As Babylon Five’s Draal said to Delenn after Londo’s rant
about the Hokey-Pokey, “I rather liked the song.”
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?
