Maybe it was just the fact that it wasn’t woke. Maybe I was just so ecstatic that the women, even the strong ones, weren’t so empowered that they had lightning bolts shooting out of their vaginas and the men so limp that they had overcooked linguini in their shorts, but I like a lot of this movie. Quite a lot.
It didn’t trash its predecessors for cheap promotional value. It didn’t take any cheap shots at Christopher Reeves, Margot Kidder, or Gene Hackman. Or George Reeves, for that matter. In fact, it did a lot to honor the original. The casting was spot on.
I thought the Engineer was as much a victim as anybody else and not just a girl boss. She had been forcefully infected, raped as it were, by Lex Luthor with nanobots called nanites and was under his control. She wasn’t exactly a strong woman in the likes of Lara Croft, Princess Leia, Princess Peach, Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, Scarlet O’Hara, Sarah Connor, any film with Sigourney Weaver, actress and co-inventor of the cell phone Hedy Lamarr-which puts her the equal of Marie Curie in accomplishments-or countless other women who were phenomenal without being assholes.
Seriously? Is the only way to have a woman look accomplished to make the men around her look like idiots in contrast? Do we have that little faith in a woman's prowess and worth all by herself? The Engineer was a woman of consequence and had a tragic back story since she was once a superhero and then came under the sway of Luthor.
She was intricate and complicated, in other words.
The fact that the movie just dropped into the story instead of getting a Marlon Brando-esque, origin sequence was a good choice. I wondered how Gunn would handle the back story in this movie. But everybody knows the Superman back story by now already. There’s nothing new to explore and no need to waste time on it.
Starting with a bloodied Superman on the snow is jarring. We see the consequences of a whole history contrary to everything we thought we knew about Superman and gradually found out why. Talk about a way to draw you into the story.
The foreshadowing was well done, I think. Eve, the ditzy Miss Teschmacher to Lex Luthor's evil genius, whose constant vapid selfies turned out to be the saving McGuffins of the show, was a good use of her character without her just being there for exposition. Jimmy Olsen being a macho man who tried to avoid Eve while using her as a source added some business for both characters. In the 1978 film they were just extras.
When Eve glommed onto Jimmy at the end he looked like the classic male who flirted with the cute girl and then got an insecure, clingy girlfriend in return and all he could say was, ‘Oh, shit.’ Then, just before the scene switched, he smiled. That was cute. And it worked.
Eve was hardly a girl boss, but her actions saved the day. Even Krypto’s slobbering affection was key to deactivating Luthor’s control over Ultraman and saving Superman.
Then there is Superman trying to save villains, such as Kaiju. He wants to rescue this monster and bring him to a zoo. That’s an odd choice for a superhero vs. a monster. Complex, actually.
But it pays off when we learn that Superman was sent to earth to enslave it, not to serve it. The ending is sappy-saccharine sweet, but it appeals to one’s sense of right and wrong in storytelling.
Superman is barely present for most of the daring-do done, whether destroying the pocket universe, mending the black hole rift, or stopping the war in Boravia. Superman was barely present. But the ending shows that the movie is not about any of that. It’s about Superman’s own journey.
The ending might be sappy and dopey, but in the post-modern, post-Christian, post-human, post-love, post-life, post-happiness, post-everything era, what’s wrong with that?
These little, and not so little, acts of foreshadowing make for a very satisfying movie. I like a movie where all the loose ends and frayed edges fold together into a seamless whole, a tapestry if you will.
Yes, there was a lot of snarky humor. James Gunn tends to slather it all over his films like too much barbeque sauce on corn flakes. But what the heck? It was a comic book movie that didn’t pretend to be anything else.
Yes, it was disjointed in places. The whole Justice League or whatever they finally called themselves kind of came out of nowhere, though I liked the characters and thought the banter between them was well balanced and, again, without any preferential treatment for protected woke classes.
I would have liked for the girl robot, Number 12, to have an epic girl boss fight with the Engineer at the ice palace scene. That could have been a great way to mock the whole girl boss thing.
Baby steps, I guess. Woke may be faltering but it is not yet available for wholesale mockery, it seems. And I was afraid the Engineer would show up some time before the last post credit bit and do something stupid and ruin the whole movie. Or there would be some sort of pitch for the next movie.
She was obviously set up for a return and her character is definitely worth exploring in more depth. Sometimes not showing something can be more enticing than showing something.
Instead, the show just ended with another snarky quip as if to say, “Well, life goes on.” I said to my son-in-law on our way out of the theater, “Less is more.”
Yes, I know. ‘Less is more’ for a James Gunn movie almost seems like an oxymoron. But it could have been worse.
I just have one question: Who was that chesty blond in the Daily Planet supposed to be? Just eye candy? She was prominently displayed, no pun intended, at the beginning and towards the end, with lines even. At first I thought she was going to be Lois Lane, but she did NOT look at ALL like what I imagine Lois should look like. Not that I’m complaining, but what was her point?
There seems to be a lot of controversy with this film. People seem to love it or hate it without middle ground. I’m surprised it didn’t do better at the box office, it pretty much bombed overseas though it was well received on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not Guardians of the Galaxy, but it was a satisfying flic.
Some carnivorous interviewers have tried to bate actors into saying something they could detonate into toxic sound bites. The movie is about immigrants. It’s about Gaza. It’s about Ukraine. It’s about the culture wars. It's pro-woke. It's anti-woke. It's bad. It's good. Good grief.
Arguably the original Superman was about the superiority of American Capitalism over Communism. Back then that was considered a good thing. Today, anything you believe in can and will be used against you.
Lighten up, people. It was a fun, refreshing movie that didn’t try to put on airs.
What more can you ask for?
