I said I was burned out on superhero movies and wasn’t going to watch them anymore. But then I saw that Fox News declared that Superman was superwoke
and Kellyanne Conway came out against it because it was nice to immigrants. James Gunn, the director said that “Superman is the story of America, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” If MAGA hates it, I might like it.
So I saw it last night, and those reviews are correct — it is a “woke” movie, it does valorize the immigrant experience, Superman’s greatest quality is not that he’s invulnerable (he’s not), but that he is kind. This is a Superman I haven’t seen since 1978, with Christopher Reeve in the lead role. I think maybe I’m not so much tired of superhero movies as I am grimdark superhero movies.
That said, while it’s a much more optimistic kind of movie that represents the values America was brought up on (although it’s often poor at the practice — this is the idealistic superhero that masks the American villainy that has blossomed on Fox News), a Gunn superhero universe could be just as wearing as a dark Zack Snyder universe. It’s silly. It’s colorful. It has swarms of goofy superheroes. It’s a comic book movie!
Comic books had to churn out new plots week after week for decades, and they often got ridiculous. Remember Mr. Mxyzptlk? Bizarro Superman? The many colors of kryptonite? The contrived plots that wobbled between melodrama and comedy?
I would get so annoyed at those wordy covers that set up some improbable gimmick that would be completely resolved by the end of the issue, usually with some strange unlikely twist that Superman was just pretending, the bad guy didn’t stand a chance.
This movie would have appealed to me much more when I was 14. I’m a little bit older now, so I’m thinking it was fun, the message was great, but, you know, the country is in crisis right now and a bit of fluff isn’t what we need. OK, maybe we do need a sense of humor to get us through dark times, so it’s nice. And kind of Gunn to give us a little sweetness to annoy the MAGA trolls.
Also, Superman doesn’t actually punch Donald Trump in the movie. Although he probably should.
My favourite Superman story is just a one page comic strip where he talks a young girl into not jumping off a the roof of a building. It’s just one page story, but I tear up every time I even think of it.
Also Superman smashed the KKK
I’m not gonna lie, that Tojo in the last photo looks a little racist.
So you’ll continue to watch Marvel’s cornball, slapstick output I take it.
Can somebody please trick Trump into saying his name backwards?
Saw it yesterday. Very Silver Age and reminiscent of the Paul Dini DC animated series along with his Justice League and Justice League Unlimited.
I still can’t believe they haven’t made a “Matter Eater Lad” movie yet.
Hulk smash.
Steve Shives has a good new clip on this movie here – Kindness Is Their Kryptonite: Why Are Right-Wingers Mad About the New Superman -which is 25 mins long.
OMG! I bought that “banana submarine” issue. Remember it well. I looked it up, July 1962, right in the middle of my prime comic book buying days.
It’s ironic that while some within the MAGA faithful are declaring their hatred of Superman, chief MAGA and his MAGAtts are sharing images of Trump as Superman. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that, considering how they’ve been portraying the Oaf-of-Office as Jesus Christ for years. The next time that they declare the mandatory postings of the 10 Commandments, a Democrat should argue for the amendment to include the Sermon on the Mount.
Superman is an illegal alien. Call ICE.
Raised in priority on my watch list. I watched the Mario movie because the anti-woke were being crybabies about it. It was decent, mindless fun (lots and lots of Easter Eggs for a nerd like me to spot). If this has similarities to the Diniverse, I’ll probably enjoy it more.
In some ways, despite his inherent silliness, Mr. Mxyzptlk was a great Superman villain, for the simple reason that he was someone Superman couldn’t punch and had to outsmart.
(And honestly one of the funniest moments in the Paul Dini cartoons is where we see Mxyzptlk building a power armour suit to go after Superman, step into the portal… his wife just starts counting off the seconds, and then Mxyzptlk returns with a few pieces of wreckage from the suit and looking even more annoyed. We never do see what happened with Superman in that encounter, but that bit was just perfect comedic timing.)
@HidariMak:
One of the problems with that is that they’re already not using any church-recognized version of the Ten Commandments for that sort of thing (because different churches number things differently) and instead they’re using an unnumbered set that was literally created by a judge who liked sentencing young offenders to bible study, as a PR campaign for Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments movie. This was a set deliberately created to be non-denominational and designed to be a ‘civil’ (i.e., government-enforced) version of the Commandments.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/05/20/louisiana-will-post-the-twelve-commandments-in-schools/
I wonder how Republicans would react if someone proposed a monument simply saying “Love thy neighbor,” “Love thy enemies,” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Recursive Rabbit @13: Nice, but those fucks need some brimstone:
I read an article recently about how the creators of Superman were jewish. And, the article went on to point out how Superman was an illegal immigrant who came here to make the world a better place for all.
ok but was this the one with the robots? what was up with the robots?
This film might be just the thing for the younger generation that is being raised by the RWNJs to see.
As a high school teacher, I knew that there wasn’t much that those kids didn’t get to see, despite the disapproval of their overly-religious parents.
Anything that will appeal to those kids and subtly teach kindness and acceptance may turn out to be a way to earn the hearts and minds of the next generation.
I got the sneaking suspicion that Vasil Ghurkos, the President of Boravia, was supposed to be a stand-in for both Vladimir Putin (invading Ukraine) and Benyamin Netanyahu (Invading Gaza). Superman threatens him into not invading.
Later, Ghurkos has something very bad happen to him, which I suspect was meant to be a wish-fulfillment proxy of something bad happening to the above-named real world politicians overseeing real-world invasions.
The robots are Kryptonian machines that take care of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude while he’s away, and help take care of Superman when he’s been injured and brought to the Fortress of Solitude (which we see has happened in the opening scenes of the movie).
I think there might have been a bit of an easter egg in casting Alan Tudyk as the robot with the most lines, because Alan Tudyk also played the robot Sonny of “I, Robot” (2004).
I’ve been watching it, and he just said that Superman is always an immigrant. However, I read a comment somewhere that one version by one author had Superman sent to Earth as an embryo. The embryo gestated in a Kryptonian artificial womb, and was “born”/decanted on American soil, precisely because that particular author did not want Superman to be an immigrant.
So . . . I guess that version of Superman was an anchor baby instead?
Yeah, I tend to be a bit more optimistic about stories. With the exception of a brief period on TV, when we had a lot of super heroes, and, hilariously, they where all “woke”, there was a huge gap in time in which you got nothing but crap westerns, war movies, maybe some stuff from Disney, and a mess of bad comedies. No one was making movies for the “geeks” much. Then we get an explosion of super hero movies, and yeah, the theme was, “OK, so.. most of this stuff was just campy nonsense before, lets go darker with it.” Because, well, the real world isn’t some nice place, in which every problem is solved in a single movie, the bad guys are all bad at their jobs, and everyone, on both sides, magically parachutes to safety, like its GI Joe. People actually die and get hurt in real conflict, so lets show this. Has it gone too far? Maybe. I do find it kind of ironic that some of the “worst” of the ones put out in the MCU, according to most people, are things like Ant Man, which was “not” dark and gritty. Mind, this doesn’t mean some of the ones that did do that where not deeply flawed in some ways too (Age of Ultron).
But, weirdly, having this one come out may be a good thing for one very simple reason – Hollywood is driven by, “We are smart. We made money. We have money, which makes us smart.” I.e., the STNG Pakled way of judging how useful something is. In general, the people running the studios are often absolute idiots, who have even less clue what people like, or why, than conservatives are at judging, and/or creating, humor. But, this was wildly successful, so… odds are we will see a string of, ironically, “Campy, woke super hero movies.”, following it. And, the mere fact that this will piss off MAGA is more than enough, no matter how bad some of them end up being, due, again, to the studio execs having no f-ing clue, and just demanding, “Write something like that! It made us money and that makes us smart!”
Me.. I am just happy when the trend changes, and we get more movies I can tolerate, even if they are not “great”, instead of years of truly horrible crap, that catered to the last trend that hit (and all the bad tropes that underpinned it).
Following up on myself:
This is what was being referred to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_of_Steel_(comics)
AJ has an opinion piece here on Superman movie and the Zeigeist generally :
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/7/14/the-superhero-film-genre-is-on-a-decline-and-so-is-american-empire
There’s also some rather worrying stats there incl :
@20. Owlmirror : I’ve been watching it, and he just said that Superman is always an immigrant.
Hey, Steve Shives said and covered a lot more than just that!
I meant “just” as in “just now” ; “at this point in the video”, not in the sense of “this is all he was saying”.
It reminded me of the counterexample that I wanted to post before forgetting about.
Speaking of counterexamples, I was reading the WikiP for Superman, which covered the literary origin. Originally, Siegel and Shuster had their character as a human who was granted his powers by experimental drugs. Later iterations had him be a time-traveler from the distant future.
None of these early iterations made it to actual publication, but “immigrant from another planet” is what actually got published.
Since Superman’s moral character has been under discussion (and is an important part of the 2025 film), I thought this was an interesting point:
You spelled Mxyzptlk correctly. I am impressed.