2025’s Superman is both the beginning and end of an era. For those who loved the Snyderverse version of the DC Comics world, David Corenswet’s casting as Clark Kent was the definitive end to any hopes that Henry Cavill would don the cape once more. Where Zack Snyder’s films were dark in color palette and even darker in tone, writer-director James Gunn’s relaunch of DC’s film franchise is filled with colorful costumes, tons of light and tons of jokes.
It’s also, crucially, not an origin story. While superhero storytelling (and arguably serialized action filmmaking in general) has been trapped in an endless cycle of origin stories and retconning for decades, Gunn’s Superman is refreshingly and almost performatively uninterested in making sure its audience has full context for every little aspect of its world. When we meet him, Corenswet’s Clark is already a successful journalist at The Daily Planet, he’s just started dating coworker Lois Lane (a clever, capable and gratifyingly real Rachel Brosnahan) and Superman is already a revered public figure — until his recent interference in Boravia’s invasion of Jarhanpur that is. He has longtime allies like Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and the scene-stealing Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and, more importantly, a nemesis in Lex Luthor (an unhinged Nicholas Hoult), who has spent years studying him in order to enact a plan that will destroy Superman and his image worldwide.
It’s a lot to keep track of, but for comic fans, that won’t necessarily be a negative. Watching Superman feels like picking up an individual issue or trade paperback of a comic series. The story is already in progress, but the familiar set of characters and history keep the consumer from getting completely lost. Gunn doesn’t feel obligated to explain how Superman made friends with the Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) or how he got his dog Krypto, their inclusion is as simple as: Superman needs buddies to help him save the world and Krypto makes cute merchandise.
In truth, Gunn uses these elements as flashy window dressing to do something more abstract. He uses these elements to ask, what does this Superman mean in this world, and therefore, to us the viewing audience? On the surface, the answer is quite plain: Corenswet’s Clark/Kal-el/Superman is a good guy. Even when a giant kaiju is attacking Metropolis, he wants to find a way to keep it alive so it can be studied rather than take the easy route and just kill it. He’s the kind of hero who is just as likely to save a squirrel from being crushed by a falling building as a person. All life is important and worth saving. He believes that his Kryptonian parents (in part due to their incomplete final message) sent him to Earth to do good and be of service — and that’s what his loving, country bumpkin parents back in Smallville have raised him to do.
For his part, Corenswet is charming and adorably dorky in the role. We believe it when Superman avoids cursing by saying “gosh” instead or considers turning himself in just because he doesn’t want Krypto to feel abandoned. However, Gunn is smart to not make Superman solely a cipher of superhero goodness. This Clark is also arrogant. In an early scene, when his and Lois’s banter-fueled fake interview goes from flirty to harsh as she challenges him to explain why he thought he had the authority to stop the Boravian invasion, he is almost condescendingly dismissive. To her credit, Brosnahan perfectly contrasts Corenswet’s guilelessness. Her Lois is enamored but skeptical, unwilling to compromise her journalistic integrity just because she knows him. The fight is the first major test of their budding relationship and Superman fails it. And yet it’s still somehow largely to the character’s credit that he finds Lois’s questions silly. For Superman, it is impossible to consider not saving as many people as he can. He doesn’t question his own actions or motivations because he is unimpeachable in his character and it’s both the major question of his relationship with Lois and of the film itself how a person so straightforward can be accepted by a person — or audience — so cynical.
There’s a scene from 2013’s Man of Steel that’s particularly instructive here. In it, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) chastises young Clark (Dylan Sprayberry) for nearly revealing his powers to his classmates after their school bus crashes. When Clark asks if he should have just let his friends die, Jonathan pauses for a long moment and then responds, “maybe.” In the context of Gunn’s Superman, this exchange is unthinkable. Pruitt Taylor Vince’s Jonathan Kent is canonically “mush.” He cries telling Clark how proud he is of his choices. In the context of Snyder’s film, however, it was essential. It marked that take on the character as decidedly different from previous incarnations. But it was also a reflection of the world contemporary viewers lived in.
Man of Steel, it becomes clearer with each passing year, is for a post-9/11 America. For that audience, it made sense that an all-powerful alien who could be taken by the government to be experimented on or persecuted for his difference would actively have to convince himself to save humanity. Gunn’s Superman, as the character states in one of the film’s most moving scenes, saves humanity despite its and his own flaws. Still, as diametrically opposed as these films are, both interpretations are undeniably reflections of their times. Snyder’s film is more cynical, less human, more obsessed with the titular hero’s invincibility than his humanity just as America itself was determined to reassert its own strength and formidability.
This Superman is for an America unable to halt its own collapse. He is a reminder of the dream, the failed experiment of the “American Way.” His golly-gee, optimism and goodness is a vision of what we aspired to be, a nostalgia for the myth of what we wanted to represent. Is this version of our most uncomplicated hero a little shallow, a little too unwilling to grapple with the tough moral quandaries it sets up before dismissing them as but the machinations of an evil billionaire with an inferiority complex? Sure. But isn’t it also nice, finally, to see an uncomplicated Superman? A hero who is simply good, a dork who loves his parents and has somehow dazzled the most intelligent and skeptical woman he knows. That too can be a thing of wonder, of aspiration, but especially in this moment, profound tragedy. It is beautiful to see a hero so undeniably good, but it is also devastatingly sad to know he simply cannot be real for us.
