Superman

The Radical Act of Being Nice

Very early in James Gunn’s *Superman*, the movie tips its hand. Clark is already stuck inside one of those noisy, debris-heavy battles, dodging energy blasts while masonry collapses around him. And then he breaks his momentum to save a panicked squirrel. I laughed in the theater, not because Gunn was undercutting the scene, but because the sincerity of it landed like a surprise. Superhero movies have spent twenty years teaching us to expect solemn gods in pain, men swallowed by guilt and shadow. David Corenswet’s Clark Kent isn’t built that way. He isn’t carrying the burden of the world on his face. He’s busy getting people out alive.



Maybe that kind of open-hearted optimism is exactly your thing, maybe it makes you squirm a little. Gunn’s whole career has been built on irony, on turning weirdos and rogues into dysfunctional families. I had real doubts about whether he could set the smirk aside and make a straight-ahead Boy Scout work. Somehow he does, mostly by refusing to waste time on mythology we already know. No doomed Krypton. No lovingly tragic baby-in-a-rocket montage. He drops us into a Metropolis that is already humming with costumed heroes, a city that feels bright, cluttered, and gloriously overdesigned—less like a plausible skyline than a pop-art mural somebody set in motion.



Corenswet is the reason the whole thing holds together. So many Supermen arrive puffed up, chest-first, performing some abstract idea of nobility. Corenswet goes the other direction. He slouches. His shoulders hang loose. He doesn’t rumble every line from the center of his sternum; half the time he sounds like a friendly stranger at a gas station telling you which road to take. After years of watching actors strain toward grandeur, that lack of ceremony feels weirdly fresh. He plays Superman like a decent Kansas guy who, by coincidence, also can’t be destroyed.



A hero this guileless needs an opponent fueled by pure suspicion, and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor understands the assignment. This isn’t Gene Hackman’s gleeful crook. He’s a contemporary tech billionaire: sleek, smug, buffered from consequences, and spiritually vacant. Watch Hoult’s jaw tighten in scenes with Clark. His eyes never stop calculating. He cannot process a person who acts without some hidden profit motive. As David Sims noted in *The Atlantic*, "This Superman is, more than anything, concerned with our society's struggle to accept the possibility of inherent goodness." Hoult gives form to the worldview that sees kindness and immediately assumes there has to be a catch.

The movie absolutely has problems. Gunn stuffs the frame with so many side heroes—Edi Gathegi’s Mister Terrific, Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner—that the middle stretch sometimes tangles itself up. At its noisiest, the film crowds out the intimate character beats that make the opening sing. Still, whenever it calms down, the human core comes rushing back. I walked out feeling lighter than I expected. Maybe we’re done asking every hero to reflect our darkest instincts back at us. Maybe sometimes it’s enough to watch one remind us to take care of each other.