⚠️ Contains spoilers.
🧂 Superman (2025)
He's an illegal alien with a god complex for kindness, and half the planet still finds a way to be mad about it.
Directed by James Gunn. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2025.
🧂 Salt: 6 / 10. A script this busy juggling war metaphors, sitcom banter, and franchise real estate can't help tripping over its own subplots. and ⭐ Stars: 6 / 10. A genuinely fun, well-cast reset that still asks you to ignore how thin its central scheme is.
Superman didn't start a war. He just gave everyone already looking for a reason to hate him something to point at.
James Gunn's Superman skips the origin story entirely and drops you three years into Clark Kent's (David Corenswet) career, mid-controversy, after he unilaterally stops a war between Boravia and Jarhanpur and the world decides that a flying alien making unilateral foreign policy decisions is, understandably, a problem. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), meanwhile, has been sitting on a decrypted fragment of Superman's Kryptonian message from his parents, one that reads less like a lullaby and more like a colonization memo, and he's more than happy to leak it to turn public opinion into a mob. It's a Superman movie about the exhausting modern problem of narrative control: who gets to decide what an act of good actually means once it's been edited for the news cycle.
Corenswet plays sincerity like it's a superpower in its own right, and the film is smart enough to let him. There's no smirking, no ironic distance, no modern-superhero embarrassment about being hopeful in public. He plays Clark as a golden retriever with a god complex for decency, and the film commits hard enough to that idea that it mostly earns the corniness it's chasing, rather than undercutting it with a wink.
Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor is the best version of the character in years because his motivation is embarrassingly small. He's not plotting world domination for its own sake; he's a genius who can't stand that the most powerful being on Earth got there by being born, not earned, and every scheme is really just a tantrum with a PR budget. The reveal of his pocket-universe prison, where he tortures metahumans who've crossed him under the polite fiction of "containment," is the one moment the movie's comic tone drops entirely, and it's genuinely unsettling because Hoult never once plays Luthor as a cartoon.
Krypto is a chaos gremlin, and the film knows exactly how to use him. He shreds furniture, ignores commands, and drags an unconscious Superman around by the cape when the plot needs him rescued, and every one of those beats is funnier than it has any right to be. It's cheap, unapologetic comic relief, but it's also doing real thematic work: even the world's most powerful being needs somebody undisciplined and loyal enough to save him when strategy fails.
The Justice Gang, Mister Terrific, Hawkgirl, and Guy Gardner, are a genuine blast and also obviously a trailer for movies that don't exist yet. Edi Gathegi's Mister Terrific gets the most to do and steals every scene he's handed, dry and competent in a way the rest of the ensemble isn't given room to match. It's fun in the moment and a little cynical in retrospect, three interesting characters given just enough screen time to make you want the spinoff instead of finishing the thought here.
The Boravia-Jarhanpur war is the film's boldest idea and its most chickened-out execution. Gunn clearly wants to say something about real-world intervention, media narratives, and who gets to be the good guy in a border conflict, but the moment the metaphor gets close to specific, the film swerves back into generic action-movie shorthand. It raises a sharp question and then answers it with an invading army of pocket-universe monsters instead of an idea.
The verdict: a genuinely purehearted, well-cast relaunch that finally lets Superman be sincere without embarrassment, anchored by a career-making Corenswet performance and Hoult's pettiest, best Luthor. It stumbles whenever the plot needs to be clever instead of earnest, and the political allegory it keeps almost making never quite closes the deal.
So why only six shakers? Because a movie this eager to comment on manufactured outrage and foreign intervention shouldn't flinch the second its metaphor gets specific, and three good supporting heroes deserve more than glorified cameo time. Real structural gripes, not a dismissal of how much charm is actually on screen.
So did Gunn actually fix Superman's cool-guy problem? Mostly, yes, he just forgot to fix everyone standing around him first.
Pass the salt. 🧂
