Finally, a Movie That Doesn't Treat Me Like an Idiot!
A few words about 'Superman'
I was nervous about James Gunn’s Superman. Not in an invested way. I was never a comic book fan, and I didn’t have cable growing up, so my exposure to Saturday morning cartoons was limited. I first saw Superman: The Movie and its sequels in high school, when Superman Returns was coming out. I obviously had a general knowledge of and affection for Superman as a character, his iconography, all that. I’m a human being living in North America, of course I do. He’s built into our mythology. I want to be able to go see a Superman movie and enjoy it and feel like that mythology was served well. But superhero movies have been almost uniformly shitty for years now, and while I respect Gunn well enough, his talents weren’t enough to make me a Guardians of the Galaxy fan. It didn’t help that the trailers looked… not great. Still, I held out some hope: Gunn’s annoyingly titled sequel The Suicide Squad, while not the best movie I’ve ever seen, surprised me with its funny, deft style, and its political ideas. Perhaps Superman could do the same.
Ladies and germs, I’m here to tell you James Gunn’s Superman, starring David Corenswet as the übermensch in tights, is a triumph! Specifically, it triumphs at the most beautiful thing of all: it doesn’t treat me like an idiot.
Coming out of a late show of Superman in IMAX on Friday night—trailer report: The Odyssey in IMAX looks dope; One Battle After Another in IMAX looks dope; The Cat in the Hat appears to be the most evil film ever devised—I was buzzing. First of all, the movie is fun. It is overstuffed, but also feels like bingeing a six-episode arc of a cartoon, with whole new adventures and characters popping up every twenty minutes or so. The action, even at its most CGI slop-y, is coherent and colourful and exciting. That’s because the characters are great, too. Gunn drops you into this DC universe like it’s Star Wars, with a title crawl that doesn’t really matter, except to let you know that you’re entering a world already established before you got there. Superman and Lois are already dating, though it’s still early days. The Justice Gang, as they controversially call themselves, have already been allies/competitors for Superman in the fighting monsters department. Characters pop in and out of the story like they’ve always been there, with little explanation. There’s next to no handholding here, and that was thing thing I buzzed about most.
Finally, a movie that doesn’t treat me like an idiot!
Gunn’s Superman starts with an important assumption: we all know how superhero stories work. Simple, but everything good about the movie stems from this starting point. Rather than the modern gods and monsters shit Snyder was up to, or building out a universe as cynical marketing strategy a la Marvel, Gunn just says, “Because it’s modern myth, you get what this all is, I don’t need to wallow in it, I’m just tellin’ stories.” Will these characters appear in future movies? Sure! That only makes sense, and I’m not an idiot, I know what I’m dealing with here. Yet characters aren’t introduced setting up plot threads that will all, presumably, add up to something. They’re just characters, who happen to exist in this world, and they’ll pop in and out of different movies based on the needs of that particular story. Because in the end, the story is prime, and the movie you’re watching is first and foremost an end to itself.
On The Big Picture podcast, hosts Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins had a great conversation about Superman, extolling its virtues and critiquing its various imperfections. It wasn’t a lovefest, but they got at something true about why the movie works. Amid their discussion, they touched on a plot line in the movie involving Lex Luthor—great performance by Nicholas Hoult, by the way—turning public opinion against Superman using old dug up information and an army of literally internet troll monkeys. I might not have put it together myself, but Sean and Amanda noted how clearly inspired this was by Gunn’s experience of cancellation at the hands of right-wing trolls, leading his temporary firing from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. This, the hosts admit, is a kind of artistic narcissism, but Sean defends that narcissism on the grounds of art. He likens Gunn’s identification with Superman to Brady Corbet’s slightly absurd identification with László Tóth in The Brutalist. Sean argues that we should want more of this, because it’s honest, it comes from the depths of artists’ humanity, it expresses something. It’s art.
“Why make a movie— Why write and direct a movie if you’re not gonna pour yourself into it? If you’re not gonna pour your ideas about your experience as a living person into it? I think I have a natural empathy to that, I’m interested in what people have to say through this medium of storytelling, and so I liked that Gunn did it,” Sean says. “Now, is it goofy? It’s a little goofy! But it’s better than, just like, ‘Here’s Captain America 4, you’re an idiot, I hope you enjoy this.’”
Preach! Gunn’s Superman is a movie that respects the audience. That allows itself to be goofy, and perfectly entertaining for kids, and even a bit simplistic in its rendering of big ideas. But it also believes in those ideas and trusts that we’ll see that. The same way it trusts that we’ll go along with the introduction of a character like Mr. Terrific, who I had no concept of prior to the movie, and came away loving, not as some figure to see in future installments, but as a character who was well-written and well-acted by Edi Gathegi in this movie. The one I actually paid to see, not a glorified commercial for the next glorified commercial.
And what a pleasure to see a superhero movie like that. One that takes advantage of the scale a big budget provides to do fun things with fun characters. The fact that on the way out of the movie, most people I overheard were talking excitedly about a purely talky scene in which Lois interviews Clark as Superman is all you need to know. Gunn located the heart of the movie in these people, casting characters and character types we can all intuitively understand thanks to a century of superhero comics, TV shows, and movies with good, charming, actors and letting them cook.
Another great fact is that the movie isn’t trying to be some profound, five-star movie vying for critical canonization and Oscars. But it’s not satisfied being dreck either. I was never enamoured of Marvel’s output, but even I can recognize it got worse and worse over time, especially post-Endgame. The reason is simple: Marvel Studios treats its audience like pigs at the trough. The public will eat up any old shit so long as they recognize the IP and it promises to connect to future movies. Superman is, at least on its own, the antithesis of this. For all the references and fan-service it no doubt contains, I was able to watch it purely as the entertaining blockbuster projecting onto the screen in front of me. I wasn’t expecting the world, and it’s okay not to expect the world. Sometimes you just need a movie to be good, and Superman is great at being good. It’s a five-star three-star movie! Well, perhaps a four-star three-star movie, but you get the idea. A movie free to be silly, and fun, and a little bit emotional and inspiring, and above all, a movie that respects me. It’s not too much to ask, and I’m glad to see Gunn agrees.
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