have any story at all?
I looked it up: she’s The Engineer, a.k.a. Angela Spica. In the lore, she served in the army, was gravely injured, and got noticed by Lex Luthor. He rebuilt her with nanites — microscopic machines that can reconfigure her body into programmable metal, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. On paper, that’s a solid origin. But how much of that backstory makes it into this movie? Absolutely none. She just appears at Luthor’s side, her hand turning into a blade because it looks cool. Casting a sympathetic actress is the only hint that she might not always have been evil.
I skipped the Zack Snyder era. From the outside, those films looked joyless, and if Gunn’s movie is this desperate to course-correct, maybe they really were. Snyder was never the right choice anyway. Nolan could balance absurdity, self-seriousness, and spectacle into something resembling art. Snyder, the guy who made 300, was never going to walk that line with Superman. Did we really need to see him slugging it out with Batman in what looked like a truck-stop men’s room? That was the big payoff?
The last Superman movie I saw before this was Superman Returns (2006), and I really didn’t like it. Supposedly a direct sequel to Superman II, it cast 23-year-old Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, suddenly the mother of a five-year-old. (She was apparently 18 when Superman left Earth.) Did people actually like this movie? Superman was a godlike voyeur, eavesdropping on every conversation on Earth, while Lex Luthor, villain realtor extraordinaire, finally achieved his dream of building a Kryptonite continent that would sink the world’s coastlines. Real estate. Yawn.
By then, my stock in DC superheroes couldn’t have been lower. Wonder Woman (2017) was the first sign they could still get one right. Gunn was clearly hired to do for Superman what Taika Waititi did for Thor in Thor: Ragnarok: break him down and reintroduce him as fun. But while Waititi’s absurdity produced one of Marvel’s crown jewels, Gunn’s film feels more like a WB-themed screensaver.
Take the ending. Superman sits in the Fortress of Solitude, surrounded by robot attendants, watching a Kryptonian home movie while Iggy Pop’s “Punkrocker” plays. Iggy sings, on repeat, “I am a punk rocker, yes I am.” You can almost picture Gunn pitching this exact scene to WB: stylish needle-drop, warmth, nostalgia, cool factor. And it is appealing — until you think about it. The Fortress is supposed to be Superman’s retreat, the place where he wrestles with loneliness and the burden of saving the world. “Punkrocker” is ironic fluff, a song about being punk without rocking at all, wrapped in cheerful synths like a hug from your older sister. It’s clever, but does clever fit Superman? And beyond that: if Iggy Pop exists in this universe, what does that say about Metropolis and Superman’s Earth? Did anyone even ask that question? At Marvel, someone would have.
Rewatching Superman (1978) and Superman II, I was struck by how those films were both spectacular and modest, stories simple enough for kids but mythic enough for adults. DC hasn’t known what to do with the character since. Superman (2025) doesn’t feel like a movie at all. It feels like a Cliff’s Notes guide to a Superman show that ran for two unseen seasons. It isn’t a trailer for the movie. It is the trailer.
I want to know what actually happened. Where is the movie?
5.5/10
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