Splat: James Gunn's Superman

Superman (David Corenswet), looking glum. (Warners Brothers.) 

The beginning of James Gunn’s new iteration of the Man of Steel is somewhat promising: Superman (David Corenswet) has intervened to prevent a foreign war, and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is running a successful PR campaign to convince people the supposedly apolitical Supe took sides and broke international law. But things rapidly devolve from there. A giant robot machine thingy from the aggressor country is terrorizing Metropolis, except it’s really not a giant machine robot thingy, it’s regular sized, and it’s not really a robot, it’s a supervillain under Luthor’s sway. I’m sure the supervillain’s name was mentioned, but I missed it, and he’s sort of indistinguishable from Luthor’s attack squad, The Raptors, who are either robots or superbeings themselves. Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and discovers that the message from Jor-el (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (some woman I thought was Lady Gaga but wasn’t) that Superman can only listen to half of—because the second half was damaged—is actually a message telling the Man of Steel to enslave the earth and rule over it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not canon.) Luthor also has a private prison in a “pocket universe” where he keeps his enemies and ex-girlfriends, and there are portals in and out that are in danger of decaying and becoming black holes that could destroy Earth. I think the guards in this prison realm are also Raptors but they might not be. When Superman is captured and put in one of the cells in the pocket universe, there’s a superbeing in his cell who can turn his body into Kryptonite, which is how Supey is kept under control. The superbeing is kept under control because his alien baby is in a cell opposite with someone else who will kill the alien baby if the guy in Superman’s cell doesn’t do what Luthor wants—which, as stated previously, is keep Superman under control. Lex is, of course, a combination of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and it turns out he’s in league with the aggressor country because he wants to develop the lesser one as Trump wants to do with the Gaza Strip. Also the Justice League, which consists of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) and some really deep cuts from the DC stable, Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific, is around to help Superman out when needed. Maybe. Green Lantern refers to the group as the “Justice Gang,” and Hawkgirl objects to the name, which you’d better find funny because it happens 87 times. I have no idea what Mr. Terrific’s superpower is, but he’s really good with tech stuff. Not to mention another supervillain called the Engineer—not sure what her powers are either—and a murderous clone of Superman, just for fun. Exhausted yet? I sure am.

Now, I could have logged into IMDB and looked up the names of the superbeings and the actors and all that, but what would be the point? This Superman isn’t so much a Superman movie as it is Guardians of the Galaxy, Part IV. Gunn employs his trademark mix of hip irony and sentimentality, undeniably potent in that it never fails to irritate me. The rescue of the alien baby, where the Man of Steel is in some sort of rainbow plasma river in the pocket universe, is fucking endless. And then once the baby is safe we never see it again. There’s a romantic scene between Clark and Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) played against a backdrop of the Justice Gang battling a giant jellyfish monster, which Clark dismisses, claiming, “They’ve got it handled,” before returning to talk earnestly about relationship stuff with Lois. Ha. There’s also Krypto, the ill-behaved superdog. (It’s funny because he’s super-strong but acts just like a dog!) And Clark’s foster parents the Kents appear to be morons with thick hick accents who can’t even work a smartphone.

We all know Gunn had a gazillion dollars to spend on his reboot of the DCU, so why does the movie look so awful? His aesthetic is retro-70s cum anime cum hippy-dippy, so everything is sort of blob-shaped and psychedelic. And why are the costumes so bad? The red portion of Superman’s costume covers more territory than usual, so they have a granny-panties vibe. Green Lantern’s costume is hideous, but nowhere near as hideous as his haircut. Lois makes fun of it so presumably it’s meant to look ugly, but why? Mr. Terrific’s face mask is odd and off-putting. (Beth Mickle is the production designer while Judianna Makovsky did costume duty.) One of the Daily Planet reporters is got up like Sabrina Carpenter (retro-blond babydoll pop star) for no good reason: everyone else on staff wears standard journalist schlub clothes, including Lois Lane.

Corenswet isn’t terrible, which is surprising considering the work he’s done in the Ryan Murphy productions that comprise most of his résumé, and Brosnahan is fine. Hoult needs more humor as the sociopath Luthor: he hasn’t got the right comic-book tone. But if they were all Oliviers they wouldn’t be able to triumph over Gunn’s overstuffed, underwritten narrative. He completely lacks myth-making ability: he just piles on one damn thing after another, and you can’t keep track of anything. And he’s so intent on making Superman human that he forgets to make him heroic.

At the movie’s end, we get a glance of Supergirl, Krypto’s real owner, who’s up next in the DCU. She’s played (by Milly Alcock) as a cross between a Kardashian and a TikTok influencer. (Or is that the same thing?) Lord help us all.

– Joe Mader has written on film and worked as a theater critic for various publications including the SF Weekly, The San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and The Hollywood Reporter. He previously served as the managing director for the San Francisco theater company 42nd Street Moon. He currently works at Cisco Systems and writes on theater for his own blog, Scene 2.