REVIEW: Superman

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.

The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.

And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.

I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who really built him into a pillar of goodness. That is why even when he steps into the thick of the human messiness, such as you would find in a place like a human city, and encounters such paragons of villainy of evil overlord, Lex Luthor, his unwavering goodness elevates him into a templar of decency and altruism against all odds.

James Gunn's new installment certainly uses all that as a starting point, but it introduces one crucial wrinkle into the Superman narrative. The film finds the world uncovering a vital piece of Superman's backstory, leading Clark Kent to question who he really is in a world that is wrestling to define him. As his story approaches several critical junctures, Superman will have to put his ideals to the test and figure out whether the world really has a place for the kind of goodness he knows how to give.

This film's economy runs on both wide-scale global set pieces and intimate character moments, and these progress hand in hand. Without ever feeling anything like an origin story, each bit of this relay race juxtaposes Clark against the people who have formed him.

This being that kind of movie, there are all sorts of high-octane action bits. The movie's visuals prove the scale of the conflict less by furnishing the battlefield with computer-generated explosions and more by adding in a great deal more vibrancy than you'd expect in an earth-bound action pic, giving the film the feel of an adult coloring-book.

But the plot also rests on the outcomes of much smaller players on the board: dogs, street vendors, literal babies, and this is where the story really finds its muscle. This superhero's circle is not insular, the film commits to the superhero thesis of fighting for those who can't fight for themselves in a way few other superhero movies have. By the time judgment day is on for Superman, we know where we stand because we have seen firsthand who he serves.

David Corenswet's instinct seems to be to look for the least decorated reading of any given line. Eschewing unnecessary pretense helps this Clark feel unguarded and without ulterior agenda: we feel like we know who Clark is because he is completely willing to show us.

Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane has substantial presence in the narrative--without ever insisting too hard that she's not a damsel in distress, guys!--and Brosnahan effortlessly carries a character who is at once empirical unto sterility and also deeply principled.

Again, I'm not partial to the Superman story. But after he helmed the most important superhero saga put to film, I will admit I am partial to James Gunn and anything he wants to do with the superhero world.

We can perhaps speculate on exactly how large Gunn's fledgling superhero team will grow in the years to come. However that plays out, the narrative will bear out that the modern DC film canon started out just like Clark Kent: an agent of the ordinary, and an advocate for the vulnerable.

--The Professor

Comments

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century With the development of the inter...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: ONWARD

The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to gui...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone. But the movie has a system error t...

My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues. My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend. I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought. Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to ...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog