Superman is Fine (Though Not What I Requested)

Andrew Anglin July 16, 2025

I wrote a post a few months back saying that a really positive and pro-America Superman film could be a good thing for American culture. I said it could happen as a part of the “Trump Effect.” A lot of people were saying that no, I was stupid, it was going to be woke as all heck.

Well, the film has been released.

Statistically, most of you didn’t see it, and probably are not really very excited to. It didn’t perform poorly over the weekend, but it certainly was not a blockbuster, and not what Warner Brothers was looking for. That said, after the weekend box office (which was below projections with the film on the path to break even), WB head David Zaslav said this new DC Comics “universe” of films will go ahead and he was happy with the box office.

For some reason, before the release of the film, director James Gunn decided to attack his own film release by announcing that Superman is “an immigrant story.” This caused many people to believe the film was woke, and refuse again to pay $15 for a moral lecture.

If this film was actually woke, it still wouldn’t have made sense for him to say that, but it really isn’t woke. The wokest thing about the film is that they cast a Mexican who looks like a literal satanic ape as the Engineer.

In principle, I am not even against having a Mexican and a black. These big blockbuster CGI fest children’s films are intended for wide audiences and I think there might be some data-backed truth to the fact that people from these races will be more likely to see a film if they feel they are “represented.” (Although the thicc Mexican bitch who played Hawkgirl seems like enough Latina representation?) This was the original idea of having a black character in films. In old slasher films, blacks actually loved the trope that “the black guy always gets killed first” (maybe they related to it, I don’t know, but they certainly always went to see these films and cheered when the black died first). I don’t expect these films to be full-Nazi, or whatever. So a bit of diversity in the casting, if it’s not an overload, isn’t “woke,” as this has always been a thing. I do think it is woke to pick a bitch with that face.

But everything else was fine. The black guy was fine. Literally the only political thing in the film at all was a surprisingly heavy-handed Palestine analogy with the Boravia plot line. The Jews are freaking out about that. I guess woke people do support Palestine, but Israel is so despised by the right, that doesn’t really count. And though Gunn made it way obvious what he was talking about, it wasn’t a huge part of the story. Though getting the actor who looks the most like David Ben-Gurion to play the leader of the racist oppression nation was funny.

That was sort of anti-woke, antisemitic casting, frankly. It made up for the Engineer being purposefully ugly.

So, I don’t know why Gunn decided to sabotage the film this way. It’s a head-scratcher. He can’t possibly have imagined that making the film seem “woke” before the release would be good for it. Maybe it was just an offhanded comment he made, possibly while drunk and on pills. I am sure Gunn’s personal politics are left, but he also seems like he would be willing to do a film that slightly signals to MAGA if it would secure him more money. Also, Zaslav, you’d think, would go along with doing some jingoistic Americanism in the film in the name of getting Americans to sign up and die for wars for his homeland. (Though he sort of did the opposite of that, actually, by allowing Gunn to put the Palestine thing in there, but this sort of indicates he just doesn’t care at all.)

They asked poor Nathan Fillion about the “immigrant” thing, and he said “c’mon, guys. It’s just a movie.” This is exactly what it is: it’s just a movie. (Unless you’re a Jew who doesn’t think anyone should be able to say genociding Arabs is wrong, in which case it is like another Holocaust all over again.)

If you would have thrown in some dogwhistles, shown some more American flags (I was excited by the one in the trailer), and had someone say “truth, justice, and the American Way,” the film could have been a blockbuster despite its mediocre quality.

And that is how I would rate the quality: it is mediocre.

Most of the critiques of the film are right. People are posting that clip of Trey Parker explaining if your story is just a bunch of “and then this happens” scenes strung together, it’s not a good story. That is factually true. That being said, it’s difficult for me, as a “science of literature” expert, to see how you could have shoved that many characters into the film and then stuck to any sort of meaningful storytelling format. Yes, there are good novels with a lot of characters, but these novels would make 10- and 20-hour movies (as was done with the Game of Thrones books). To shove as many characters as were in Superman into a movie and not just have it be a series of events would probably be impossible. The literature on the structure of stories is clear that the characters and plot are inseparable. No one has ever said “I liked the plot, I just didn’t like the characters,” though with Superman, you could say the opposite thing. I did like most of the characters. Superman was my favorite character, however, and he ends up getting pushed out of his own movie by a barrage of different characters, some of whom might be interesting in their own right, but there just isn’t enough time in a film’s runtime to find out.

I think this was the only mandate from Zaslav: you have to include a bunch of different characters we can use for our “universe.” Very stupid thinking. But I don’t think this means James Gunn is a bad writer. Unless it was his idea to have this many characters, which I doubt, then you can’t blame him for not being able to formulate a properly flowing cause-and-effect plot around this directive. It could only really be a series of strung together “oh here’s this person who has this thing going on, that’s fun, right?” scenes.

Frank Grillo as Rick Flag, Fillion as Guy Gardner, and others to various extents, were potentially interesting characters. The film simply didn’t have room for all of them.

In terms of watching the film as a comic book fan, there was nothing offensive. Well, there is one very offensive thing that I expected to get revealed as a Lex Luthor scheme by the end, but it never was, and that was really more confusing than offensive, because I just assumed that it would be revealed it was a hoax. (And maybe it will be later on in the series, check the spoiler at the bottom of this page. I guess I liked Superman enough to think some people will want to go and watch it and have fun and not have it spoiled, so I’ll keep it down there for the majority who do not care.)

Along with liking the characters, I liked the general tone, which drew on Silver Age themes that Gunn has said he came across through Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman. It’s a very silly and comic-booky tone, which you have to have if you are doing literally any DC comics heroes other than literal Batman. (Yes, if you “nerd out,” there are other DC heroes you can do dark and “realist” takes on, but it works with none of the main Justice League characters. If you want to “nerd out” right this very moment, go look at the current “dark” line of DC comics, the “Absolute” series, and tell me why Absolute Batman is awesome and the others are unbearable.)

DC should have looked at Disney’s success with Marvel’s “universe” and said they were going to go in the opposite direction, and be more comic booky and silly-fun than Marvel. Instead, they let Zack Snyder make all of those nightmarish films and lost I think multiple billions of dollars. I’m sure part of the pitch from Gunn was exactly this: “let’s go in the other direction and just have fun,” and to a not totally insignificant extent, Superman succeeds with this.

It’s almost like there is just a lot of bad market research going on here. Like, as if a bunch of marketing research people are literal criminal fraudsters. Along with the silliness of Gunn saying that immigrant thing before the release of the film, the film was also sabotaged by the trailers, which made Superman look weak and whiny. Releasing the scene with Clark and Lois arguing was really dumb, as in context, you don’t really think much about that. Clark/Superman as a character is totally fine and I liked almost everything about the portrayal. Even the suit that everyone complained about before release looks great.

But yeah, not a great film, not a film I would really recommend anyone watch, and definitely not the “Trump Effect” pro-America film I was hoping for. I don’t know, maybe Warner has marketing research geniuses who did the math and realized the Trump Effect would be mostly gone by mid-July. My original thinking was that if they could have gotten Trump to endorse it as “a great pro-America film,” it would have been a big deal, and I still think it would have been a better strategy, but it wouldn’t carry the weight it would have in April. Faster than I ever could have imagined, the MAGA Spring has given birth to a “Wait, What Did He Just Say? What the Hell is Going on Here?” Summer.

But hey, I don’t want to talk about that in this article, man. I don’t really want to talk about that at all anymore, dude. I just want to do “woke or not?” pop culture reviews, bro.

Just relax.

None of it even matters anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Lois breaks up with Clark when he’s getting attacked by the media then decides she’s in love with him after the media decides he’s good. Literally, there is nothing else driving her relationship decisions other than Superman’s social status. The sort of garbled non-plot might make it not obvious, but if you watch it, you can literally see she does not have any interactions with Superman between giving him a cold “now you’re in the friend zone” hug and jumping all over him telling him she loves him. No interactions. Her decision was completely based on media reports of the man’s social status.

I think what probably happened was that in the frenzy of reshoots and recuts, trying to turn this garbled mess of mostly disconnected things into a coherent whole, they didn’t realize they got a bit too real with how women actually think about men. It could also have been on purpose. Either way, it was very funny to me. And literally true.

When Mel Gibson got condemned as evil by the media for saying those things about the Jews, when he was literally at the lowest point in his life, his wife of many decades with whom he had seven children decided to do the brave thing and file for divorce. I guarantee if there ever comes a day when the media decides “it turns out Mel is the good guy after all,” that ex-wife is going to start calling him and talking “oh, I was just thinking about you, we had so many good times together and a part of me misses it.”

Women are utterly ridiculous, actually buffoonish in nature, and I always love when that is pointed out.

Spoiler Thing:

The thing I expected to be a Lex plot was the video that Superman’s birth parents sent him from Krypton, where they told him to conquer Earth and have a harem of women to produce the maximum number of children with Kryptonian blood to rule as his heirs. That is very offensive if it is an in-universe thing that’s real. The thing is, Supergirl is in this universe, and if she’s Kara, which I assume she is, she was also sent to Earth to escape Krypton’s destruction, and if you were planning on conquering a planet, and you specified how to do so by using the “Spanish dudes in Mexico” method, you would not send a female with a vagina and would instead send two males with penises.

They could say that Kara was sent to be Superman’s pureblooded Kryptonian wife to create a royal line to lead the half-breed earthlings (which was the only reason Spain ever sent women to Mexico), but in this case, they wouldn’t have sent his first cousin, which Kara is, and I’m pretty sure it says “cousin” in the film.

Anyway, it never crossed my mind that this was anything other than another Lex trick, so it didn’t bother me until I’d finished the film and realized it was never resolved. Anyway, if this does turn into a successful “universe,” which seems unlikely because I just don’t think this “blockbuster film that has to make a billion dollars to be profitable” model was ever sustainable (but who knows), they will just retcon that even if it was originally intended by Gunn to be canon. Because no one likes this “Superman’s parents were evil” thing. Superman has been around nearly 100 years, they’ve done every possible storyline with him, including various versions of “evil Superman,” but the only case I know of where Superman was sent to earth to set up a one-man breeding farm and conquer the planet is in Invincible, which is not a Superman book, even whilst Omega Man is obviously a Superman parody. The Invincible cartoon is really popular now (not for no reason, I’d argue), so maybe someone thought it was a good idea to weave that in? That doesn’t make any sense, but nothing about it makes sense. Even on a basic level of the story itself, a people whose planet is being destroyed and who can only send one child to another planet (later two, with Kara) would not be thinking “we command you to conquer this planet in our name.” The reason it works in Invincible is that Omega Man lies about being the last of his race and he’s actually a representative of an alien empire that is planning to conquer Earth.

Although I am on the “it’s definitely mostly nature” side of the nature vs. nurture debate, I am also sympathetic to “you’re not required to be like your parents” stories, which can be real human stories. But this is not the place for that, James Gunn. Literally no one wants “Superman was supposed to be evil but he overcame it,” except in Invincible, where it is a completely different thing and “Superman” actually does do a bunch of evil things before reflecting on whether or not he wants to be like his parents.

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