Episode 52: Superman 2025

Transcript

When Superman is done well, when he's written well, there is a reason that he is the iconic superhero.
Part of that reason, of course, is the longevity.
Like, he was, I don't know the exact history.
If he wasn't the first true superhero, he was among the first.
So some of it is that, but also some of it is, I think we all at some level like this idea of a immovable, incorruptible beacon of hope kind of thing with limitless power, right?
Virtually limitless power.
And when he is written well, very few people can argue that it is a, I don't know, an iconic experience.
It is the type of superhero experience that really can't be replicated because he is Superman.
Problem, of course, is that writing Superman well is difficult.
It's a very hard thing.
I worked in a comic shop when I was younger in college.
And I was given to understand during that time that, essentially, if any comic book, it's almost every comic book writer's dream to get a crack at writing Superman.
And if that opportunity presents itself, just about every comic writer is willing to drop whatever projects they have going on to pick up a Superman arc simply because it's Superman.
You can get into a lot of detail around why Superman is difficult to write a good plot line for.
But I think most of it at a high level could be summarized with the idea of one of the problems with Superman is that he's not a particularly dynamic character.
As I mentioned a couple minutes ago, he is an inshakable, incorruptible beacon of hope and good.
And if you play with that too much, if you stretch it too far where he becomes corruptible or he's no longer hope or symbol of hope, then he's no longer Superman.
But if you don't push it a little bit, there's no story to write, right?
Because his power level is off the charts, comic-wise.
He can't be tempted by anything.
So what do you do?
And this is where you get so many plot lines, particularly in the earlier days, where it's just, you know, the villain of the week going to threaten Lois Lane or whatever.
It's the people around him.
His true weakness is not kryptonite, right?
It's his friends.
It's the people he has surrounded himself with that he goes out of his way to protect.
But even those plot lines, you can only do so many of them before it's like, oh, okay, got it.
Like, we're going to save Lois Lane again, right?
I just saw...
Now, by the time this episode releases, this will be a few weeks ago.
But I just recently saw the new Superman movie.
The 2025 James Gunn Superman movie.
I...
So I did my normal thing.
I avoided spoilers.
I avoided most reviews.
I...
I was very excited for this movie.
Not necessarily because Superman is my be-all-end-all favorite superhero.
He's not.
He's up there.
When he's done well, I really, really like Superman.
However, the main reason that I was so excited for this is because it's DC taking another crack at launching its superhero franchise.
It's almost hard to explain at this point with Marvel and everything, but back when I was growing up, we, you know, people like me, nerdy, geeky comic book nerds, I would eagerly anticipate any superhero content that would come to the screen because it was so rare.
And when it got there, more often than not, it was terrible or at the very least, barely resembled a comic story or the superheroes were totally different or the villains were totally different or, you know, a true like comic, a comic, a recognizable comic movie was barely to be found.
Really before probably the X-Men movies, the Bryan Singer ones, but, you know, even then, you could really make an argument that Iron Man or Spider-Man, one of those two really ushered in the more recognizable superhero stuff, at least from my perspective.
When DC content is done right, I love it.
I far prefer it to Marvel content.
I like those gods among us type of things, you know, the power levels, the cast of characters.
A lot of my favorite superheroes are in DC.
I wasn't a huge fan of, geez, what's his name?
Ooh, drawing a blank.
Like, I wasn't a fan of the latest, you know, the Superman with Henry Cavill and the Batman and all that stuff.
I actually really liked Ben Affleck, but outside of that, I really wasn't a big fan of it.
God, I'm totally drawing a blank.
Whatever.
Zack Snyder.
I was, I wasn't a huge fan of it.
I watched them.
I really wanted them to be good.
I really wanted them to be better or different than they were.
They were what they were.
They have their audience.
Their audience wasn't necessarily me.
I really liked this movie.
Now, this new Superman movie.
Now, let me preface this with a couple of things.
The biggest criticisms that I have of this, it was a bit of a mess.
And, specifically, it was a bit of a James Gunn mess.
Now, I get, I'm not, I'm a little less tied up in, you know, director tropes than some critics are.
I do understand that James Gunn has his sort of fallback, knee-jerk, almost defense mechanism-esque sorts of things that he has in his movies.
They don't bother me as much as they bother some people.
So, that's, it's not, my criticism isn't necessarily that.
But, there were certain things about it that I just thought were either unnecessary or whatever.
For instance, and yes, some of the humor, from what I understand, some people are really up in arms about how much jokey-jokiness there was in this movie.
That didn't bother me so much, but the plot line was just all over the place, I felt like.
Now, I can spin this in a couple of different directions, right?
But, let me get into a couple of things that I like first.
I really like, God, what's his name?
I can't remember any names today.
David Cornswet.
I really liked him as Superman.
I thought he brought almost a Tom Wellington, Smallville type of energy to the role.
He even looks a bit like him to me.
And he was, he brought optimism to the role and lightheartedness in a way that the Snyder and Henry Cavill ones, the thing that didn't, one of the main things that didn't work for me about the Cavill stuff and the Snyder stuff was that, especially when you got to Batman and Superman on the screen at the same time.
What you had felt like a competition between who can mope harder.
Like, they were both just broody, mopey, dark, serious, you know, and that's Batman, but that's not Superman, not really.
To me, he's much more lighthearted, and he does approach things with a sense of humor, and it's supposed to be brighter and lighter and nicer, and I got that from this movie.
Nicholas Holt as Lex Luthor.
I was not sure about this one in the previews, but I think it came off really well.
And the reason I think it came off really well is what we're seeing here is a different, it's the zany version of Lex Luthor, right?
There are serious Lex Luthors, there are businessman Lex Luthors, there are truly evil Lex Luthors, and then there's sort of the zany version of Lex Luthor.
Lex Luthor, which the last time I really remember seeing is really the Gene Hackman from, you know, the Christopher Reeves movies.
I, and I liked it.
I think it worked well.
His plan was a little crazy, it was all over the place, it was unnecessarily complicated, but that's how the Lex Luthor that Gene Hackman portrayed was as well.
The through line there barely made any sense most of the time.
He's, you know, trying to section off part of California or whatever.
Like, it's a weird plan.
And this, in this movie, was also a weird plan.
But that's okay.
Like, that was okay with me.
That didn't bother me.
So I thought he did a really good job to Lex Luthor.
I thought the, the Superman choice was really, really well chosen and he acted well.
And those two pieces are probably the most important to me in terms of characters.
Like, you've got to have a good Lex, you've got to have a good Superman.
If you're going to have Lex in the movie, obviously.
So that worked for me.
So the very core of this worked for me.
It was optimistic.
It was bright.
There was some humor.
And I liked Superman and I liked Lex.
So the core of this movie worked for me.
And therefore, I'm willing to forgive some other things.
Some other things that I thought, for instance, the Justice Gang, I'm still trying to roll around in my head whether or not this was necessary to add.
I mean, it definitely wasn't necessary, but did it hinder the movie or not?
And I'm not 100% sure.
This is one of these, like, this to me feels like one of the more obvious James Gunn-isms.
James Gunn is known for these kind of ragtag teams of whatever that come together and kind of begrudgingly work on something.
And there's a lot of sarcastic humor and blah, blah, blah.
That was the Justice Gang in this.
And I just, it almost felt like a defense mechanism.
It was almost like he couldn't just make a Superman movie.
He had to have this other cast of people.
But there were times that I thought that was useful.
Like, at a high level, I suppose, this idea that Superman would also be interacting with some other heroes.
I like that because, I'll talk about two things specifically.
There's a couple things that my interpretation, I think Gunn did a couple clever things here.
One of them is the Justice Gang.
Because it almost shines a light on all these other movies and shows and whatnot that are centered around a hero.
But that hero never sees any of the other, like, hundreds of heroes that are presumably in this world.
Like, they're never there.
So, I like that this kind of shone a light on that.
Like, oh, there is this whole other team that shows up sometimes and does things.
I thought that was clever when I look at it from that perspective.
But when I look at it from the perspective of, this was supposed to be a Superman movie and who are these other three clowns floating around?
I like it less from that angle.
So, my jury's a little bit out on that.
The other thing I thought that was clever in the movie, which was similar to this Justice Gang thing.
There's a scene where there's this big floating cosmic whatever going on outside.
And Superman's sitting in an apartment talking with Lois.
And he's just kind of like, ah, it's fine.
They got it handled.
This, again, shone this light on, like, hey, sometimes there's these big world events that are occurring that heroes just don't get involved in.
And this showed, like, a really concrete example of why they might not get involved.
Where they just figure, like, ah, someone else can take care of this one, right?
And I thought that was clever.
And you don't see that very often in hero plot lines.
Overall, I'm willing to forgive a lot on this movie.
Because, again, there's some messiness around the plot.
There's some odd choices in terms of who is and is not included in it.
The stuff with Lex, I think it's going to be one of those, like, love it or hate it things.
Like, either you look at the Lex in this movie and you're kind of like, oh, yeah, this is the zany version of Lex with really crazy, you know, Rube Goldberg machine style evil plots.
And either you like that or you don't.
Superman, I have a hard time.
I know that there's a whole Henry Cavill fandom.
And I liked Henry Cavill just fine, at least when he was at his best in the Superman movies.
I'm not saying he was horrible at it at all.
I know there's a whole fandom around that.
But I, just from my, one of the things I would say is, it's very hard for me to understand how someone could not like this new Superman.
He's very charismatic.
He's very optimistic.
He plays the role well.
And you can tell he's having fun doing it.
And I think some of that stuff we really haven't seen in a long time.
But overall, I'm willing to forgive a lot.
Not even necessarily on the back of the characters, but on the back of one simple thing.
Which is that this movie felt hopeful to me.
It felt like it was bringing a message of hope and optimism and good.
In a world of just brutal, gritty content.
Right?
I mean, you can throw a rock at this point and hit something like an Invincible or a, man, I can't remember the word for anything today.
The, the, the guys, the boys, the guys, yeah, the boys, the boys, Invincible.
And I'm not saying I don't like those shows.
Like, especially Invincible, I really do enjoy.
Um, the boys kind of tapered off for me over after maybe season one, but it's just brutal and it's violence and there's no one to really root for.
Like, everyone's terrible.
They're all just like horrible, murdering, terrible people.
And there's, there just feels like there's enough of that where I just don't need more of it.
And I like, I liked this, this movie about a super powered beacon of hope and justice and optimism that takes on a bald dude, a rich bald dude with a crazy Rube Goldberg evil plot.
And by and large, the visuals held up and it gave Superman real challenges that he had to overcome.
And I, I thought it was well done and a great blockbuster for the summer.
And I, I hope, even if this isn't the best Superman content ever created ever, I hope that it does kick off a universe for this type of, this type of world that, that is being started here turns into something.
I would like to see that.
I want to see more of it.
I want to see the Batman in this universe.
I want to see, I want to see maybe Shazam in this universe because he's one of my favorites.
And I always love seeing that.
I want to see a justice league that comes out of this.
I want to see the villains that come out of this.
I want to see more of this.
It, it inspired me to want to see more.
So what did you think?
Are you on that sort of page?
Did you have some other opinions that I missed something?
These are just sort of the thoughts that I had on top of my head.
Again, I'm no movie critic, but this, this, these were the things that kind of came to mind for me.
I'd love to hear from, from you.
Feel free to drop a comment or, or send me, drop me a line.
There's a contact page over at lmc.fm, lmc.fm.
Always feel free to reach out if you want to come in on and just, even if you just want to come on and talk about Superman, happy to do that.
Uh, let's talk.
But if you haven't seen this movie, give it a shot.
I, I really enjoyed this.
I was in the mood for something optimistic and this delivered.
I, I'm out.
You