Dispatch from a Darker World

It’s essential to begin with a confession, a disclaimer that colors every observation that will follow: I am, by temperament and by long-established preference, a Batman guy. My cinematic North Star in the superhero genre is not a shining beacon, but a flickering, grime-covered bulb in a city drowning in its shadows. For me, the definitive live-action portrayal of a hero’s journey is Matt Reeves’ The Batman. That (imperfect) film is not just a comic book adaptation; it is a meticulously crafted piece of detective noir, a psychological study wrapped in the aesthetics of a seventies thriller. It is a story about a man so thoroughly broken by trauma that he has weaponized his own pain, transforming himself into a nocturnal predator to hunt the monsters bred by the very system that failed him.

The appeal of that world is its pervasive, suffocating texture. It’s a world of tangible consequences, where violence is brutal, clumsy, and leaves scars, both physical and psychological. Its hero is not a god who reassures us, but a man who frightens us, a symbol of vengeance who must learn, painfully and slowly, what it means to be a symbol of hope. He is a detective first, relying on his intellect, his discipline, and his obsessive drive to solve a puzzle that is, in essence, the very soul of his city. This vision of heroism—grounded, tactile, psychological, and morally complex—feels honest to me. It feels like a genuine reflection of a world that is itself complex and often broken.

I lay this all out to establish the significant intellectual and aesthetic baggage I carried with me into the theatre for James Gunn’s Superman. My attendance was an act of what I considered to be necessary due diligence. With a new cinematic universe kicking off, it felt essential to understand its foundational text, even if I suspected its language would be alien to me. I went in with a critic’s notebook and a skeptic’s heart, fully expecting to encounter a story whose moral simplicity and bright-eyed optimism would feel like a relic from a bygone era. I anticipated a well-made film, perhaps, but one whose central figure would be too powerful, too perfect, and too fundamentally unrelatable for me to truly connect with.

What I did not, under any circumstances, expect was to walk out of the cinema feeling so thoroughly engaged, so intellectually stimulated, so deeply and surprisingly moved. The film is, without question, a glorious, overstuffed, and profoundly flawed mess. It buckles under the weight of its own narrative ambition and makes a series of baffling creative choices that I will spend the bulk of this essay dissecting. And yet, through it all, it radiates a sincerity so potent, so utterly devoid of irony, that it forces even a hardened Gothamite like me to reconsider the very nature of heroism itself. For the first time, I think I finally get Superman. This, then, is not so much a review as it is a field report. A dispatch from a man who went expecting a god and was surprised, and relieved, to find a person.

The Anatomy of Hope

My journey from skepticism to appreciation began, as it must, with the man in the cape. The film’s greatest triumph, the bedrock upon which all its other successes are built, is the casting of David Corenswet and the profound understanding of character he and Gunn bring to the role. This is where the movie won me over, not by overpowering my sensibilities, but by disarming them.

However, it is impossible to discuss a new Superman without acknowledging the legacy of the actors who came before. Each embodied a specific facet of the character. Christopher Reeve was sincerity incarnate, a classical Hollywood star whose earnestness was so complete that he made the impossible feel plausible. Brandon Routh, in his turn, was a melancholic echo of that sincerity, playing a hero out of time, a ghost of a more optimistic age. And Henry Cavill was a physical deity, a man who looked less like he was playing Superman and more like he was sculpted from Kryptonian marble for that very purpose. He possessed an unmatched physical presence, embodying the “god among us” aspect of the character.

David is intentionally cast against this tradition of archetypal presence. While he kinda-sorta looks the part, his defining feature is not an otherworldly physique or an iconic jawline; it is his performance of a fundamental, accessible humanity. He doesn’t play a god pretending to be a man; he plays a man - a kind, slightly awkward, deeply feeling man - who is grappling with the immense responsibility of being a god. This is a crucial distinction. His power doesn’t emanate from his physical presence, but from the emotional truth of his acting.

The film is filled with small, illustrative moments of this principle, what my notes refer to as him killing people with kindness. In one scene, after he averts a city-threatening disaster, he doesn’t just receive adoration from afar. He lands among the shell-shocked survivors. There’s no grandstanding. He moves through the crowd, his immense frame made deliberately smaller, less imposing. He speaks to a local vendor, not with the authority of a superhero, but with the calm, reassuring tone of a paramedic. It’s in these quiet interactions that his character is truly built. His most impressive power is not his strength, but his empathy.

This hyper-positive, earnest approach initially felt alien. As a viewer conditioned by a decade of heroes defined by their trauma and inner demons, my first reaction was to ask: where is the conflict? Where is the psychological depth? But I came to realize that the film was proposing a different, more radical kind of complexity. Superman’s heroism here is not about overcoming a darkness within himself; it is a story about a man who possesses an innate and powerful goodness, and he struggles to project that goodness onto a world that is often too cynical and broken to accept it. His fight is not against his own nature, but for it. This isn’t a lack of complexity; it’s a different, and perhaps more challenging, form of it.

This philosophical choice is also reflected in the very design of the film’s world. Gunn has resurrected a “Silver Age” aesthetic, not as mere nostalgia, but as a core tenet of his storytelling. Metropolis is a dream of a city, a utopia rendered in clean lines and wide-open skies perpetually bathed in a warm light. It is a world without shadows, without grime, without the oppressive weight of a corrupt history.

Initially, I found this relentless brightness to be sterile and uninteresting. It lacked the texture of reality. But as the film progressed, I began to see it not as a failure of imagination, but as a deliberate and defiant choice. In a genre that has become increasingly dark and deconstructionist, the film’s visual language is an act of rebellion. It dares to suggest that hope is not a naive fantasy, but a worthy aspiration, and that a world built on our better angels is a world worth fighting for.

Ghostly Glasses, Absent Clark

If the film’s greatest strength is its thoughtful portrayal of Superman, then its most profound and inexplicable weakness is its almost complete sidelining of Clark Kent. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me due to the film’s sheer narrative density, we are given only a handful of fleeting moments with Clark as a distinct character. There is a powerful scene with Lois in her apartment, and a few establishing shots of the Daily Planet that do little to ground him in his human life. For a movie so deeply invested in the humanity of its hero, this is a staggering miscalculation.

This film denies us that essential drama for Clark. By focusing so overwhelmingly on Superman, it avoids the most compelling questions about his existence. Is the mild-mannered, slightly clumsy Clark Kent a deliberate, carefully constructed performance designed to make people underestimate him? Or is that the “real” man, the farm boy from Kansas who has to suppress his true, gentle nature every time he dons the cape and becomes a global icon? The film never seems interested in exploring this tension.

What is the immense, soul-crushing burden of being Clark? We needed to see the scenes that were left unwritten. Maybe a scene of Clark at his desk at the Daily Planet, trying to write an article about a local fire while his super-hearing is tormented by the sounds of a dozen greater tragedies happening simultaneously across the globe, tragedies he must force himself to ignore. We needed to see him at a dinner party, smiling and nodding while feeling utterly alienated, unable to participate in a simple conversation because he is parsing a million other sounds. We needed to see him fumbling an excuse to Lois, the lie tasting like ash in his mouth, because the truth is too dangerous for her to know.

Without these moments, without the grounding texture of his human life, Superman risks becoming an abstraction, a symbol without a person inside. The film gives us an incredible performance of the man in the suit, but it tragically forgets to show us the man without it. It’s a missed opportunity of colossal proportions, and the film is significantly poorer for it.

Sins of the Father

Just when I thought I had the film’s measure, a well-acted but dramatically thin story, Gunn deploys his narrative centerpiece. It’s a twist so potent, so rife with thematic and psychological possibility, that it elevates the entire film into a different stratosphere of storytelling, even as its flawed execution proves to be the movie’s most spectacular and frustrating failure.

For decades, one of the central challenges of writing Superman has been the problem of his perfection. How do you create compelling conflict for a man who is essentially a god? The traditional solutions: kryptonite, magic, villains who are his physical equal … are all external. They challenge his body, but rarely his soul. The revelation that Kal-El’s Kryptonian parents sent him to Earth not as a refugee but as a conqueror, a biological seed for a new Kryptonian empire, is a staggering and brilliant solution to this problem.

From a Gotham-centric worldview that values internal conflict above all else, this is narrative gold. It gives Superman a flaw. It gives him a legacy of sin. It introduces a source of darkness that is not external, but is coded into his very DNA. The hero I understand is one who must wrestle with his own potential for evil. Batman’s entire crusade is a battle against the darkness that the murder of his parents planted in his own heart. This twist gifts Superman with a similar, though distinct, internal struggle. He is no longer a perfect messiah sent from the heavens; he is the son of would-be tyrants. He is the living embodiment of a fallen, imperialist culture.

This masterstroke recasts his entire heroism. Every act of selfless kindness is no longer a simple expression of his good nature; it is an active, conscious, and perhaps difficult rebellion against his programmed purpose. It suggests that his goodness is not a given, but a hard-won choice he must make every single day. It provides him with the kind of psychological and moral weight that makes a character truly timeless.

Herein lies the film’s central, tragic paradox. What is a massive gain for Superman’s character complexity is a catastrophic loss for the film’s thematic integrity. The immigrant allegory, so central to Superman’s cultural DNA since his creation by two Jewish artists, completely falls apart under the weight of this twist. For a film that so clearly wants to engage with the idea of Superman as the ultimate immigrant, the choice to make his parents’ intentions malevolent is disastrous. It plays directly into the most toxic and pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric: the xenophobic fear that the “other” is not coming for refuge but to conquer, to steal, to replace. It posits the immigrant as a secret threat, a sleeper agent whose true, sinister purpose will one day be revealed. For immigrants (and sometimes their families), who often face accusations of having hidden agendas, this development was uncomfortable and unfortunate.

The film attempts to resolve this through a theme of American individualism: you are not defined by your parents or your heritage; you choose who you want to be. While a fine theme on its own, its application here is clumsy and culturally myopic. The film presents Kryptonian culture as monolithically “evil” or “backwards.” We experience their world through the distorted lens of Lex Luthor’s propaganda. Their language is presented as harsh, their motives as sinister. The film’s solution is for Kal-El to find salvation by wholly embracing his wholesome, all-American upbringing in Smallville, Kansas, and utterly rejecting his foreignness. It’s a narrative of assimilation through purgation, which is not how healthy cultural integration works. A more nuanced story would have allowed Clark to struggle with this duality. He could have found a way to honour the memory of the parents who gave him life, to perhaps even find beauty and value in aspects of Kryptonian culture, while simultaneously and fiercely rejecting their imperialist ideology. The film, in its rush for a simple resolution, opts for a binary choice: be Kryptonian and evil, or be American and good.

The film’s greatest tragedy is the monumental missed opportunity that this central conflict presented. Gunn makes the firm choice that the Kryptonian message is authentic, shutting down the possibility that it was faked or manipulated by Lex. But imagine, for a moment, a different path, a third act built not on a CGI spectacle, but on a crisis of faith and information.

Imagine Lex Luthor, in a move of cold, calculated genius, forgoes a monster attack. Instead, he leaks the complete, verified, and untranslated Kryptonian message to every news outlet and government on Earth. The world is thrown into chaos. Their god, their protector, their symbol of hope, is revealed to be the advance scout for an invasion. The very foundations of global security are shattered. Protests erupt in the streets. Armies are mobilized. He is declared a global threat. For the first time, Superman is truly, utterly alone, feared by the very people he has sworn to protect. Now, imagine the scene that should have followed. Superman doesn’t fight his way out of this problem. He confronts it. He flies to the (useless) UN General Assembly in New York. The chamber is thick with fear and hostility. He doesn’t enter as a god descending from on high, but as a supplicant, a man asking to be heard. And he gives a speech.

In a long, vulnerable, and brilliantly written monologue, he could have laid his soul bare for the world to see. He could have started by confirming the truth of the message, acknowledging the terrible, imperialist ambitions of his biological parents. He could have spoken of the profound grief, shame, and confusion of learning that his entire life was predicated on a lie. Then, he could have spoken of the Kents, of the love and the values they instilled in him: compassion, responsibility, respect for life. The gentle giant could have articulated, for himself and for the world, how he made a conscious choice to embrace the values of his adopted home over the programming of his genetic one. He could have deconstructed Lex’s xenophobic framing, asking the world to judge him not by the sins of his fathers, but by the evidence of his own actions. And he would end by placing his fate in their hands, vowing to submit to any judgment they rendered, thereby proving that his ultimate allegiance is not to his own power, but to the will of humanity.

That scene would have been everything. It would have been a battle not of fists, but of ideas, of fear versus trust. It would have been a more compelling climax than any monster fight because the stakes would have been the soul of the world and his place within it. By choosing a simple “I’m good now” resolution, the film shies away from its own best, most complex, and most powerful idea.

Rules & Ruin

Beyond the grand themes of character and allegory, the film is hampered by a series of more mundane, though no less significant, structural flaws that prevent it from achieving true greatness.

Superman, as presented in this film and others, seems to operate under a more utilitarian framework: he will avoid killing, unless killing is the only way to prevent a greater loss of life. From a purely logical standpoint, this makes sense. But for a being of his unimaginable power, it is a terrifyingly unstable philosophy. When a man breaks his rule, the consequences are tragic. When a god decides his rule is flexible, the consequences are apocalyptic. Who gets to determine when the line can be crossed? Him? The very idea is a terrifying concentration of power and judgment in one being, accountable to no one.

This is why the Zod neck snap in Man of Steel was so viscerally wrong for so many people (like me). It wasn’t just the act; it was the casual, unexamined way a new, godlike hero resorted to it without narrative weight or consequence. This film repeats the error on a smaller scale with the quick, consequence-free murder of Bizarro. It’s treated as a moment of narrative house-cleaning rather than a soul-wrenching moral choice. For a hero defined by his compassion, taking any life should leave a permanent scar. The film seems to believe it’s just a tough day at the office, a fundamental misreading of the gravity of such an act.

Compounding these philosophical issues is the simple fact that the film is a structural mess. It suffers from a now-common disease in blockbuster filmmaking: the burden of being a universe-starter. The need to introduce a dozen characters, hint at future plotlines, and set up a multi-year franchise comes at the direct expense of telling a single, coherent, emotionally resonant story.

The opening is a baffling barrage of text and contextless action that feels more like a TV series “previously on” segment than the start of a major film. The pacing lurches violently between different tones and subplots. One moment we are in an earnest character drama, the next we are in a slapstick comedy sequence featuring a “hater monkey,” then we are in a large-scale action set piece. The humour, while often charming in isolation, can be tonally jarring, and some jokes, like Jimmy naming Eve “Mutant Toes,” are simply baffling. The editing feels frantic, as if the film is constantly terrified of boring its audience for even a single second. And some moments, like the blatant imitation of the Hulk-Loki smash from The Avengers, feel so creatively bankrupt they momentarily break the spell of the entire movie. It’s a film with a dozen great ideas that are all suffocating each other for screen time. It desperately needed a more ruthless editor and a more focused script that was content to tell one story well, rather than trying to tell ten stories at once.

Conclusion

I began this essay in the dark, in a critical and philosophical headspace shaped by a hero who embraces it as his natural element. I fully expected to end my analysis in the same place, with my preference for the shadows reaffirmed, my belief in the superiority of its grounded, psychological heroism intact. And in many ways, that remains true. The dark, rain-soaked streets of a morally complex Gotham will always feel more like home to me than the sun-drenched, idealistic spires of Metropolis.

But I cannot deny the profound and unexpected impact this film had on me. It is a messy, deeply flawed, and narratively frustrating movie. It fumbles its most interesting ideas and buckles under the weight of its own franchise ambitions. And yet, its central thesis — that in a world drowning in irony and cynicism, the most radical, courageous, and powerful act is one of sincere, unapologetic goodness — is presented so effectively through its main character that it transcends the film’s many failures.

I used to think Superman was an uninteresting character because he didn’t struggle in the ways I recognized. I was wrong. I was simply looking for the wrong kind of struggle. His fight is not a singular battle against the trauma of one bad night; it is a constant, lifelong war against despair. It is the soul-crushing burden of infinite power paired with the wisdom to know its limits. It is the profound vulnerability that comes from having a boundless love for a fragile, flawed, and often self-destructive species.

The film’s most beautiful idea, one it actually manages to execute perfectly, is that Superman’s ultimate strength is not his invulnerability, but his humanity, and that this humanity is forged and sustained through community. His affection for Lois and his connection to his adoptive parents are not weaknesses; they are the source of his power. They are his anchors to the world he has chosen to protect.

I will always believe the world needs a Batman. It needs a dark detective to hold a mirror up to its own corruption and to remind us that we are all fallible, all capable of succumbing to the darkness. But this film convinced me, for the first time, that the world also needs a Superman. Not just as a protector, but as a possibility. A Batman fan’s worldview is about finding that one flickering candle in an overwhelming darkness. Superman proposes that a person can choose to be that candle for others. It doesn’t replace the former worldview, but it makes it feel less lonely. It completes the picture. It suggests that heroism isn’t a single note, but a chord, made richer by the harmony of its different, even opposing, parts. And that is a revelation worth flying for.

Other Notes

• Lex Luthor was a triumph of PETTY hatred. Nicholas Hoult plays him not as a cold mastermind, but as a deeply insecure tech bro whose genius is constantly being sabotaged by his own ego. The meta-layer of Hoult almost being cast as Superman himself adds a delicious sting to his performance. You could feel his indignation in every line. Shouting “1A, 1A, 1A!!!” while remotely controlling Ultraman was peak pathetic villainy, and I loved it.

• The ensemble cast understood the assignment. Special shoutouts to Nathan Fillion’s perfectly obnoxious Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi, who finally got a deserved spotlight as Mr. Terrific after what they did to him in X-Men: First Class.

• When did Lois fall in love? The relationship felt rushed. Brosnahan and Corenswet have great chemistry, but the script leaps from a hesitant interview in his apartment to “I love you” with a crucial scene seemingly missing. The emotional payoff wasn’t earned.

• This movie embraces its comic book silliness. A farm bot armed with literal hater monkeys? It’s absurd and peak weirdness, and it was a welcome dose of levity in an otherwise overstuffed plot.

• A few key fumbles: The editing often felt like three different movies were fighting for control. Jonathan Kent seemed miscast and had little impact. And the clunky opening felt like starting a TV show on episode four.

• The film is liberal in its critique of a Lex-like figure sponsoring a proxy war, but it never questions the systems that give a billionaire a seat at the Pentagon in the first place. It critiques the bad actor but not the stage he performs on.

• The movie stands on business with its analogous critique of real-life occupations (mostly Gaza and Palestinians, a bit of Ukraine)

• The movie’s smartest theme might be its refutation of “cool.” In a world of posturing try-hards, Superman’s power is that he can’t help but be square and decent. He’s not trying to be cool; he’s just trying to be good. That earnestness is what ultimately makes him resonate. The Big Blue Boy Scout.