Superman has survived eighty years of reinvention — camp, propaganda, myth, immigrant parable, boy scout, science-fiction curiosity — and absorbed nearly all of it without breaking. James Gunn’s film doesn’t break him by modernizing him. It breaks him by never doing the work modernization requires. Its method, from the opening frame to its most politically charged subplot, is substitution: symbol for structure, signal for character, iconography for consequence. The film wants the audience to feel that arguments have been made when only their costumes have appeared onscreen. Nowhere is this more damaging, or more revealing, than in the Boravia-Jarhanpur war and the death of Vasil Ghurkos.
Diminishment as a Starting Principle
The film opens by shrinking its hero. Superman is beaten, hauled home by his own dog, and spends the first act absorbing blows rather than making decisions. Vulnerability was never the problem — Superman has always had a body that fails and choices that cost him something. This film confuses smallness with intimacy, as though the audience can only love a Superman it has first been permitted to pity. A hero introduced through humiliation has to claw his way back to authority for the rest of the runtime, and this film never fully lets him.
The same confusion governs Clark Kent. A veteran reporter who doesn’t understand “off the record” is not an endearing quirk; it’s the screenplay forgetting what its own character does for a living. Small failures like this are symptoms of one disease: competence is treated as an obstacle to likability, so competence keeps getting sanded off.
Lois Lane, Written About Rather Than Written
Lois Lane is less a character here than a position paper on what a strong woman is supposed to look like. She’s dressed down deliberately — practical pants, minimal makeup — and the costuming keeps announcing “serious professional” rather than trusting the writing to establish it. The old Lois never had to make that trade. She could walk out of a press conference looking immaculate and take apart a senator’s alibi twenty minutes later, and nobody treated those as contradictory facts. Her tradecraft once included charm and seduction as tools of the job, not embarrassments to be edited out. This Lois has none of that in her kit; her competence is instead spontaneous and unlimited — she simply knows whatever the scene needs her to know. When she mocks Mister Terrific’s T-Spheres as mere circles, the line is built to sound sharp and only succeeds in making him defensive. Nobody gets smarter in that exchange. The film manufactures wit by making someone else stupider, and manufactures seriousness by making its heroine plainer — which is not the same as writing her as competent.
The Clark-Lois physical relationship suffers the identical error. Superman’s defining physical trait was never strength — it was restraint, the sense that every gesture is a fraction of what he’s holding back. The film stages ordinary romantic-comedy blocking that could belong to any two attractive leads in any other movie, and throws away the one thing that made the relationship specific to this character.
Institutions Without Architecture
Perry White edits a newspaper without appearing to occupy any part of the building. That isn’t a set-design footnote — offices create hierarchy, doors create authority, and a reporter being summoned into one is characterization before a word is spoken. Strip that away and the Daily Planet stops being an institution and becomes a room full of people sharing fluorescent lighting. Mister Terrific, one of DC’s great polymaths, keeps gaping at things he should already understand, so his face can do the audience’s reacting for it. Lex Luthor, described as an obsessive strategist, talks his creation through a fight in real time like a man giving driving directions. None of this is fatal on its own. Together it describes a writers’ room reaching for the appearance of intelligence, competence, and menace rather than building scenes that would generate those qualities honestly.
Metamorpho gets the same treatment in reverse: instead of being denied an interior life, he’s handed one manufactured entirely out of a missing person. Luthor keeps him compliant by holding his infant son Joey hostage, and the film treats that single fact as sufficient grounds for an entire arc of coerced sympathy and eventual defection. Nobody asks where Joey’s mother is, or why a father this devoted has been raising an infant alone in circumstances that delivered him into Luthor’s power. That gap is exactly what the scene needed filled to make the stakes feel like a family rather than a hostage prop wheeled in so Metamorpho could switch sides on schedule. A baby with no mother and no explanation is not pathos. It’s a lever with a diaper on it. And the erasure is not neutral. A film this fluent in cultural signaling — one that trusts its audience to read Boravia as Israel without a word of confirmation — does not build a family expressly without a mother and expect the choice to read as nothing. It reads as something akin to cheap trans handholding, in the same vocabulary that once put “a man has a baby” on Oprah’s stage: the image of a family with motherhood made optional, offered to the movement as a symbol of a power it can never have in fact. Motherhood. Like everything else in this film, it arrives as iconography with the structure stripped out.
Ultraman — Luthor’s clone of Superman — is the same problem at climax scale, which is the worst possible place for it. Superman fighting a version of himself demands, at minimum, a mechanism the audience can believe in before the fists start flying. What the film offers is soap-opera plumbing: Luthor happened to have a hair sample, gathered through surveillance the film never dramatizes, and that alone manufactures a fully grown, combat-ready double. It’s the contrivance a soap opera reaches for when it needs a long-lost twin by next week’s episode, not a setup a film spends two hours earning. Worse, once Ultraman is actually fighting, he isn’t operating as a character — he’s a puppet, worked by Luthor and a bank of technicians barking commands from individual consoles, a control-room setup better suited to a video-game boss than to the supposed dark mirror of Superman himself. An obsessive strategist capable of engineering a living weapon apparently couldn’t be bothered to make it autonomous; the film wants the spectacle of a doppelganger without the difficulty of writing one that thinks. The climax needed a genuine dark mirror. It got a plot coupon cashed at the last moment and flown by remote control.
Boravia and Jarhanpur: The Allegory That Skips Its Own Argument
Here the film’s central defect stops being an annoyance and becomes something closer to an indictment. Boravia is introduced as a U.S.-aligned state under President Vasil Ghurkos, invading Jarhanpur, and the film never asks the audience to consider Boravia as anything but a monster wearing a country’s flag. It is supplied by sinister patrons, led by a cartoon of a tyrant, and granted no scene in which its position, however indefensible, is allowed to be a position rather than a costume. Jarhanpur receives the mirror treatment: pure victimhood, no interiority, a nation that exists so another nation can be blamed. Audiences and critics widely read the pairing as gesturing at the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Real-world allegory is not the sin. Superman has always metabolized contemporary anxiety — Cold War dread, post-9/11 unilateralism — into mythic shorthand, and done so honorably when it dramatized the underlying stakes rather than merely gesturing at them. This film gestures. It borrows the emotional weight of an actual, ongoing human catastrophe and spends none of the dramaturgical currency required to earn the borrowing.
Ghurkos is not an accident, and not an innocent one. Superman has been fighting thinly disguised real-world tyrants since Siegel and Shuster put the device into the character’s DNA: a 1938 story sent him after a warmongering arms dealer peddling influence in Washington, then into a foreign civil war he ended by seizing both commanders and forcing them to fight it out themselves; later stories sent him after barely disguised stand-ins for real wartime dictators, uniforms and all. That lineage carries moral authority earned scene by scene, and it was invoked here on purpose — Ghurkos’s uniform, sneer, and parade of menace are visual quotations of that tradition, deployed because audiences already know what the iconography is supposed to mean. The choice does real work: it lets the filmmakers borrow eighty years of accumulated moral certainty without writing a single scene to justify it. Siegel and Shuster’s stand-ins earned their villainy through depicted action — invasion, atrocity, named crimes enacted on the page — before Superman touched them. Ghurkos is handed the costume without the crime.
That failure bottoms out when Hawkgirl drops Ghurkos to his death after he insults her. The scene is not staged as a crisis but as a release — the satisfying end of a man the film has already flattened into pure villainy, so his death can be enjoyed rather than reckoned with. A story that wants to kill a head of state and have the audience cheer owes that audience a scene that earns the cheer: what the man has done, at what cost, to whom, and why no other outcome remains. This film substitutes the fact of villainy — visual shorthand and a hostile expression — for the demonstration of it, then asks the killing to land as justice rather than the extrajudicial execution it plainly stages. That is not a political argument. It is the absence of one, dressed in the clothes of an argument. The same instinct that let Mister Terrific gape instead of think, and let Lois announce her competence instead of proving it, here lets an assassination substitute for a verdict.
Fidelity Spent in the Wrong Place
The film’s priorities reveal themselves in what it treats as untouchable. Guy Gardner’s absurd bowl cut — the single most comic-accurate image in the movie — survives intact, because fidelity is apparently sacred when the source material is a haircut. Superman’s bearing, judgment, and relationships get no such deference. The film will reinvent a sixty-year-old character’s soul before it will touch a bad haircut, which tells you exactly where its priorities sit.
What Restraint Actually Costs
None of this required two hundred million dollars to avoid. The best Superman scene ever staged costs almost nothing to shoot: Clark hears trouble from three blocks away, sets down a glass without breaking it — because his whole existence is calibrated restraint — and is gone before Lois notices. No effects budget, no set piece; just a character understood well enough that one small gesture carries the whole idea of him. That’s the scene this film owed itself and never wrote, spending its budget instead on incident that says less in two and a half hours than that gesture says in five seconds.
Conclusion
The customary concession — that the film at least has talented actors — is declined here. This essay comes from the Hitchcock school: performances are the director’s material, and whatever charm flickers onscreen was aimed by Gunn at likability, the same surface the film keeps mistaking for character. What remains in the film’s favor is evident affection for the character’s history. Affection is not understanding. The film’s governing habit — structure replaced by symbol, character by signal, argument by iconography — is an irritant in its treatment of Lois, Mister Terrific, and the Daily Planet; hardens into contrivance in a climax built on a hair sample and a remote-controlled Ultraman; and becomes something far worse in Boravia, Jarhanpur, and the death of Vasil Ghurkos, where the same habit produces a killing the film wants credited as justice without ever building the case for it. Even the ending reads like a checklist closed out rather than a story concluded — the film runs out of runtime before it runs out of things to resolve, and resolves them anyway, because the credits were coming whether the ideas were finished or not. The greater nightmare here isn’t Kryptonite. It’s a script willing to let spectacle stand in for the argument it never wrote.
Rest in peace, Superman. ■