I somehow wrote over 2,000 words about Superman yesterday and never mentioned the dog.
And I can’t decide which picture I want to use, so have another:
I gotta say, including the dog in this movie was a stroke of genius in a film that is not wanting for genius moments. And making Krypto an asshole was another great decision. I’m choosing that word deliberately, mind you; Krypto’s not mean, he’s not a bad dog, no, he is in fact the goodest of good boys, but he is absolutely a furry little asshole and he could use quite a bit more training. And having a pet, much less a pet he can’t really control, humanizes Superman in a way I really like. Superman’s powers don’t help him with Krypto at all, and his anger when he can’t find his dog after Lex and his crew invade the Fortress of Solitude leads to one of the movie’s best scenes– and, not for nothing, one of its most relatable as well. It’s a two-minute masterclass of acting from both Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult. One of them has to play the part of a man who could absolutely wipe the problem in front of him off of the face of the earth with no consequences, but who knows he can’t do that, and has to contain his perfectly understandable rage. The other guy has to stare his death in the face and smirk. It’s a stellar scene, and for my money better than this scene from Superman ’78 that it’s a callback to:
I had forgotten what a champion shit-talker Reeve’s Superman is. “Diseased maniac” indeed. Corenswet could never. He’s too nice.
… suddenly it hits me that none of the three men in this scene are with us any longer. Damn.
But back to the dog: Krypto is 100% CGI, a decision that I didn’t like until I saw the film and realized that there is about a minute out of the entire movie where they could have used a real dog, and most of that minute is in the two pictures at the top of the post. And the CGI is seamless anyway; the FX in the movie are generally solid, but none of the occasional less-than-perfect shots involve Krypto. (For some reason, shots where Superman is flying directly toward the camera tend to look weird, and I’m not sure why.)
So yeah. Absolutely ready for Krypto to have his own movie, where he goes and does dog stuff and accidentally saves the world while the Justice League is busy with something else. The Zeppo, but with a lead I actually like.
Tomorrow: maybe not a Superman post! But we’ll see.
I’m just gonna say it: James Gunn’s Superman is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Please take that with whatever amount of salt you like; my opinions are subject to change and enthusiasm can take me on a ride from time to time, so it’s possible that in six months I’ll have cooled down a bit for whatever reason. The only movies, though, that are even close to this one are the original Christopher Reeve Superman, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Avengers movie. And if I’m being honest, Superman ’78 hasn’t aged as well as I might have wanted it to, and I think this version is much better as a movie although I’m not quite willing to put David Corenswet above Christopher Reeve just yet. It doesn’t have the emotional baggage those movies have; I’d been waiting for Iron Man and Avengers for decades when they finally came out, and I grew up watching Superman ’78 over and over and over again.
It’s difficult to overstate how shocked I am to be saying this. In retrospect, I should have put more stock in the tagline they chose for this movie: Look up. It’s fucking brilliant on a whole bunch of levels, but the most important thing about it is that it speaks directly to this movie’s sense of aspiration, the idea that Superman is, first and foremost, a hero, someone who wants nothing more than to do good and to leave the world better than he found it. Superman has not been an aspirational figure for some time, and I’m not even willing to admit he was in the last three movies that had a dude with an S on his chest in them. Hell, two of Reeve’s movies weren’t great, and one of those two was genuinely hot garbage. I’ve really only genuinely liked two movies with this character in them before last Saturday. I am immensely, irrationally protective of Superman, and this movie simply gets him right. Finally. Finally.
I have been waiting for a very long time to watch another Superman movie that understands the character. Going in, I figured that at best I wouldn’t be trying to get the sun to explode on the way out of the theater, and I might have just decided to lay down in traffic if it had been genuinely bad. 2025 has been a terrible enough year without Superman getting fucked over again.
But let’s get into some details. Buckle in; I’ve got a lot to say about this movie, although I don’t think this is going to reach the epic length of some of my Star Wars reviews. Then again, there have been a couple of those that I didn’t think were going to end up being very long that ended up over 10K words, so …
(This won’t be completely spoiler-free, by the way, but I’ll try not to mention anything that wasn’t made obvious by the trailers.)
Let’s start with the casting. There’s not a single weak spot in the main cast. Not one. David Corenswet is amazing, although I’d have liked to see more of his Clark– even during one of his “Clark scenes,” the interview with Lois in her apartment, he’s actually playing Superman wearing Clark’s clothes. We never get anything approaching the epic Reeve transformation scene I linked the other day, but the characters are differentiated enough that it works. Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are both phenomenal, and Hoult’s Lex in particular manages to make scene-chewing monologuing scary. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen is the most useful Jimmy Olsen I’ve ever seen on screen. I liked the Justice Gang enough that I want a movie just for the three of them– Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific are both outstanding, and I’m gonna have to be careful that I’m not overusing my superlatives, but they take a character I’ve never liked and a character I know nothing about and make me want to see movies about them. Isabela Merced doesn’t have as much to do as Hawkgirl, but I enjoyed her nonetheless. Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell as Jon and Martha Kent are flawless. And María Gabriela de Faría brings a twitchy vulnerability to her Engineer, another character that I don’t know much about and want to see more of.
My wife commented that this did sort of feel like a sequel to a movie that they hadn’t made, which I can see, and there are a handful of characters who feel like they’re there just to be there– you need Perry White, of course, and I liked Wendell Pierce’s casting even though I’m not a hundred percent certain they ever actually said Perry’s name. Mikaela Hoover and Beck Bennett as Cat Grant and Steve Lombard are just sorta there. Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho is scary and sad and creepy, which … again, I don’t know a ton about Metamorpho, but from what I do, that’s about right. The worst thing I can say about the casting– and, hell, one of the worst things I can say about the movie— is that I don’t quite get Eve Teschmacher as a character, but that’s not Sara Sampaio’s fault.
This is one of the best-shot action films I’ve seen in a long time, and even scenes in relative darkness are clear. You can actually tell what’s going on during the fights, and it’s amazing that a movie that features a kaiju the size of a skyscraper never manages to disappear into smearing CGI all over everything. Every punch that gets thrown has weight. I’ve seen a few people say that Mr. Terrific’s solo fight about halfway through the film is the best scene in the entire movie, and … I don’t quite agree (the best scene in the movie is between Clark and his dad, at the farm) but it’s up there with Yondu and his arrow as far as Gunn’s action scenes go.
The score uses John Williams’ iconic original music to its benefit without feeling enslaved to it, and while I can’t hum any of the other themes without seeing the movie again, it definitely puts its own spin on things. They could have copy-and-pasted half of Williams’ score and been just fine, so the idea that they added to it and changed it and it worked is an impressive achievement.
Let’s talk about the Star Wars movies for a minute, though. I’ve completely turned on two of three of the new trilogy movies, and while I loved The Last Jedi I will probably never watch it again. The Force Awakens was made retroactively worse by Rise of Skywalker in a way that I’m not going to explain right now. But part of what annoyed me about the discourse around Rise is the people who were insisting that it was a repudiation of The Last Jedi. This was mostly people who didn’t like Last Jedi saying this, and those folks are, in general, not to be trusted– but it went from simple shit like he smashed his helmet in the second movie, and has a new helmet in the third! to slightly more serious if still wrong critiques like insisting that Kylo Ren telling Rey that her parents were nobodies who left her to die in a ditch was absolutely 100% meant to be canonical truth and not Ren deliberately making shit up to fuck with her, which was obviously the case to anyone with a smidge of media literacy. I didn’t like the idea that she was a Palpatine, but it wasn’t a repudiation of anything at all.
James Gunn’s Superman, on the other hand, is a direct thumb in the eye of the Angry Murder Alien movies, and I couldn’t be any happier about it.
Over and over again during this movie, you see Superman stop fighting in order to save people. The kaiju wrecks a floor of a skyscraper and he stops to make sure everyone is OK before rejoining the fight. He protects people, throwing his body in between civilians and danger over and over again. He literally saves a squirrel at one point. And while the climactic fight in Metropolis at the end of the movie probably did as much property damage as the climax to Angry Murder Alien1, the movie takes it time to make sure everyone understands that they are evacuating Metropolis while the fight is going on. Is it completely logical and reasonable to believe they knocked over a couple dozen huge skyscrapers and no one got killed? Eh, probably not. But you don’t care, because by this point in the movie it’s been made clear over and over again that Superman is there to save people, that people believe that Superman’s job is to protect them, and you’re willing to believe that if Superman says Metropolis has been evacuated, then it’s damn well been evacuated.
I never understood why any of the Murderverse characters wanted to be heroes. Calling their little group the Justice League made no damn sense– can you name any time in any of the main DC movies that anyone other than Wonder Woman cared about justice? That’s a real question! And you can’t do it! Lex Luthor would still be an evil, murderous bastard if Superman had never shown up. Nothing in Angry Murder Alien 1 or Angry Murder Alien Vs. Bat-Themed Ninja Killer would have happened if Superman had never come to earth!
Corenswet’s Superman wants, before anything else, to do good and to save people. His desire to keep people from getting hurt sets the entire story of the film in motion. When he’s fighting the two physical villains of the film, Ultraman and the Engineer, he tries to talk them out of fighting.
Superman’s greatest power as a character isn’t his heat vision, or his strength, or his ability to fly. It’s that he refuses to accept that there’s ever nothing he can do. That if put in an impossible situation where the only way out is to kill or to let someone die, he does the impossible thing anyway. They effectively put him in that exact situation in this film, where there’s a dimensional anomaly eating Metropolis at the exact same time as a nation on the other side of the world is being invaded by a technologically superior force and the citizens are literally crying out his name to come and save them. The movie wants you to think that he’s going to have to choose, that he’ll either have to let people die in Metropolis or let people die in Jarhanpur.
No. He’s fucking Superman. That’s not how it works. He’s going to save everybody. That’s what makes him Superman. And he does.
(There is also a brilliant, if maybe a little overly snarky, scene where Lex Luthor reveals that he has a literal army of genetically enhanced monkeys manipulating the internet into hating Superman. It’s … maybe a little too on the nose. But I loved it anyway.)
Little spoiler coming. It’s not going to be anything that surprises you if you’ve thought much about the movie and it’s absolutely not going to ruin anything, but still.
This actually ties into the only thing I can think of that I really didn’t like about this movie. The film has three bad guys: Luthor, Ultraman, who is a black-suited Strong Silent Guy for 90% of the movie, and the Engineer, whose bloodstream Lex has filled with nanites so that she can create weapons out of her body and interface with computers. You’re meant to believe (although this is a comic book movie) that Ultraman doesn’t survive the movie, and while the Engineer’s fate isn’t quite as clear, she gets knocked unconscious in a really dangerous place late in the movie and you never see her again after that. She could very well still be alive; her status is more ambiguous than Ultraman’s.
I’m not going to get into why, but I would really have liked to see Superman work harder to save both of these characters. He’s kind of got his hands full with other shit when Ultraman goes down, but he tries to talk both of them off of the ledge and away from Luthor during their final battle, and you get the feeling that the Engineer, at least, is listening. Again, she’s kind of fascinating– she’s twitchy and broken and walks with a limp when she isn’t doing metahuman shit and, while I might change my mind after a second viewing, you get the feeling that her enhancement wasn’t entirely her decision. I can do without more Ultraman, and Superman doesn’t directly kill him, but I feel like he should have shown more concern for him, for reasons I’m not going to talk about– this is a guy who lectures Guy Gardner when the kaiju dies, for crying out loud– but I want to see María Gabriela de Faría again. I’ll be paying the closest attention to the last parts of this fight when I inevitably see this movie again.
Okay, that’s it for the spoilers.
You should see this movie. You should see this movie if you love superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you’re tired of superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you don’t usually see movies at all. This movie deserves to be extraordinarily successful. 2025 has been a miserable fucking year for anyone with a trace of a human soul, and it’s probably going to get much, much worse before it gets better. This movie foregrounds hope, and truth, and justice, and a better tomorrow, better than anything I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie that I really feel like America needs right now. And it’s really hard to imagine how I could have loved it any more than I did.
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