James Gunn’s Superman is a curious film: so earnest, so heartfelt, and so defiantly weird it sometimes feels less like a reboot of the world’s most iconic superhero and more like an elaborate fan project. Most of us will be relieved we’ve said goodbye to the heavy metal space Jesus of the Zack Snyder years, and that Gunn has avoided paying too much retro cosplay tribute to the Christopher Reeve era. This is undeniably a Superman we’ve never seen before on the big screen: a Kal-El who’s deeply human, flawed, and more likable for it.
The new Man of Steel, played with boyish charm and the right amount of golden retriever energy by David Corenswet, spends most of the movie juggling black holes, battling clone siblings, and dealing with the looming realisation that his space dad might have been one bad day away from full-blown genocide. And yet there’s always the sneaking suspicion he would break off from all this in a second if you asked him to fix your router and play Enya until your existential dread subsides.
