Hello all you happy people! I saw Superman last night and I thought I would share some thoughts with you this fine Sunday.
Spoilers abound, so read carefully!
First off, we finally have a comic book accurate Lex Luthor on the silver screen. And I don’t just mean he’s proper bald now. Gene Hackman’s take is funny, but he’s not Lex. And the less said about Jesse Eisenberg in any context the better.
Lex has had three major interpretations in comic books over the years. In the Golden Age, Lex was a straight-up arms dealer, selling weapons to every faction for a quick buck. In the Silver and Bronze Ages, Lex was a mad scientist, concocting ever more absurd inventions to defeat Superman. In the Iron Age, Lex had settled into his current model of corrupt businessman.
Lex as portrayed by Nicholas Hoult, is a combination of all three major interpretations. He’s an arms dealer, a mad scientist (cloning Superman, creating a pocket universe, creating the Engineer) and a deeply corrupt businessman.
Which does bring us to his creations: the Engineer and Ultraman. Both are under-served in the story. The Engineer gets it a little better, as she can actually talk, but she’s pretty much there for cool action scenes. Ultraman gets it much worse, as he doesn’t resemble any of his comic book inspirations beyond evil counterpart to Superman. He’s lacking Bizarro’s strange speech patterns, opposite way of thinking and weird appearance, but Ultraman is also lacking… well, everything from comic!Ultraman. He’s not from another universe, can’t talk, and is less evil than just a programmed attack dog.
David Corenswet is an excellent Superman and he has good chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan. Though the fact that Ms. Brosnahan is six months younger than me and Corenswet is almost four years younger than me is… weird. Very, very weird.
The fact that they got an actual Jewish guy to play Superman is great, too. I like the fact that Gunn and Corenswet went with the dorky, ‘aw, shucks’ interpretation too, of both Clark and Superman.
Rachel Brosnahan is excellent as Lois, and there’s just not really a lot to comment on there.
Wendell Pierce is perfectly cast as Perry White, which is why it’s such a shame he’s so underutilized here. That’s actually a recurring problem for this movie: it’s crowded. It’s really crowded and not everybody gets a chance to shine.
Hey, Jimmy’s a redhead again! Shame his arc is kind of creepy. Not a fan of what they did to Tessmacher.
I have some problems with the Boravian conflict. First off, it’s an obvious send up of the Russia-Ukraine War (along with possibly the Armenian-Azerbaijan Conflict), with a dictator who speaks in a heavy Eastern European accent, looks like a skinny version of Belarus’s dictator and has the offensively Eastern European name Vasil Ghurkos. A lot of Americans are taking this as commentary on Israel-Palestine (which reignited after the movie went into production) but that’s because Americans are both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic and just want to jerk off to dead brown people on screen.
Fucking Yankee bastards anyway. One of you assholes tried to firebomb my dad’s work last night because you are 340 million fascist loving, hyper jingoist, murderous cowards.
My problem with the Boravian conflict isn’t that it’s an obvious, ham-handed piss-take of Putin. The guy needs to be mocked all the way to his grave, dirty Nazi-lover anyway. No, the problem is why would the American government give a damn if Superman stepped in to stop Boravia? Superman is a deniable asset: he’s a private and extremely powerful citizen with no connection to the US government.
The American government, in the real world (and assuming Trump isn’t in control) would likely shake their fingers at him, deny they had anything to do with his actions and quietly smirk at Boravia behind their glasses of cheap bourbon. I can understand why American citizens would be pissed: Superman had just denied them one of their favourite forms of entertainment, watching brown people get murdered.
This gets to a core problem with Superman: the version of America he represents is not, in any way shape or form the America we have to deal with. The United States of America that exists in the real world is all too often is the America of Donald Trump: a cowardly, arrogant bully with strong fascist leanings that likes to beat up little countries to make themselves feel better.
In many ways, Lex is a truer representation of America than Superman ever could be. Granted, the US isn’t always pure evil, but the difference between Americans at the best (arrogant bullies with hearts that are sort of in the right place) and America-as-represented-by-Superman is… jarring. To say the least.
I still can’t get over the fact that the put the loser Green Lantern in the movie! I mean, Guy Gardner’s been a walking punch bag, both in comics and the real world, since at least the ’80s! And they gave him his terrible bowl cut too. It’s hilarious that they put Guy of all people in the movie but hey. Maybe it was to avoid comparisons with Green Lantern (2011)?
For fans of Hawkgirl from Justice League (Timmverse)… yeah, she’s kind of wasted here. Technically it’s a different Hawkgirl, but that doesn’t really make it better.
The falafel guy getting murdered to motivate Superman was bullshit. In character bullshit for Lex, but still bullshit. Really not helping with the accusation that Americans just like watching brown folk dying.
Speaking of bullshit, making Jor-El and Lara villains is not cool. It just isn’t. I don’t care what the justification is, it’s something I hope gets retconned in future films. Also, man, when it comes to Gunn’s Batman I really hope they don’t make Thomas and Martha Wayne bad guys.
In general, aside from Lois, this film kind of drops the ball when it comes to female characters. We’ve already discussed Hawkgirl and touched on Tessmacher briefly. I get that creepy ex-girlfriends exist, but one you only have one fully developed female character in the film it comes off kind of sexist. Ma Kent was okay, though I’m not entirely keen on the technologically blind elders angle they had for her. Phones have been around for a long time at this point, it’s a stretch to find anyone who doesn’t know how to use one. Especially in the frigging United States of America.
Aaaand then there’s Supergirl. Sigh. Look, Kara’s getting her own movie next year so we’ll have to see how this goes. But a drunken party girl isn’t Kara. I’m really, really freaking tired of people butchering Kara’s character ever since they killed her off in Crisis (I’m going to have a long rant about how Crisis was bullshit too, one of these days) and this is just the latest in a long line of butchery. I will grant you that this much better characterization than, say, that stupid stint with the Red Lanterns or whatever the hell was going on in Ezra Miller’s Flash but yeah. Still not a fan. We’ll see how this shakes out in a year.
Krypto was amazing. As a dog sitter, I’ve sat a lot of dogs like Krypto. At least I can send those kinds of dogs home and ask their parents not to come back; poor Superman is stuck with Krypto. Worse, as Krypto isn’t technically Superman’s dog, Superman can’t even train Krypto to be better!
Obviously, my sympathies are all with Clark. Nevertheless, watching Krypto kick ass was a lot of fun, especially when he humiliated Lex.
Mr. Terrific was pretty great in the film too. He’s a pretty deep cut, so I was surprised to see him here, but he made for a good stand-in plot-wise for Batman (Or Tony Stark if this were an Avengers movie) while still being his own character. Watching him talk shit about Lex and his mad science was great too.
