'Superman' Is A Bad Start To James Gunn's DCU
The new Man Of Steel is plucky enough, but the movie is ultimately just more of the same generic superhero slop.
I went to Superman with my son Tuesday night. We got tickets thanks to Amazon Prime’s Fandango partnership and caught an early screening, which is very useful since I’m a movie critic but never have the opportunity to see theatrical releases ahead of release.
It wasn’t very good. Not terrible, but not great. Entertaining on a sort of superficial level. I was sitting through the opening fifteen or twenty minutes thinking to myself “I hope this gets better” but by the halfway mark, and certainly by the third act, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t all bad. We talked about it on the drive home and we both agreed that there were a lot of fun moments, but overall it just didn’t come together as a very satisfying movie. David Corenswet is good as Clark Kent. The rest of the cast does a fine job. But the script just isn’t there. James Gunn’s sense of humor is all wrong for this character.
The sunny optimism we hoped for is stained by an underlying cynicism that makes the whole thing tonally bizarre. The story is a retread of countless other superhero movies that pit a supervillain against a superhero, introduce a potentially world-ending catastrophe, and then mop things up in the end. There are no hard choices or genuinely tight spots for to help create suspense or tension. Superman himself has very little agency.
My official review of Superman is up at my Forbes blog, so give that a read if you’re curious. I can’t recommend the movie, though lots of people seem to like it including both fans and critics. Of course, any audience reviews are from people who bought early screening tickets, so I suspect they’re somewhat biased, but I harbor no ill will toward people who enjoyed the film—though I wish they’d stop calling me a Snyderbot, a Nazi, a Trumper or claiming I have an “anti-Superman ideology”. Gosh golly, Twitter is a fun place. Then there are the Snyder fanboys who want the movie to fail because they’re still butthurt about Henry Cavill being recast. I’m no fan of Snyder and while I do like Cavill a lot, I think it was a good idea to recast our heroes and start fresh. This just isn’t the fresh start I was hoping it would be.
In any case, you can read my review over at Forbes. I also made a review video on my YouTube channel which you can watch here:
Let me know your thoughts on the new Superman in the comments. Thanks for reading!