James Gunn Rescues Superman

David Corenswet in 2025’s Superman. Jessica Miglio/Warner Bros. Pictures

It took me a long time to understand the mythology of Superman, no matter how often Quentin Tarantino tried to teach it to me. I think part of the problem was that filmmakers had focused too hard on one specific aspect of it. The Christopher Reeve films didn’t take the mythology seriously enough. Zack Snyder took it too seriously. The 2006 Superman Returns had so many Christ parallels. (I don’t remember why. It was 2006.)

Who do you hire to unite all the separate and opposing faces of a hero with nearly a century of legacy, who has served as a symbol for both the labor movement and the American military, whose popularity has been in doubt since the total implosion of the original DCEU? My top picks are all wildcards a major studio would never go for, but I would get to James Gunn faster than you’d think. His Guardians of the Galaxy movies are beloved for a reason. The Suicide Squad betrayed a sameness in his formula, but it was a fun two hours I would never complain about. I thought Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, his last film with That Other Studio before he got hired to reverse-engineer a Kevin Feige for DC, was the best thing he’s made so far and a well-above average example of the genre. I’ve secretly had this film on my wildcard list for a while.

Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

I’m very pleased to report that despite one abysmal character choice and a couple of the most chaotic CGI action sequences I’ve ever seen, James Gunn’s team did it. They made the best Superman. They delivered a film that somehow balances all of Superman’s faces—as an immigrant, as a midwestern American, as a moral idealist, and as the most powerful man in the world. Gunn establishes Superman/Clark Kent (David Corenswet) in his Depression and Civil Rights–era incarnation, as both the spirit and conscience of lower-class immigrant America, pitted against tech bro Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who, no surprise, is willing to cause wanton death and destruction to achieve his single-minded goals. It’s not a subtle allegory. Hoult’s Mark Zuckerberg stare isn’t subtle either.

At the heart of the movie lies Clark’s relationship with Lois (Rachel Brosnahan). She’s a pragmatist. He’s an idealist. She’s a reporter. He’s power incarnate. They debate these differences in close bodily proximity, being enormously charismatic and hot and likable. Their “third week” dating shenanigans are bookended by extended action sequences that are occasionally choreographed to peppy indie tracks from the mid-2000s. I am a sucker for these. So are you, probably. James Gunn knows this.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

If that all sounds a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy to you, you’re not wrong. The aesthetics are more sophisticated, which makes the comedy more pronounced. While the overall aesthetic is largely coherent, Gunn will occasionally put a deeply weird science fiction element in the background of an immaculately composed bit of Americana imagery, like a teenager defacing a Norman Rockwell painting. (Note in this scenario that Gunn is both the teenager and Norman Rockwell.)

Not every big swing works. The CGI-laden climax, for one, feels like the team bit off more than they could chew. I can see the logic behind it, as it’s entirely unlike anything I’ve seen in a Superman movie before, but it’s actually very familiar for anyone who has seen an Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy or Dr. Strange or Spider-Verse film. In this moment, it feels less like the movie is reimagining Superman and more like it’s trying to make Superman more like every other popular thing.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

But most of the big moments still work quite well. The film gave me chills more than probably any movie in the genre since Into the Spider-Verse. It draws power from taking its optimistic daydream seriously, and you can be cynical about that if you like. I get it. But there are a lot of filmmakers trying and failing to evoke the same feelings in other films in the genre. One reason Gunn succeeds is how successfully he navigates both the silliness and sincerity, contextualizes the big emotional moments so they feel earned. That’s his gift, and from that perspective, Superman might be his masterpiece. It wins you over one moment at a time, through unexpected jokes, through a clever edit that frames the next scene perfectly, through extraordinary feats of craft.

Nobody has ever put forth such a coherent idea for Superman’s aesthetic on screen. Even during the film’s dumbest gags, the mise en scene is gorgeous, working bright blues and whites and classic lines into an otherwise modern American Metropolis. The script is equally impressive as a Wrath of Khan/Blade II/Iron Man 3 sort of reevaluation of a familiar genre. Those movies all somewhat reinvented their mythos, the kinds of stories their franchise could tell, the lore and conflict and visual aesthetic audiences expected. Superman makes that same shift away from the stodgy choreography that previous filmmakers felt obligated to include, like the extended flashback of Krypton’s collapse. Fans will get most of what they care about—they just might not get it in the order or form they might expect. And in that difference between expectation and delivery, Gunn makes some of his most interesting points.

Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, Isabela Marced as Hawkgirl, and Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Film genres have always needed to evolve with their audience. Superman stops well short of being a full-on evolution for the genre, but it finds opportunities that none of its predecessors came anywhere near. I’m not exactly psyched for the concept of another collected universe, but I would see more movies as good as this one.