Oh hey, I’m back! I went on a vacation with my girlfriend for a week or so and then had some visitors. But wouldn’t you know it? My girlfriend booked where we were staying months in advance, and then the one movie I wanted to see all year, the big thing that most intrigued me out of everything, would be coming out the same weekend we were leaving. Normally, I could then go see it by myself, but my girlfriend saw the trailer, saw Krypto the Superdog, and then she decided she wanted to see it too. Now, I make it a rule to always wait until she’s free before going to see anything she also wants to see so we can make a date out of it. It’s why I still haven’t seen Elio, a movie I otherwise would have seen opening weekend. Could we go while on vacation? Well, she needs a reader for the hearing impaired, so we’d need to find one, and we weren’t going to be in an area that tended to have those.
But then she found one because she’s awesome, and we did see it. I had to wait until I got home and free to write the review.
The movie doesn’t waste time as some opening text explains that superhumans have been around for 300 or so years in this setting, Superman (David Corenswet) landed on Earth 30 years earlier, came out as a superhero three, and just lost his first battle, landing hard in the Antarctic close enough that he can summon poorly-behaved superdog Krypto to take him back to the Fortress of Solitude for healing. That, it turns out, was the first step in a plan by tech mogul Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) to finally defeat and destroy the alien superhero for the crime of being more popular than Lex in the hearts and minds of regular people. Superman doesn’t know it yet, but Luthor is about to really rock his whole world and everything he believes in.
Meanwhile, Superman’s other identity as Clark Kent is having other issues. He’s been dating co-worker Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) for three months, and she’s calling him out–correctly!–for his habit of interviewing himself for the newspaper. Lois, conducting her own interview of Superman, gives a more hard-hitting scene, one of the movie’s multiple highlights, showing that Superman’s motives are up to debate given his actions overseas recently. For Clark, it’s a simple idea: help others and save lives. For Lois, it isn’t in her nature to trust people by default like Clark does. Superman does what he does because all he wants to do is help people. But not everyone seems to be able to believe that. What happens when Luthor just out-maneuvers him as part of a greater scheme to destroy a man whose only goal is to help?
I had high hopes for this movie, based almost entirely on writer/director’s James Gunn’s track record. The movie isn’t perfect. I don’t think it will be my best of the year by any stretch of the imagination. What I do think is the movie is just flat-out fun. It’s a feel-good movie the likes of which I don’t think I’ve seen in a number of years. I’d say there’s some pacing issues in the beginning of the movie, and there’s a rescue in a pocket dimension’s weird river that looks a bit rough, but it’s a really fun movie. My girlfriend was under the impression, no doubt due to the so-called Snyderverse and a whole lot of Batman movies she’s not interested in, that DC was the dark comics company compared to Marvel, and this movie, as I hoped it would, helped her see that wasn’t the case at all. Corenswet’s Superman performance is great, and it’s honestly the most comics-accurate Superman since Christopher Reeve wore the tights. This is a Superman who will take a few seconds in a battle to save a squirrel, but that is the sort of movie it is: this Superman inspires people to do better, respecting all life, including animals like Krypto or the squirrel.
It helps that he’s surrounded by a great cast doing great work. Brosnahan may be the toughest Lois Lane in ages, one that earned her place as a legit star reporter that doesn’t play favorites. Hoult’s Luthor is the sort of evil that seethes with jealousy so much that he doesn’t see that he could probably get what he wanted if he just left Superman alone and maybe just followed his example. And it wouldn’t be James Gunn-superhero movie without some other oddball heroes in the form of the “Justice Gang,” where smart guy member Mr. Terrific steals almost every scene he’s in, and it helps that actor Edi Gathegi makes the most of his screentime. I can foresee Gathegi and Corenswet both seeing boosts to their respective careers thanks to this movie, and man, does it look like DC Comics finally has a chance to a good cinematic universe. If they can keep making more fun movies like this one, then that just seems to be very likely.
Grade: B+
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