This popped up on the one of the sites I use for TV so I gave it a watch. The trailer made it look incredibly overstuffed and while that very much played out (the Justice Gang did approximately nothing of value, with the main contributor being Mr Terrific opening a portal and providing Lois with a ship), the core characters and 'story', as far as there was one, were somehow far, far worse.
To begin with, there's no first act at all: if the film doesn't want to do the full origin story, that's fine, but we still need to get to know this version of Superman, what he's like and establishing what he's capable of at his best to contextualise his struggles once the story properly begins. Instead, a few expository paragraphs are written on-screen (with an odd and meaningless repetition of the number '3') where we're told he's just lost his first fight and we see him crash to Earth bloodied and bruised, followed by a comedy bit with a CGI dog, before he flies away and gets beaten up again. That's this Superman's introduction: being bad at what we're supposed to admire him for, interjected with some schtick with a dog and some robots.
Unfortunately, that's a pretty accurate representation of who this Superman is, as he's repeatedly shown to make bad decisions, able to lose all public support in a second, be self-doubting for no reason (he tosses out the "I'm not who I thought I was" line at one point, de facto replaying the conclusion of the Timeless Child arc from Doctor Who's lowest point where the hero's lesson is that the source of all the agonising self-evidently doesn't matter in the slightest) and generally bad at what he does. The most egregious point is when he ignores a monster attacking the city because he's having a conversation with Lois (he handwaves away that the Justice Gang can handle it), which seems to me the antithesis of who Superman is (always wanting to save people and do good) both in this film and in general. He's willing to get involved in a foreign war because he doesn't want to people to die, but is happy to let an alien creature repeatedly fire lasers into his city because he doesn't want to break up a chat with his girlfriend?
Lois herself gets one good scene, when she interviews Superman and holds him to proper journalistic scrutiny: at that point in the film, Clark reacting petulantly to being pushed back on makes sense as someone who hasn't been a public superhero for long, and might have been an angle to explore had he not already been shown to be useless in general. Again, had he been given a proper introduction where we seem him being effective at his heroic purpose, it would at least have established someone who usually does a lot of good but whose positive intentions led him into a moral blindspot, not someone for whom this was just the latest in a succession of failures and terrible decisions.
Unfortunately, outside that scene, Lois goes downhill as well: later, when she should be focused on a rescue mission, she starts blabbing about her relationship problems, and then for some reason doesn't know the difference between a circle and a sphere. Small things perhaps, but it's her character being diminished for the sake of jokes, an ongoing issue with the film undermining itself repeatedly to shoehorn in laborious, unfunny gags (see also: everything with Krypto, including a less funny, less coherent rehash of a beloved moment from the first Avengers film). Even the bulk of the journalistic work is done by Jimmy, weirdly characterised as being irresistible to women, yet even his profession integrity gets undermined when a female source offers him everything he needs on the condition he spend the weekend with her: rather than say whatever she wants to hear just to get her evidence, he starts hesitating and moaning because he finds her annoying (she sends everything anyway, mid-kidnap, because it would be awfully inconvenient if she hadn't).
Nicolas Hoult as Lex doesn't work either: apart from the fact he spends virtually the entire film in the same control room at LuthorCorp tower, he's an unthreatening whiner whose scheme/the plot of the film is so badly told as to be relayed to the audience in its entirety in a single monologue towards the end. I'm a lifelong Bond fan so have no issues with a hammy villain speech, but in Bond films, you typically have a rough idea of what is going on and what Bond's mission is by that point, even if we need the villain to tie up the loose ends with an explanation at the beginning of the third act so we can see how Bond foils it all. This, however, is not only flat exposition by a one-note villain, but has to tell you literally the entire plot right at the end of the film, when everything has effectively already been resolved. The whole film is a mess of discordant events and subplots with not a hint of a discernable throughline, so the monologue's purpose is not to fill in blanks, so we know exactly what the hero has to fight against, but more like the writers remembered at the last second that they had to somehow link all the shit they'd been throwing at the wall and give Luthor a semblance of motivation. Just as the first act and a proper introduction to the protagonist were thrown away in favour of on-screen text, this is a film which repeatedly tells you everything about its story and shows almost nothing: its only interest is action, so the stuff which should be contextualising that action and setting the stakes both narratively and for the characters is either reduced to exposition, repeatedly undercut by bad jokes or simply a desire to move on as quickly as possible.
I'm not going to pretend I'm a fan of Gunn's, whose work has always seemed completely superficial to me, suggesting themes and character work without doing the work to make anything meaningful of them. This however is a nadir, all plot and no story, a succession of half-baked, barely related events half-heartedly tied up at the very end and stranding its actors in roles where what little characterisation they're given is thrown away or inverted at the first opportunity for a joke or to squeeze in some action. It alludes to real-life conflicts in the shallowest, most distasteful way possible: one side only wants to murder everyone on the other and take their land. Even Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for all its evil, isn't just motivated by mindless bloodthirst, and best not get into some of the anti-semitism it skirts with in alluding to Israel and Palestine. Once you get past the more colourful palette - heightened in that unreal CGI way which leaves most modern blockbusters in the uncanny valley even when ostensibly shooting real life - the differences from Snyder's films is far shorter than the publicity department would like you to imagine. The mass destruction of Metropolis remains, as does Superman killing someone, albeit by throwing him into a black hole rather than a neck break, though at least Snyder's Superman was shown to be pained about it. A fight with a kaiju pays lipservice to Superman wanting to save rather than kill it, but it gets killed anyway and only ends up establishing that nobody really cares about what Superman thinks. Even the music underwhelms, heavily leaning on lesser remixes of the classic Superman theme alongside original tracks either too on-the-nose or utterly generic.
I am admittedly coming to this from the perspective of someone who has never read a Superman comic, and the bulk of my knowledge of the character is from the films and wider pop cultural depictions. That said, Gunn wanting his film to be more like the comics does not excuse fundamentally bad (verging on absent) storytelling, inconsistent characterisation repeatedly undermined by out-of-place and narratively incoherent attempts at humour, swathes of characters who take up a lot of screentime for no purpose, a camera which won't stop swirling around and a soundtrack which sounds like a placeholder. If you enjoyed this, then all power to you: I freely admit to probably not being the target audience. That said, I found nothing of value in it at all, a movie which tries to con its viewers into thinking 'more' is the same as 'fun' when it's really just another badly-made, badly-written, overbudgeted mess to throw on the pile.
To begin with, there's no first act at all: if the film doesn't want to do the full origin story, that's fine, but we still need to get to know this version of Superman, what he's like and establishing what he's capable of at his best to contextualise his struggles once the story properly begins. Instead, a few expository paragraphs are written on-screen (with an odd and meaningless repetition of the number '3') where we're told he's just lost his first fight and we see him crash to Earth bloodied and bruised, followed by a comedy bit with a CGI dog, before he flies away and gets beaten up again. That's this Superman's introduction: being bad at what we're supposed to admire him for, interjected with some schtick with a dog and some robots.
Unfortunately, that's a pretty accurate representation of who this Superman is, as he's repeatedly shown to make bad decisions, able to lose all public support in a second, be self-doubting for no reason (he tosses out the "I'm not who I thought I was" line at one point, de facto replaying the conclusion of the Timeless Child arc from Doctor Who's lowest point where the hero's lesson is that the source of all the agonising self-evidently doesn't matter in the slightest) and generally bad at what he does. The most egregious point is when he ignores a monster attacking the city because he's having a conversation with Lois (he handwaves away that the Justice Gang can handle it), which seems to me the antithesis of who Superman is (always wanting to save people and do good) both in this film and in general. He's willing to get involved in a foreign war because he doesn't want to people to die, but is happy to let an alien creature repeatedly fire lasers into his city because he doesn't want to break up a chat with his girlfriend?
Lois herself gets one good scene, when she interviews Superman and holds him to proper journalistic scrutiny: at that point in the film, Clark reacting petulantly to being pushed back on makes sense as someone who hasn't been a public superhero for long, and might have been an angle to explore had he not already been shown to be useless in general. Again, had he been given a proper introduction where we seem him being effective at his heroic purpose, it would at least have established someone who usually does a lot of good but whose positive intentions led him into a moral blindspot, not someone for whom this was just the latest in a succession of failures and terrible decisions.
Unfortunately, outside that scene, Lois goes downhill as well: later, when she should be focused on a rescue mission, she starts blabbing about her relationship problems, and then for some reason doesn't know the difference between a circle and a sphere. Small things perhaps, but it's her character being diminished for the sake of jokes, an ongoing issue with the film undermining itself repeatedly to shoehorn in laborious, unfunny gags (see also: everything with Krypto, including a less funny, less coherent rehash of a beloved moment from the first Avengers film). Even the bulk of the journalistic work is done by Jimmy, weirdly characterised as being irresistible to women, yet even his profession integrity gets undermined when a female source offers him everything he needs on the condition he spend the weekend with her: rather than say whatever she wants to hear just to get her evidence, he starts hesitating and moaning because he finds her annoying (she sends everything anyway, mid-kidnap, because it would be awfully inconvenient if she hadn't).
Nicolas Hoult as Lex doesn't work either: apart from the fact he spends virtually the entire film in the same control room at LuthorCorp tower, he's an unthreatening whiner whose scheme/the plot of the film is so badly told as to be relayed to the audience in its entirety in a single monologue towards the end. I'm a lifelong Bond fan so have no issues with a hammy villain speech, but in Bond films, you typically have a rough idea of what is going on and what Bond's mission is by that point, even if we need the villain to tie up the loose ends with an explanation at the beginning of the third act so we can see how Bond foils it all. This, however, is not only flat exposition by a one-note villain, but has to tell you literally the entire plot right at the end of the film, when everything has effectively already been resolved. The whole film is a mess of discordant events and subplots with not a hint of a discernable throughline, so the monologue's purpose is not to fill in blanks, so we know exactly what the hero has to fight against, but more like the writers remembered at the last second that they had to somehow link all the shit they'd been throwing at the wall and give Luthor a semblance of motivation. Just as the first act and a proper introduction to the protagonist were thrown away in favour of on-screen text, this is a film which repeatedly tells you everything about its story and shows almost nothing: its only interest is action, so the stuff which should be contextualising that action and setting the stakes both narratively and for the characters is either reduced to exposition, repeatedly undercut by bad jokes or simply a desire to move on as quickly as possible.
I'm not going to pretend I'm a fan of Gunn's, whose work has always seemed completely superficial to me, suggesting themes and character work without doing the work to make anything meaningful of them. This however is a nadir, all plot and no story, a succession of half-baked, barely related events half-heartedly tied up at the very end and stranding its actors in roles where what little characterisation they're given is thrown away or inverted at the first opportunity for a joke or to squeeze in some action. It alludes to real-life conflicts in the shallowest, most distasteful way possible: one side only wants to murder everyone on the other and take their land. Even Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for all its evil, isn't just motivated by mindless bloodthirst, and best not get into some of the anti-semitism it skirts with in alluding to Israel and Palestine. Once you get past the more colourful palette - heightened in that unreal CGI way which leaves most modern blockbusters in the uncanny valley even when ostensibly shooting real life - the differences from Snyder's films is far shorter than the publicity department would like you to imagine. The mass destruction of Metropolis remains, as does Superman killing someone, albeit by throwing him into a black hole rather than a neck break, though at least Snyder's Superman was shown to be pained about it. A fight with a kaiju pays lipservice to Superman wanting to save rather than kill it, but it gets killed anyway and only ends up establishing that nobody really cares about what Superman thinks. Even the music underwhelms, heavily leaning on lesser remixes of the classic Superman theme alongside original tracks either too on-the-nose or utterly generic.
I am admittedly coming to this from the perspective of someone who has never read a Superman comic, and the bulk of my knowledge of the character is from the films and wider pop cultural depictions. That said, Gunn wanting his film to be more like the comics does not excuse fundamentally bad (verging on absent) storytelling, inconsistent characterisation repeatedly undermined by out-of-place and narratively incoherent attempts at humour, swathes of characters who take up a lot of screentime for no purpose, a camera which won't stop swirling around and a soundtrack which sounds like a placeholder. If you enjoyed this, then all power to you: I freely admit to probably not being the target audience. That said, I found nothing of value in it at all, a movie which tries to con its viewers into thinking 'more' is the same as 'fun' when it's really just another badly-made, badly-written, overbudgeted mess to throw on the pile.
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