Last night, I watched James Gunn’s Superman (2025). OMG, where do I begin?

Oh, Spoiler Alert. This review is full of them.

First of all, let me say that I get where Gunn was taking the film and the character. He was balancing Superman as an alien vs Clark as a human. This is seen both in how goofy (in my opinion) both Superman and Clark (played by David Corenswet) appear and behave. Face it. Clark really doesn’t have to act like an inept nebbish to keep people from finding out he’s Superman. Why would people even believe Superman has another identity and if he did, he could be anyone living anywhere.

The secret to Clark’s insecurities, sometimes unstable behavior, and pathetically Boy Scout (even by campy comic book and earlier movie and TV standards) actions and attitudes lies in his humanity, in being raised by Martha and Jonathan Kent on a farm in Kansas.

The Kents, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell respectively, are the quintessential country hicks. I’ve worked in rural settings before, and Ma and Pa Kent might as well have been Ma and Pa Kettle. They weren’t necessarily strong or heroic and are never seen struggling over raising a son from outer space. They’re “just plain folks” and their defining characteristic is how much they love their son.

At the start of the film, after Superman has had his ass kicked and crashed into Antarctica, Krypto his dog, well actually Supergirl’s (Milly Alcock) dog, drags him to his Fortress.

I should say that the Fortress of Solitude is typically hidden in the arctic but in the 1980s/90s Superman comics, it “floated” under the ice in Antarctica so that part was okay.

Clark, while in the Fortress, is attended to by a bunch of robots and listens to the message his birth parents, Jor-El and Lara (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) sent with him, some of which had been corrupted during the space flight.

Everything taken here is associated with Kal-El’s alien origins and his belief that his parents sent him to Earth not only to save his life, but to be a protector of our planet.

Once Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) takes Clark back to Smallville in Mister Terrific’s (Edi Gathegi) ship (how did no one notice this thing entering Kansas airspace and landing on a farm?), you get a very clear picture of who the Kents are (big country doofs who adore their adopted son) and how he was raised. I mean for bleep’s sake, during a disaster in Metropolis with whole buildings being ripped apart, Superman saves a squirrel.

Then, at the climax, when Superman confronts (and Krypto defeats) Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), he gives Lex a sappy speech about how insecure he is and how he makes plenty of mistakes, but he keeps going and trying to do good because that’s what it is to be human.

Yeah, I get it.

But even by Superman the Movie (1978) standards, Superman is a total goof. He’s kind, generous, and loving to a fault, but he lacks the awesomeness, the majesty, the incredible spectacle of being Superman that both Christopher Reeve and Henry Cavill brought to the role.

Reeve made both Clark and Superman seem like complete Boy Scouts, but it was an act. You can see that in the 1978 film at the end of the helicopter rescue scene when Superman is giving Lois the speech about how safe air travel is. As he turns away from her and walks out of the frame, he breaks into a huge grin telling the audience that he was just messing with Lois.

That’s not how Corenswet depicted the Man of Steel.

Yes, it’s an important point but it was already covered in Man of Steel (2013). Gunn just took it one step further which was one step too far.

Hoult played Luthor as insanely jealous of Superman. Superman is the focus of public attention including social media and Lex wants everything to be all about him. He engineered a war just to have an excuse for the government to give him permission to kill Superman.

As another aside, I liked that Lex had an army of literally brain boxed monkeys on rows and rows of keyboards acting as social media influencers. Whenever I see these clowns on X (twitter), Bluesky, or wherever from now on, that’s how I’m going to picture them in my head.

I guess the other big thing Gunn was trying to do was make a truly comic book movie. I mean he had comic book references from everywhere including comics I’d barely heard of such as “Superman for All Seasons” (1998), “Superman: Ending Battle” (2002), “Superman: Birthright” (2003-04), and “All-Star Superman” (2005-08; which has been adapted as All-Star Superman (2011)).

I’m an old school fan starting with the 1950s TV show starring George Reeves and the 1960s comic books. I sporadically read Superman into the 1970s and picked him up again in the 1990s during the Death of Superman story arc leading into the “Reign” and “Return” arcs.

Yes, I probably watched the Super Friends cartoon which I mention because the actual “Hall of Justice” is shown as the headquarters for the “Justice Gang” featuring Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillon), Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Michael Holt/Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi). I never liked what Gardner turned into in the 1990s comic books, but I thought Fillon nailed the role including the ugly mullet haircut.

I never thought anyone would put Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) into a live action film. He’s not one of the really well-known DC heroes and he’s pretty quirky in the comic books, but for what it’s worth, he was okay.

That’s the whole movie. Just a few little jewels in the middle of a gigantic, mix-and-match, confusing, overloaded with trivia points, shitshow.

And don’t get me started on black holes and quantum rivers.

I don’t blame the actors. They did their best with what they were handed and I’m sure they earned every penny of their salaries (Corenswet and Brosnahan got $750,000 each while Hoult scored a cool two million).

But it was a mess.

It’s hard enough to buy that intelligent life on another planet would evolve to look just like humans without having to believe their dogs look and act like our dogs (except for superpowers) too.

I liked Hawkgirl showing the dictator guy Ghurkos (Zlatko Buric) she’s not like Superman by shoving him out a window, carrying him into the sky, and then dropping him to his death, but since the “Justice Gang” is funded by some corporation (not LuthorCorp), wouldn’t there be some consequences? After all, the U.S. government got really upset with Superman because he stopped a war between two countries just because he could (I know, “people were going to die”).

I thought the resurrection of Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) was going to be a total downgrade from how the wonderful Valerie Perrine played in in the 1978 film. At first, she was just a selfie taking bimbo that Lex (probably) just kept around for sex. Little did we know that in all those selfies, she was really taking shots in the background of Lex’s evil plan.

She was still played as an idiot which Perrine never did. Perrine’s Eve was a stereotypic vamp, a gun moll, but with a kind of style, and she wasn’t afraid to tell Lex (Gene Hackman) what she thought of him.

I didn’t buy that Eve (Sampaio), as much as she may have felt used by Lex, could possibly throw him to the proverbial wolves because she was hopelessly in love with Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo). I mean, women are drawn to billionaires because of money and all it can buy, not true love or anything close to it. Why Jimmy and why did Eve, who somehow met Jimmy’s mom once, think of her as HER mom, throw over billionaire Lex for a “cub reporter” who could give her pretty much nothing? On top of that, Jimmy had zero interest in Eve (I kind of agree with that part since I think Perrine was much more attractive). I suppose Eve, after turning state’s evidence, will end up in the witness protection program.

“Don’t call me Chief.” Perry White (Wendell Pierce) says that to Olsen at one point and fans saw it as a callback to the 1978 movie. Actually, it originated in the 1950s TV show as a classic interaction between Perry (John Hamilton) and Jimmy (Jack Larson). I know that because I’m old and James Gunn is only 59 as I write this. I’ve been a Superman fan longer than Gunn’s been alive.

I could go on and on but I’d end up writing longer than the film’s runtime. Suffice it to say that this Superman, in my opinion, isn’t really “Superman.” A lot of actors, TV shows, and movies have come and gone over the years. I haven’t seen them all or maybe I just saw a few episodes of some of the shows. They all depicted Superman in varying ways. But they all have to have certain things in common to be Superman. Not just honesty, integrity, and humanity, but that sense of being not only a hero, but being THE hero, a leader, a cut above, the sort of person we all strive to be, not just another guy with a lot of superpowers.

The Guardians of the Galaxy film series made by Gunn was intended to be cartoony, goofy, oddball, and full of highly improbable and not impossible characters pulled from the comic books. James Gunn made the huge mistake of thinking he could do Superman the same way.

He was wrong.

If you like or love this movie, that’s totally cool. I’m not knocking you. I’m knocking James Gunn for not understanding Superman, regardless of how much research he did.