Just the Ticket #227: Superman (2025)
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
Yes, I'm reviewing Superman (2025) for Bastille Day week in 2026. I know that I'm a year late to the conversation (which, I am painfully aware, was mostly conducted by sentient neckbeards, cyborg monkeys, angry Snyder apologists, and self-brainwashed, self-reporting grifters who think prometheotic bigotry equivocates to credible criticism), and that by virtue of my tardiness, there isn't much, if anything, approaching novelty that I can say about it. Aside from the Donner Superman films, Man Of Steel, the Burton/Schumacher and Nolan Batman films, the DCAU, Teen Titans (but not Go!), The Batman (the cartoon, not the movie), the broadcast seasons of Young Justice, Gotham (until my priorities shifted and I lost interest), and the Arrowverse (through "Crisis On Infinite Earths"), I am more of a Marvel fan, and if my Retrospective/Omnibusted series isn't a big enough clue, my imprint of interest for the past decade has been Zenescope. I don't know enough about the world being presented here to speak to any references or the film's print authenticity, but I mostly enjoy James Gunn's movies (Slither is a long-time favorite of mine, and my most-viewed review ever), I know enough about Superman as a character, and I have enough understanding of movies and how to competently state my feelings, that I can say I liked it, and explain why.
In James Gunn and Peter Safran's DCU (movies, shows), metahumans have existed for roughly three hundred years (grounding the Universe, such as DC can be considered grounded, in the tall tales and folklore of America's history because that puts the first metahuman appearances around the 1720s, though the much-later arrival of our titlar hero here—the mid-to-late 1990s—suggests that awareness of metahuman, alien, and other phenomena on a global scale is still fairly new territory, so Wonder Woman might become a factor later (there is a movie being planned), if the continuity can recover from the negative reception of Supergirl on both sides of the aisle, opening things up for the First Book's titular Gods and Monsters, as hinted in the opening text narration).
Superman (Pearl's David Corenswet) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel herself) are acted like characters with history that it doesn't take decades of homework to understand because it's raw and real and so easy to feel that exposition is rendered unnecessary. Characters like Perry White (Bulworth's Wendell Pierce), Jimmy Olson (Skyler Gisondo, the Vacation legacyquel), and Cat Grant (frequent Gunn collaborator Mikaela Hoover) feel like the important but recurring extras that they should be. Ma (Neva Howell) and Pa Kent (Identity's Pruitt Taylor Vince) are stereotypical elderly Midwesterners, but also embody the nurturing spirit in a way that few adaptations of the characters have before without the audience having to watch Clark grow up chasing trains for the sixty-seventh time. And the concept of corporate- and government-sponsored metahumans is introduced clearly with the early appearances of Guy Gardner (The Rookie, Castle, and Firefly star Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Madame Web's Isabela Merced), and Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi, getting a major aura runback after his appearance as Darwin in X-Men: First Class), a.k.a. "The Justice Gang*".
The film even opens in the midst of one of Superman's fights (basically, what we saw in the teaser and most of the trailers), where he has been handily beaten by "The Hammer Of Baravia" (whose real identity is maybe too obvious to be the long game mystery that it becomes, but the foreshadowing is pretty subtle and brilliant).
Speaking of X-Men: First Class, though, Nicholas Hoult (Renfield) may have given us the best Lex Luthor adaptation since Clancy Brown and Michael Rosenbaum (not that the bar has been set that high before or after, mind you, but I like the modern commentary, right-wing tech bro interpretation of his "I became a villain because I'm envious that a god-like alien usurped my heroic destiny" pathos-as-ethos). That he would engage in anti-woke social warfare (saying the quiet part out loud like his own existence makes him beyond reproach is his chief character trait), sacrifice the humanity of others, instigate an actual war between fictional Eastern European/Middle-Eastern countries, and endanger the fabric of reality, all just to torture his dissenters and kill Superman (who can survive a swim in a primordial river that's stated to deconstruct atoms while he's under the residual effects of Kryptonite poisoning, being stretched by the event horizon of a black hole, flying into the vacuum of space with a full-sized woman lodged in his sinuses and deadfalling into another dimension, and multiple encounters with hostile Kryptonians)—which is like Japan trying to kill Godzilla with...almost anything—is so cartoonishly evil and so realistically petty (we even have a real-world base case to compare him to, and you know who that is...) that he's almost enjoyably disgusting.
And a great villain wouldn't be worth much without a great hero, which, if my praise of the Lois and Clark dynamic (not that one) is any indication, I think Corenswet hits the perfect balance of Super-cheese (his gosh-golly "swears" are a simple but endearing touch), non-toxic machismo, "every life matters" optimism, and well-meaning but fallible humanity.
And since I mentioned Godzilla before, not only is there a slimy kaiju in Superman (there are actually two, but he only fights one, and slimy kaiju seem to be another Gunn staple), but much like Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II, Superman is about the juxtaposition of biological family and found family.
This feels a bit too much like it's playing into the "Goku and Superman are suddenly becoming the same character" discourse, but I like how the message from his parents is used in the plot and as a reinforcement of Superman's strength of character. Damaged in transit from Krypton such that it reads as a message of hope, it is later revealed by Lex as instructions to subjugate and procreate with the "weak, stupid, aimless" humans of Earth as the progenitor and ruler of a New Krypton. We don't know if the full message would have turned Superman into a Brightburn kid, if he would have rejected it on his own, if the Kents would have hidden the message from him and/or taught him morality, or any other of a number of worst case What If?scenarios. But we do know that when faced with the entire world turning against him, he didn't fold to perception and become the villain that he could have (putting him at perfect juxtaposition to Luthor's reaction to having his destiny questioned and compromised), but stuck to his truth and sense of self, and was ultimately there for those who once rejected him, because fallible or godlike, he is a hero, and that's what a hero does. That's the real punk rock.
I'd cry right now if I didn't also have to point out the film's few flaws, not many of which were egregious enough to tear me away from my two hours of zen-joyment. That's right; Superman is two hours long, and I barely felt it. The dialogue and action was paced almost perfectly, with the exception being the second-to-third act portion where it kind of falls into that "liar revealed" structure with Superman being ostracized and imprisoned and going to Kansas to recover and mope about how nobody likes or believes in him anymore until Pa Kent gives him the sage advice that he already knew all along and people need him again because the Earth might get torn in half and sucked into another Universe if he doesn't punch himself hard enough. I didn't feel most of the runtime, but I definitely felt that stretch of film, necessary as it was. There's also the obvious villain reveal I mentioned above, some of the humor didn't land with me, some of the camera dynamics hurt my brain to process (especially with the CGI overload during a couple of fight sequences and the ever-present glare of the daytime scenes, but maybe that latter was a video-encoding issue?), and as good as the movie was about choosing exhibition over exposition for the most part, there was that one scene near the end where Superman just stopped the movie to tell us the premise of Supergirl (then coming to a theater near you in 2026, please buy tickets to the next DCU chapter, senpai). Subtle.
I probably won't get invested in the DCU going forward, but this was a solid superhero film, a very competently made movie, smart, emotional, and fun in most of the right places, and one of the best Superman treatments ever put to a screen of any size.
B+
That said, I have heard pretty great things about the My Adventures With Superman animated series, so I intend to give it the time of day once Season Three ends. In the meantime, I have a Zenescope issue to read and two Godzilla movies and a season of anime to watch by the end of the month, plus editing and HeroMachine-ing to do for my big milestone project that is theoretically coming in
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