| Worth seeing: | for Rachel Brosnahan's feisty Lois Lane and a handful of spectacular CGI action scenes but not for the James Gunn Metropolis, in which Superman is a cancelled loser who needs his dog and his girlfriend to save him from a charmless Lex Luthor |
| Director: | James Gunn |
| Featuring: | David Corenswet, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Brosnahan, Alan Tudyk, Angela Sarafyan, Anthony Carrigan, Bradley Cooper, Edi Gathegi, Frank Grillo, Grace Chan, Isabela Merced, María Gabriela de Faría, Michael Rooker, Natasha Halevi, Nathan Fillion, Neva Howell, Pom Klementieff, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Skyler Gisondo, Terence Rosemore, Wendell Pierce, Will Reeve |
| Length: | 129 minutes |
| Certificate: | 12A |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 11th July 2025 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Everybody’s favourite metahuman, Superman (David Corenswet) has just lost his first fight, after three years of saving mankind from one peril or another. His foe – a mysterious, masked supervillain named the Hammer of Boravia – appears to have something to do with the state of the same name that Superman recently stopped attacking its neighbour, Jarhanpur.
His superdog, Krypto, manages to drag him back to the safety of his lair, deep beneath the Arctic wastelands, where his android assistants nurse him back to full strength.
Superman’s nemesis, the billionaire entrepreneur Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), has managed to persuade much of the public that rather than being a hero, Superman is – in fact – a busy-body, getting involved in international politics for his own nefarious reasons.
Even his own girlfriend, the hot-shot reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), is beginning to doubt his motives.
When Lex Luthor releases a recording of Superman’s alien birth parents – apparently giving him instructions on how to carry out their mission on Earth – he finally becomes a pariah and the US government contracts Luthor’s company to detain him and hold him prisoner in a – ahem – pocket universe, somewhere between his dastardly HQ and the US military base he uses to access it.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Lois teams up with another group of heroes, led by the Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) to try to infiltrate the pocket universe, save Superman and ensure that Luthor gets his comeuppance.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
There have been so many previous iterations of Superman – most notably Christopher Reeve in the 1970s and 80s, Brandon Routh in 2006 and Henry Cavill in the most recent big-screen blockbusters of the 2010s – that you have to wonder why such an established fan favourite keeps needing reboot after reboot. Cavill made a cameo in Black Adam in 2022 and later even confirmed his return, but when James Gunn took charge of the new DC Universe, he replaced him, saying he wanted to run with a younger version of the character.
“It begins,” is the slogan on the poster – but what begins? By the time we meet David Corenswet’s Superman, he’s already been on active superhero duty for three years – he’s already in a relationship with Lois Lane – who already knows that he is the secret alter ego of her Daily Planet colleague, Clark Kent. It’s long since already begun. Given that James Gunn specifically wanted to portray the younger Superman, he seems to have missed opportunities to explore the early years – discovering his powers, struggling to keep his true identity secret, finding love – but all such scope for developing the character is frittered away in a few title cards at the start.
Instead, we launch straight into a complex story, where his nemesis, Nicholas Hoult’s rather bitter and weedy Lex Luthor, is trying to undermine his reputation, using his intervention to stop a war as catnip for the social media world. When he breaks into Superman’s icy lair and finds the message from his birth parents, it just gives Luthor even more ammunition. Cue a personal crisis that sends him back to Ma and Pa Kent – the couple who brought him up and remind him how proud they are of him.
Throw in a quick-growing monster to destroy the city, a dose of kryptonite to weaken him, a pocket universe which causes the planet’s surface to tear, a superhero gang that almost has more screen time than our hero and an enemy so powerful that Superman doesn’t even seem that super after all – and you have a narrative mess that presents a string of visually impressive action sequences, but without little purpose – with very little in terms of his own super powers on display.
There is a moment, of course, when a building is about to collapse and we get a close up on a woman we have never seen before in a car – so we all know what will happen next. But Superman himself is rarely called on to rescue anyone else; no-one close to him is put in peril – in fact, it’s Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane – with the feisty attitude of Christopher Reeves sidekick, Margot Kidder – who is called upon to rescue him. While Brosnahan has welcome echoes of her 1970s predecessor, Nicholas Hoult is a one-dimensional villain with none of the disarming charm of Gene Hackman.
The idea of a world turning on its superheroes was done with more panache in Pixar’s animated hit The Incredibles, but here, Lex Luthor doesn’t seem to mind the other heroes who step in to help out, so they can carry on unopposed.
For people of a certain generation – the parents or even grandparents of the target audience of younger children – hearing the refrain from the classic John Williams theme at the start will lull you into a false sense of security, but rather than revisiting the most powerful and most pure of all super heroes, as he saves the world from evil, we see a bit of a loser, who keeps getting beaten, is cancelled by a fickle public after getting involved in international politics and needs to be rescued by his dog and his own girlfriend; there’s none of the “You’ve got me, who’s got you?” banter – only what is apparently meant to be a grown-up discussion about politics and expectations. This introspective story – nudged forwards by his reconnecting with his adoptive parents – would perhaps be an appropriate tale, some way into the franchise – but this is not the Superman I signed up for to reboot one of the most endearing and enduring super hero franchises.
For younger audiences – without expectations or memories of the Christopher Reeve iteration – there is much to enjoy, but it could have done with more Superman, less Green Lantern and more super heroics, rather than CGI cities collapsing for no coherent reason. But with very little humour from the Man of Steel himself, Green Lantern and his super-pals at least provide some lighter moments.