Even those cinemagoers who have grumbled about the preponderance of superhero origin stories – and I’m guilty there – might feel a touch of remorse watching writer-director James Gunn’s puckish and political (but wildly overstuffed) blockbuster skip merrily past all the basics of DC’s most righteous figure.
The Guardians of the Galaxy man, probably mindful of the many Super-movies that have come before his, races through Kal-El’s origins in a handful of captions over the opening frames: an Antarctic vista into which a battered and vulnerable Superman (David Corenswet) is hurled after his first defeat in battle over the skies of Metropolis. In those few sentences, establishing the existence of metahumans on Earth and the arrival of Superman from the planet Krypton 30 years prior, this DC reboot skips jauntily past the entire plot of Richard Donner’s 1978 classic.
So, there’s no orientation, none of the scene-setting Smallville stuff with Jonathan and Martha Kent (though they do get a touching later scene). We’re not getting those early flirtations with girlfriend Lois Lane (the impressive Rachel Brosnahan) either, or even Clark Kent learning how to use The Daily Planet’s nifty-looking CMS. In fact, we’re not getting much of Clark Kent at all.
It’s the most in medias res-iest bit of storytelling imaginable, a gambit that feels more and more misguided as the movie slips deeper into generic superhero terrain in a packed but muddled second half. A giant chasm is carving its way towards Metropolis? Superman is being washed towards a black hole on some kind of quantum waterway? After a while you genuinely start craving a scene where it’s just Clark and Lois enjoying a quiet date night. That’s surely closer to the heart of this franchise than this torrent of identikit dust-ups.
Sparky superdog Krypto will not be for everyone
Instead, his umpteenth attempt to get DC’s superhero universe airborne throws in team-ups with Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and someone called Mister Terrific (House’s Edi Gathegi, getting the coolest stuff to do here), plus a pair of superbads with shades of Zod’s sidekicks, and a bunch of super robots, not to mention the odd giant monster and more than a few falling skyscrapers.
The story cedes the floor to the villain: Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult as an alpha tech man-baby with a pathological need to do away with his Kryptonite foe. He has Supes dancing to his tune throughout, turning the US government and the public against him, and using portals to ship his adversaries to his own interdimensional prison. Ya-awn.
On the upside, there’s Superman himself. David Corenswet, talented-spotted by Gunn playing Pearl’s creepy projectionist, makes the best Man of Steel since Christopher Reeve, a lovely balance of sweetness, strength and self-doubt bubbling beneath the surface. Like a walking Athena poster, he’s born to cradle a baby in his bulging arms. This being a James Gunn movie, he gets a green alien one with a funny face. Its fate makes a cute interlude in one of the (very) many VFX-drenched action sequences.
And I enjoyed sparky superdog Krypto! A mundane-looking white pooch, he’s a sidekick whose lack of proper training and licky nature makes him a menace to foes and friends alike. Admittedly, he won’t be for everyone.
Best of all, Gunn never shies away from the political optics of this immigrant hero and his zeitgeisty nemesis, a billionaire megalomaniac adept at manipulating talk shows and social media discourse alike. Luthor even gets his own troll farm staffed by rabid typing monkeys trying to make the hashtag ‘Supershit’ stick online. (Fox News went with ‘Superwoke’ instead.) A Superman movie that starts with this immigrant saving an unarmed, possibly Palestinian-coded populace from a neighbouring despot is more than honouring the spirit of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation.
For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.
★★★
In cinemas worldwide Fri Jul 11.