Review: SUPERMAN Soars into the Silver Age

Superman (2025)
Written and Directed by James Gunn
Based on characters appearing in DC Comics
Produced by James Gunn & Peter Safran
PG-13, 2hr 9m

This is absolutely most definitely not the follow-up to Man of Steel. And there was much rejoicing.

James Gunn has given DC and Warner Bros something that they haven’t had in a long while: an actual comic book movie. Not a movie based on a comic book, mind you, but a bona fide genuine article. And not only is it a comic book movie, it’s a Silver Age comic book movie.

Now, for a lot of you, that might not mean anything, but the Silver Age was a time where continuity was a little more loose, the stories were a little more fantastical and carefree, and there was a true sense of fun in the books. This is when Superman had maybe a dozen different variations of kryptonite, when Jimmy Olsen was a turtle, when the Wizard used magic to body-swap the Justice League with the Secret Society of Super-Villains. The Last Son of Krypton visited the bottled city of Kandor and was part of another hero team, Nightwing and Flamebird. The Justice League frequently teamed up with the Justice Society on Earth-2. And on it went….

It was just one of those things where you never knew what kind of story you would get next. Writers like Archie Goodwin, Denny O’Neill, Otto Binder, Gardner Fox… names only the diehard comics readers will recognize now, but those who paved the way for the comics of the 80s and 90s when stories got a little more connected, a little more grounded. Before the Collectible Years, before the Grimdark Years…

Superman has not one grimdark element to be found anywhere. There’s color — real color! — in the images, and there’s an energy on screen that I haven’t seen in a Superman movie since Superman Returns. And while there are some quibbles to be had on this new iteration, I walked away from both screenings with a sense that James Gunn got the memo and understood the assignment. No more grim and gritty movies based on comic books. Instead, we’re well past time — especially in DC’s case — to deliver a comic book to the theater.

There is also not one ounce of political or ideological messaging in this film, either. I know Variety took the Gunn interview with the Times of London and tried to create a controversy where none existed. You can even see in the L.A. red carpet footage, that James Gunn was very uncomfortable with the question and tried to answer it with a non-answer.

In fact, if there’s any “message” at all, it’s that there’s always hope, and you choose to be a good person or not regardless of what anyone says of you. Something Jonathan Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince) points out to Clark in a moment of crisis caused by a situation where Clark (David Corenswet) learns something about his parents — and the jury’s still out as to whether or not that was a complete fabrication by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).

So, let’s get into the thick of it. This will be relatively spoiler free because I want you to go see the movie. I want you to be surprised and entertained and thrown into the pages of a comic book from my childhood. This really feels like you’ve opened up the latest issue of Superman mid-battle with the Hammer of Boravia. Luthor is the techno-billionaire who’s jealous of the adoration given to Superman, who just showed up three years prior and has gained everything that Luthor has been working towards his whole life — power, influence, adulation, hero-worship — and it leads him to devise a plot that’s 1) somewhat convoluted, and 2) totally what I’d find in a comic book.

Meanwhile, Clark is having to navigate this three-months-on relationship with Lois (Rachel Brosnahan), and they’re still finding their boundaries. Lois can’t turn off her “reporter” brain, and that sometimes gets her in trouble in the personal life. And Clark is trusting to a fault, so when Lois starts grilling him over his taking unilateral action to stop a small war, it throws him for a loop because in a relationship you’re supposed to have each other’s back, right?

We’re getting a Superman who still has to find a balance between his hero work and his life as Clark Kent, and the relationship with Lois is one factor of that, along with his work at the Daily Planet, all of which gets thrown into a tizzy by the media storm that Luthor uses to manipulate the general population into turning against Superman. No less so for Lois, who’s trying to figure out the relationship question at the same time trying to figure out Luthor’s involvement in the conflict between Boravia and Jarhanpur.

I like the fact that we’re not dancing around the question of why a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist would be so blind that she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her, and the relationship feels genuine and authentic, especially when you get to a situation where reality doesn’t quite meet the expectation for either of them. And instead of inserting a Gunnism Comedy Moment, Gunn lets the scene breathe and be the dramatic beat that it needs to be, fueling Lois’ arc in coming to terms with the fact that she’s dating Superman and all that comes with it.

But then we get Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) spilling the secrets of just how that disguise works — and I wish to note for the record that this particular bit of lore, which appeared in Superman #330 (Dec 1978) was quickly dismissed by DC Comics as taking place in a different arm of the multiverse, never to be referenced again. But here we are in 2025, and the hypno-glasses are back.

I still maintain that Fillion is the wrong guy to play Guy, but his Guy is very much perfectly Guy. This is the Guy Gardner from Justice League International, and I’m looking forward to the One Punch™ that’s sure to be coming at some point. In the meantime, we can enjoy the smug self-satisfied jerk in all his glory, even though the costume isn’t right. And it’s nice to see Green Lantern constructs that are actually constructs and not blaster beams or any other variation of pew-pew.

Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific steals every scene, even the dumb one with the garage door gag. He’s got a presence and a confidence that has you believing that he actually is one of the most intelligent people on Earth. He’s slick and cool and doesn’t have time to listen to Lois’ relationship issues — that’s why we have Cat Grant (Mikaela Hoover) — and he dominates the room when he enters. Gathegi gives him just enough swagger to mean business without leaning into parody or annoying arrogance and speaks with economy (although I could do without his quoting Frank Miller’s All Star Batman and Robin…).

Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) gets short-changed here. She’s got some decent banter with Guy, but she doesn’t really have much to do outside the action sets, which has me wondering if there’s material on the cutting room floor that would add to her presence in this story. And while I appreciate just being dropped into a story very much like picking up a random comic book, I would have liked to have more here to give me a sense of 1) which Hawkgirl this is — it’s Kendra Saunders — and 2) what her power set includes. The Canary Cry isn’t hers, at least as far as I’m aware, but I haven’t read a comic book in a long while.

And yes, when I saw That Building, I heard Ted Knight in my head saying, “Meanwhile….”

Some have made the comment that the film is over-stuffed with a cast of characters that’s too big for a two-hour movie. I disagree. Especially in the case of the Daily Planet, these characters exist in the comic books to populate Superman’s world, and most of the time they wouldn’t be getting major attention there, either. Cat, Steve Lombard (Beck Bennett), Ron Troupe (Christohper McDonald), and even Perry White (Wendell Pierce) are here to interact with our heroes, both Clark and Lois, in ways that give us insight into their respective character arcs as well as provide dimension in how they interact, plus add to the world-building without excessive exposition. They’re there because they belong there.

Kind of a waste of Wendell Pierce, though.

I was pleasantly surprised by Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo, the first on-screen canonically-accurate redhead to play the part). He’s got much more to do here than I expected, although his camera is conspicuously missing. The fact that he’s supposed to be Lois’ photographer would have gone a lot further to explain how he figures out a certain thing he figures out near the end of the movie. And I am now patiently waiting for the spin-off, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, perhaps with an appearance by the Newsboy Legion.

Gunn’s usual sense of humor seems to be tamped down here just a bit, and I’ve made the observation that his usual humor is more “Brat Pack” where here it’s more “Rat Pack” — a little more sophisticated, although not by much. And yes, a few times in the story, Gunn gets in his own way and drops a joke where it might not be the best fit. Some of them don’t land very well, but most of them perform to spec and keep the movie well away from any Snyderverse vibe.

Which brings me to Krypto…

I’ve been surprised at how divisive Krypto has been. He’s not the white Labrador of the comics, and he’s a lot more rambunctious and undisciplined — Gunn himself says Krypto’s behavior was inspired by his own rescue dog — but if you watch carefully, you can see that even Krypto has an arc. He starts out destructive, trashing the Fortress of Solitude. But then Superman figures out a way to channel that energy and give Krypto a chance to be part of the solution to his problem with Luthor; namely, stopping the destruction of Metropolis because Luthor was reckless enough to open a rift in the space-time continuum, or thereabouts.

And that’s the crux of the story: Superman, through his interactions with the other characters, inspires them to be better, from Krypto to Guy to the people of Jarhanpur to Miss Tessmacher to Metamorpho and everyone in between. Every day, Superman makes the choice to do good, to be better. Whether that’s inspired by what he thinks is his parents’ message or not, he’s making a deliberate choice to use his powers for good. And that also means restraining himself and not doing the other thing, because in a world of cardboard and tissue paper it would be so easy for him to use his powers to dominate the Earth and become a despot in the name of “what’s good for everyone” or some such misplaced good intentions. And that gets back to the interview at the beginning of the movie, where Lois plays devil’s advocate and shows Clark how his unilateral actions could be taken as a step toward that end. It causes Clark to have some self-reflection, and he has to figure out the best way to be that good person that his parents — Jonathan and Martha — taught him to be.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the Kents, as I’m still processing how I feel about how Gunn portrays them here. It’s a very different take, and it surprises me to hear them sound like they’re from Georgia or Alabama and not Kansas, especially considering that Gunn is from St. Louis and should know how Kansans sound.

One thing about the sound, or rather, the music: while John Murphy and David Fleming have delivered a solid soundtrack, although there could have been more use of John Williams’ theme. While it’s integrated into the score, and Murphy riffs with it on the guitar, you never get that one big payoff where the orchestra goes fully into the March. This piece of music is akin to “The James Bond Theme” as what started out as the theme to Dr. No became so associated with the James Bond character that it became the character’s musical signature over the next sixty years. Williams’ “Superman March” is in the same way associated with the character of Superman to the point where it’s expected anytime there’s a Superman movie. It should be there, and Gunn missed his opportunity to really give fans a moment of “One of Us”.

Aside from the parental quibbles, along with a few elements I won’t spoil here, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’d like to see a comic book movie that remembers what it’s like to read a comic book. James Gunn has delivered a love letter to comic book fans everywhere. But perhaps most of all, above everything else, James Gunn has achieved a crowning victory with a 47-year-old blink-and-you-miss-it callback as he finally gives a last name to Otis (Terence Rosemore): Berg.

I kid you not. Otis Berg. You won’t hear it in the dialogue, but it’s there in the credits, and I almost didn’t see it. When I did, I laughed out loud because I immediately heard Ned Beatty’s voice: “It’s only a little place…”

Well played, Gunn. Well played.