Superman

Writer-director James Gunn's latest dissection of costumed heroism opens with a broad-chested, Joe Shuster illustration of a Golden Age Superman springing to life to flex his muscles and pop the paltry chains that encircle him. As an opening note it's not quite as grandiose as Richard Donner parting velvet curtains before blasting off into space but, again, we're being asked to consider the totemic might wielded by those original Action Comics. Almost immediately following, once some cryptic expositional text is out of the way, we're thrust into a losing battle for Krypton's last son with Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, orchestrating this airborne one-on-one from a command room that mixes overlit standing desks with the cranks and dials seen in animated, Fleischer shorts like The Mad Scientist, or Electric Earthquake. Throughout, Luthor screams at the spittle-flecked underlings controlling his slave superhuman, with the madman using the kind of fighting game input notation that you might expect to find seated beneath an ASCII art heading on GameFAQs. 

So, despite a bleached post-processing that resembles a lifestyle magazine that has been left to curl in Earth's yellow sun, Gunn's film, in casting a net wide enough to include minor (or simply old-fashioned) DC characters like Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon's Metamorpho, betrays an adoring sort of fluency for this material. One that goes beyond the expected deification of Christopher Reeve's caped adventures or violent, satirical comics that were published in the 1980s and put the zap on one Zachary Edward Snyder. David Corenswet's frequently astonished Superman, fresh from being tossed about above Metropolis, takes another pummelling a few beats later when he submits to being interviewed, in-character, by his girlfriend, Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane. Even with a waist-coated wardrobe that recalls the vague era of the seventies, if not the specifics of Margot Kidder's 70s-does-30s wardrobe, Brosnahan's Lois is a chimeric creation who brings to mind the small screen royalty of the wider Warner Bros kingdom: the high-pitched register of Courtney Cox's Monica Geller or really any of the leading women in Amy Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls (Brosnahan's breakthrough role in Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel courtesy of the very same writer-director-producer). 

All of which is to say that this Lois is not just written to be intelligent but also principled and atypically argumentative. She's challenging for a character like Clark who, blessed with an ability to shrug off gunfire, is far more forthright and binary in his thinking. You see, Gunn's Superman examines him from a perspective of the supreme, unyielding altruism present in the character's earliest, domestic abuse-thwarting incarnation. The Biblical strain placed on this big screen character by the patchwork screenplay of the 1978 movie lingers here only to be dismissed, conclusively, by a piece that relentlessly positions everything that is great about Superman being the result of him being raised by adoring, older parents rather than the expectations mapped onto him by alien prophecy. Gunn's film also correctly identifies that the rise in fascism, corporatism and authoritarianism that we are all experiencing is, essentially, the same as that which faced a Lithuanian immigrant back in the 1930s. So, like Jerry Siegel before him, the writer-director doesn't chicken out on the implications of a working-class man possessed of a Godly power and the difference they can then make in the lives of everyday people. 

Superman is able to travel incredible distances to help the struggling people of this planet, so he does exactly that. In this instance that means interfering in the US-backed invasion of Jarhanpur by all-encompassing belligerent, Boravia. Although there's a whistling aside about the two countries being situated somewhere in Eastern Europe, the parallels between this film's images of Arab civilians dressed in rags being shelled by white troops kitted out like futuristic storm troopers and the ongoing genocide in Palestine are not just obvious but unmistakable. Rather than unthinkingly side with the expansionist interests of his adopted nation, this Superman intervenes on behalf of the oppressed, demanding pause from the frothing Boravians. Gunn has previously used the fictional countries of the DC comics universe when making contentious points (see The Suicide Squad) but this instance goes far beyond a permissible canvas on which to stage repulsive, gross-out gags. The writer-director now offers up instead a proletariat messiah committed to protecting the weak from moneyed bullies and the soaring, magical sight of Isabela Merced's Hawkgirl - in a sequence which may well be intended to echo the moment that a Thanagarian child, in the throes of retribution, chose to stave-in Lex Luthor's skull from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again - lifting a bloodthirsty dictator up into the air then, rather than listen to any of his blustering apologia, letting him plunge screaming to the ground below.