Superman Returns Better This Time

The new movie isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s a huge improvement over the previous two reboots.

Welcome to And the Quest for Pop Culture, where I explore various movies, TV shows, books, and comics. Looking for a different topic or original fiction? Check out the navigation page.

---

The first Superman movie remains the best by a comfortable margin, but I’ll take the 2025 Superman over Superman Returns, Man of Steel, and especially Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice any day.

The new movie kicks off a whole new DC cinematic universe, this time spearheaded by James Gunn, whom most people know as the writer/director of Marvel’s excellent Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Gunn wrote and directed this movie in addition to mapping out the future slate of DC films and TV shows.

(I’ll avoid major spoilers, but read at your own risk if you haven’t seen the movie yet.)

David Corenswet stars as Superman, and he nails it. He’s a straight-up dorky good guy who sees the best in people and wants to help everyone. He even goes out of his way to save a squirrel at one point. When he’s fighting a giant monster, he wants to save the monster too. He’s a brightly colored, positive superhero just trying to do the right thing. All correct.

Unfortunately, the script steers him into some dumb moves. His fuse is just a little too short at times. But he is a fairly young Superman and has only been active for a few years, so perhaps the plan is for him to mature over the course of the series.

But what’s truly unfortunate is how little we see of Clark Kent. He spends the vast majority of the runtime as Superman … and some of it as Clark with people who know he’s Superman. The movie leaves us with little sense of the secret-identity Clark.

Rachel Brosnahan makes an excellent Lois Lane. That casting choice seemed like a no-brainer from the get-go, and she lives up to expectations. She plays exactly the sort of tenacious, scrappy, sharp reporter you’d expect. And thankfully, she does not perform any aerial poetry readings inquiring about super-telepathy.

Nicholas Hoult chews up the scenery as Lex Luthor. He’s a tyrannical tech CEO who develops meticulous plans but is willing to get reckless with global safety when it might benefit him. We don’t see much beneath the surface, but he brings a campy yet sinister flair that’s fun to watch.

I agree with Gunn’s decision to start this DC Universe a few years in. We did not need another Superman origin movie, nor did we need to watch humanity meeting superheroes for the first time. For DC especially, it’s best to start in a world of established superheroes. It worked for the DC Animated Universe of the ’90s and ’00s, after all.

But this movie introduces a bit too much. It often feels like a pilot episode for the new DC rather than a standalone Superman story. We meet a proto–Justice League, here operating under the working title of the Justice Gang. Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), the Guy Gardner iteration of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) help Superman fight a monster, and we see how Superman’s idealism contrasts with their more pragmatic style.

These other superheroes also provide comic relief. Overall, the movie could have restrained itself more with the comedic elements, but the humor fits the Justice Gang scenes, as they’re built in the mold of the Justice League International comics. They don’t get much development, but they do get ample screentime, especially Mr. Terrific (no relation), who proves the most consequential to the plot. They’re all enjoyable to watch, as is Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), but I would have saved them for another movie.

Where the 1978 Superman movie truly excelled was in developing its title character, which I wrote about at length earlier this year. This Superman doesn’t feel as well developed. The script has interesting ideas about him, though. I appreciate how little it dwells on Kryptonian mythology; less is generally more with that. Rather, it uses just enough Krypton to create an internal conflict and show how human this Superman is at his core.

This is definitely not an invincible version of Superman, which the movie establishes by opening with his first defeat. They really are starting right in the middle here. This Superman is powerful, but there’s no question he can be hurt physically and emotionally.

The script also entangles Superman in a geopolitical conflict (a fictionalized one, but it’s not difficult to tell what it represents). I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, this draws inspiration from the earliest Superman comics, which depicted a Superman who didn’t think twice about stopping a war between foreign nations. But the original Superman movies wisely avoided getting involved in real-world issues … until The Quest for Peace, that is. There is such a thing as metaphor.

The movie has a scattered tone. In one corner, we’ve got a serious international conflict. In another corner, we have a giant monster and a quippy super-team. In another, we have a pocket dimension and all sorts of advanced, earth-shattering technology. In another, we have the wacky antics of a super-powered dog.

The soundtrack also demonstrates the odd tonal mix. The score by David Fleming and John Murphy weaves in elements of the classic John Williams theme without simply reusing it like Superman Returns did. But then there’s a noisy pop song during the end credits, which doesn’t feel like a Superman movie at all.

Comic book universes frequently mix a variety of tones; that’s part of the charm. With this movie, it feels like we’re sampling various aspects of this new DC Universe, getting a feel for the full range of tone and style. However, that comes at the expense of this movie and the many characters within it.

Still, I can’t deny that I had a good time watching it, and I’d happily revisit this universe in other movies and TV shows. Its heart is in the right place, and it’s a faithful effort to translate comic book storytelling onto the big screen.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of this movie’s approach is that it doesn’t bother trying to make us believe that a man can fly. It takes it for granted that we already accept such a super man. The movie—and the new DC—would have been better served by digging deeper into Superman himself, but I’d still give it a solid B.