Superman review: 'Bursting with geeky weirdness'

The first in DC's new cinematic universe starring David Corenswet is "glib and flimsy". Comic fans will love it, but this curio feels like "an eccentric sci-fi B-movie".

Superman isn't just a new film, or even the first in a potential series of films. It's the launch of a whole new cinematic universe. The previous run of DC's superhero blockbusters came to an undignified end in 2023: the studio's four releases that year were Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom – and there was no coming back from those. DC's so-called "Extended Universe" was scrapped, which meant that Zack Snyder couldn't make any more apocalyptically miserable epics starring Henry Cavill as Superman and Ben Affleck as Batman. In his place, James Gunn, who directed the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Marvel, was given the job of overseeing DC's superheroes on the big and small screens, as well as writing and directing the first film in this rebooted franchise.

The pressure's on, you might think. Superman has saved the world countless times over the decades, but now he's got the fate of a universe on his shoulders. But if Gunn himself felt that pressure, there are no signs of it in the film he made. He hasn't laid the groundwork for DC's new universe with care and delicacy, and he hasn't taken pains to craft a Superman tale that will be embraced by the widest possible audience. Quite the opposite, in fact. Bursting with the geeky weirdness that defined Gunn's earlier DC film, The Suicide Squad, not to mention the low-budget horror comedies he made before he turned his attention to superheroes, Superman is a curio that he appears to have made for his own amusement. Whether it will amuse cinema-goers at large remains to be seen.

Gunn's most striking idea is to start his story not at the beginning, but somewhere around the middle, as if this were the third or fourth film in the series. When we first meet Superman, played by the suitably handsome and wholesome David Corenswet, he's already been protecting Metropolis from supervillains for three years. He's already dating his go-getting colleague at the Daily Planet newspaper, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and he's already loathed by a fanatical bald billionaire, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). What's more unusual for a Superman franchise-starter is that he's not the world's only superhuman – or "metahuman", to use the in-universe jargon. DC's other A-listers – Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, Aquaman – are apparently being saved for their own films, but Superman is helped and hindered by the ethically murky Justice Gang, consisting of the arrogant Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), the unflappably cool Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and the sullen Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced).

It's a fun approach. Most of us are familiar with Superman's origin story – born on the planet Krypton, raised on a farm in Kansas – so it's exhilarating to skip all that and get straight to the superheroics. It's fun, too, to see Gunn throwing in all of DC Comics' whackiest conceits. Snyder's Superman films were all about darkness and angst and Biblical symbolism, whereas this one features Krypto the fluffy white Superdog, and Superman's coterie of cape-wearing robotic assistants – whom he genuinely addresses as "Superman Robots".

There are dangers, though, in having a writer-director who is also one of the bosses of the studio, because Gunn's wacky take on Superman's mythos soon comes to feel exhaustingly self-indulgent. By the halfway point, we've seen clones and hypno-glasses, a pocket universe and a fire-breathing Godzilla lookalike, a militia called Planet Watch and a giant floating eyeball called a "dimensional imp". We've heard comments on social media misinformation, and we've heard debates about the geopolitical impact of metahumans. We've smiled at the most cartoonish stuff ever to be included in a Superman film, and we've grimaced at an upsetting cold-blooded murder. Rather than suggesting that Gunn was trying to launch a long-running series of superhero films, Superman suggests that he was afraid he would be fired after just one of them, so he was determined to cram it full of everything he could think of.

His nerdy ambition will make comic fans chuckle, as will his twisted sense of humour: it takes some gall to make a zillion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster that feels so much like an eccentric sci-fi B-movie. But Superman rushes through its outlandish concepts and whiplashing plot developments too quickly for them to have any impact. Skyscrapers collapse, monsters stomp through Metropolis, and people zip into different universes, but Gunn is in too much of a hurry to instil these momentous events with any of the wonder of 1978's Superman: The Movie – however often he drops in John Williams' classic fanfare – so none of them seems to matter. The video game-style visual effects add to the sense that nothing on screen has any consequences. The evocative tagline of Superman: The Movie was, "You'll believe a man can fly." Almost 50 years later, the tagline of the glib and flimsy Superman could be, "You won't believe any of it."

It's a shame that Gunn didn't give his story more time to breathe. It's a shame, in particular, that he didn't devote more time to showing us that Superman really is the paragon that his supporters keep saying he is. Corenswet is well cast – he has plenty of all-American charm both as Superman and as his mild-mannered alter ego, Clark Kent – but we have to take it on trust that he is a selfless gentleman who helps his friends and enjoys Lois Lane's company. We don't see any of that. Indeed, Corenswet plays him as an oddly hot-headed manchild who can't get through a conversation with his girlfriend without shouting angrily at her. Was Gunn racing through his material so fast that he forgot to put in the scenes that show Superman's sweeter and nobler side? Maybe so. In a film that whirls with flying dogs and bright green baby demons, the most bizarre element is a Man of Steel who keeps having meltdowns.

★★★☆☆

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