James Gunn’s Superman (2025) reboots the Man of Steel with heart, humor, and heroics in a bold, hopeful start for the new DC Universe.
Let’s get this out of the Fortress right away: Superman (2025) has no intention of deconstructing the archetypal cape. It’s here to iron it, press it crisply against your chest, and let it billow triumphantly over a world that barely believes in heroes anymore. James Gunn’s reboot of the world’s most iconic superhero is actually a little more than good, as it’s also a tiny bit radical in presenting kindness as subversion in an age where such obvious platitudes are cultural kryptonite. And that earnestness without apology? Well, that’s just truth, justice, and a whole bunch of other good stuff.
David Corenswet, jawline sculpted by either the gods or a casting director with impeccable taste, plays the titular Man of Steel with the rarest trait imaginable in modern superhero cinema: humility. His Clark Kent isn’t a disguise or a punchline for once. No, he’s just the sort of guy who eats lunch alone, types his articles with diligence, and doesn’t always know how to handle code switching. His Superman bleeds, literally and otherwise. He’s invulnerable, but also excessively vulnerable, and it makes you want to believe in him all the more.
The Superman we’ve been waiting for?
Gunn’s film, refreshingly, skips the Krypton kaboom and cuts straight to the metahuman mayhem. Metropolis is already buzzing with chaos when we arrive: civilians sip cocoa as giant laser-spewing monsters level buildings like it’s just another Tuesday. The origin story gets brought up, sure, but without the brooding montages and instead with some honest-to-Clark organic storytelling. We actually meet a Superman already on the job, early in his career and already adored and feared in equal measure, and as usual trying to save a world that’s suspicious of being saved.
The plot, though expansive, hangs on a familiar thread: xenophobia actively weaponized by an unhinged megalomaniac. But don’t worry this film isn’t “political” (it is). Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor is a tech billionaire with a Musk-ian aroma and the emotional maturity of a Reddit comment section, treating Superman less as an alien threat and more like a personal affront to the human race. How dare an immigrant with superpowers steal the love of the people Lex considers his intellectual subjects? Hoult plays Luthor with oily precision, a performance that veers dangerously close to reality. He doesn’t chew the scenery so much as he infects it with raw villainy.
Truth, justice, and complicated chemistry
The film’s emotional center, however, is the scorching banter and unspoken ache between Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane. She’s the spunky Pulitzer-winning journalist who’s somehow still believable as a human being and romantic foil to the god among men, which might be the most impressive feat in a movie that also features a flying dog with laser eyes. Brosnahan plays Lois with clipped precision as a newsroom veteran who’s been repeatedly disappointed by the world too many times to cry about it. When she challenges Superman—sorry, I mean when she straight up interrogates him, it’s absolute electricity, the thin line between love and hate and journalism.
Gunn’s signature balance of irony and sincerity is on full display here, carrying over in spades from his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and The Suicide Squad (2021). This is a film that has the audacity to include a Justice Gang (don’t call it the League) with an obnoxious bowl-cut Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), a terrifically stoic Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and an admittedly under-utilized Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), but also dares to ask how society would treat an all-powerful outsider who prevents war without asking permission. The answer, predictably, involves smear campaigns, viral fearmongering, and a Fox-like news network parroting Luthor’s manifesto of control-through-suspicion.
Heroes with a PR problem
Still, Superman never fully collapses under the weight of its commentary. Gunn is too seasoned for that. The action is often garish, but also glorious, as punches shatter both windows and egos. The sky-duels evoke F-22 fighter jets rather than pixel soup, even when you can indeed see the pixels.
The final act may dabble in cosmic nonsense and pocket universe mumbo jumbo, but Gunn always keeps us tethered to the emotional stakes and through-line to the risky geopolitics of real life, particularly its transparent commentary on the Israeli genocide of Gaza. But even without all the physical mayhem, merely a conversation between Clark and Lois in a ransacked newsroom holds more tension than most third-act beam battles in these comic book pictures.
Action with actual stakes
Oh, and then there’s Krypto. Yes, the dog. A white blur with heat vision and the attention span of a puppy on espresso, he’s Superman’s scene-stealing companion and the film’s purest expression of both chaos and love. The film opens with Superman at his lowest—bloodied, bruised, and broken in a snowy wasteland—and naturally it’s Krypto who drags him home, rescuing the rescuer.
This cheeky opening sets the tone for a different kind of Superman film, one that embraces its cartoonish origins, underpants on the outside and all. But also a film unafraid of some edge and prickly personalities. On the one hand, it’s easy to complain that maybe this is Gunn relying a little too heavily on his signature touches, such as action-scene needle drops and the ever-present motif of wise-cracking loner-losers learning to love each other. On the other hand, that level of humor and heart and sprawling lore matches the Superman vibe as far back as the comics go, making this take feel both fresh and familiar all at once.
For all its blissfully shaggy storytelling, what really sets Superman apart isn’t the visual effects (passable) or performances (uniformly strong) or even the score (swelling, nostalgic, never saccharine). It’s the film’s unshakable belief that goodness is worth the risk. That saving people matters even when they don’t want to be saved. That truth and justice don’t have to be dated slogans, but rather a blueprint. Gunn’s Superman winks at the audience sure, but at least it’s also looking us right in the eye.
The bottom line
There will be debates, of course, about how far the film goes with its subject matter. Some will find the film too sentimental. Others will call its politics unsubtle. A few will long for the “realism” of brooding antiheroes who spend more time explaining their trauma than preventing train wrecks. But Gunn clearly doesn’t have a taste for cynicism in his comic-book worlds, no. He’s all about hope, and in 2025, hope is practically punk rock.
And I for one have had enough of these superhero movies trying so hard to please everyone and to avoid offending every corner of every theater, resulting in bland, wishy-washy products with nothing meaningful to say except “give us money again.” Bring on the age of superhero movies with an actual point of view, a personality even, a polarizing premise. In that respect, Superman (2025) could even save the genre while it’s at it.
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