Superman, released in theaters on the 11th of July, 2025, is a pretty bad Superman movie. Sure, it’s rated 7.6 on IMDb at the moment, which might lead a reasonable person to believe that it’s a reasonable movie…but not really. Ironically, being “not good” is a great way to generate publicity, and I’m happy to oblige.
Where to begin? Nicholas Hoult played an excellent villain; I’m sure James Gunn had an easy time directing his part — all Gunn needed to do was let him know he was supposed to hate the guy with the cape, and Hoult was off to the races. If you aren’t familiar with Hoult’s work, I recommend that you watch The Great, where he plays Emperor Peter III. The rest of the cast was simply meh, but perhaps that’s just because they had very little good dialog or plot to work with.
The main problem with the movie, I think, is that this Superman is a loser, in every sense of the word. The movie begins with Superman losing a battle, but it’s more than that: this Superman is severely underpowered and easily beaten by every bad guy or gal he comes across. And the way to beat him is to simply precalculate his moves and feed them to his opponent in real time. Which is to say, the fights are all rather underwhelming.
Louis Lane knows that Superman is Clark Kent, but their relationship is pretty depressing, and nothing much ever happens with it. In the beginning, she is unsure of their relationship, and in the end I guess it all works out because they had to wrap up the movie.
Then there’s a whole plotline around why Superman’s biological parents Jor-El and Lara sent him to Earth. It turns out they were Bad People™ and intended Superman to take over the Earth. But somehow, Superman had only ever heard the first part of their message, and that portion of the message had led him to believe he was here to serve the people of Earth. Anyway, putting aside the absurdity of why one would expect aliens from a distant planet to share the 21st century morality of maybe less than 20% of the world’s population, this plotline has bigger problems. For one thing, Superman has seemingly advanced humanoid robots in his crystal lair, but not one of them could figure out how to fix the ‘glitch’ in the message. And then there’s Mr. Terrific, who can easily hack a portal to a pocket universe — why couldn’t he help out poor Superman and fix the ‘glitch’? I mean, we aren’t talking about an old DVD lying in a dusty box; we’re talking about a video / hologram that Superman watches for therapeutic purposes. (As an aside, the ins-and-outs of pocket universes seem to be common knowledge.) In any case, events unfold at breakneck speed in the Superman universe — the bald guy gets hold of the message, broadcasts it to the world, claims that some 30-odd experts have already vouched for the authenticity of the alien message and its translation into English in less than a day (a claim that everyone immediately decides must be true, because why else would Lex Luther, an established Superman hater, say such an awful thing?), Superman’s most fervent supporters drop him like a hot potato, Superman has an identity crisis that’s resolved in the next scene by his adoptive father pointing out that his choices matter more than his alien biological parents’ dated opinions, and thus restored and filled with a fresh sense of purpose, Superman flies away to find another battle to lose.
Did I mention we have to deal with these pocket universes now? Apparently, Superman can’t survive if his lungs fill up with nanoparticles and other gunk, but flying around in the empty space of pocket universes? No problem! And steer clear of that black hole, if you get too close you might have to fly REAL HARD (thrusters on high!) to get away from the event horizon. Just jump on to that nearby asteroid (or is it an artificial ledge?), where you’ll be okay.
More stuff happens, and Superman finally delivers a big speech to the bald guy that overcomes his bitter opinions. He’s Superman, but he’s also human, he claims, and that clinches the argument. Phew!
The real savior in all this is the dog, or rather, the Superdog (it has a cape and everything). Seriously, the dog is the one that saves Superman in the beginning after he gets beaten up, and it’s the one that saves him from the evil Superman clone in the final battle. So really, the movie might make more sense if you were to think of the dog as the protagonist. Maybe I just got the titular characters mixed up. For isn’t a dog man’s best friend, in many ways as human as the alien child of Jor-El, and thus, a kind of (Super)man?
