I took my daughter with me to see the new Superman film on Thursday night.  I go back with Superman movies to the original 1978 Christopher Reeve film.  I was 13 when that came out and it was right up my alley.  Everything – and I mean the other three Reeve films too – gets compared back to that first 1978 film.  That to me *IS* Superman.  

Everything that came after that – the Brandon Routh version in 2006, the animated stuff in the 2000’s, the Henry Cavill version in 2013 which made appearances in other things for the next 10 years or so, Lois & Clark in the 90’s, Smallville in the 2000’s, Tyler Hoechlin’s version in the CW Arrowverse (which just ended in 2024)..  I’ve enjoyed several of these – especially Routh & Hoechlin.  But *ALL* of them took a back seat to Chris Reeve’s 1978 original, which remains a masterpiece – launched ALL the Superhero stuff that came afterwards.

So when it was announced we were getting another Superman film in 2025, I was like “OK” – I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic.  Plus the DC films have had a deservedly negative reaction in the last decade or so.  I don’t dislike the Superman character at all.  Superman’s not my favorite DC one – that’s probably Batman.  But Superman is something I’ve always liked too.  I wasn’t *NOT* going to see this.  Plus it’s being done by James Gunn whose work in the MCU I quite liked (and his take on DC’s Suicide Squad was fun).  I wasn’t sure what to expect, and in the leadup to the movie over the last couple of weeks I’ve read a lot of good things, so I was hopeful.

I drug my daughter along to this, because I wanted to see it with her – we’ve seen all the MCU films in theatres since she was old enough to go, and I kind of wanted to have her see this too.  She told me before we saw the movie that she was going somewhat as an obligation because Dad wanted to go.  I like seeing these kinds of films with my kid.  But she wasn’t expecting anything.  I’ve seen enough movies with her to know from her body language how’s she’s enjoying it.  I could tell she was liking it.  What I wasn’t expecting was what she said afterwards.  She LOVED it.  In fact, in the debrief with my wife when we got home, my daughter said that she was expecting it to be “ok”, but when it was over it shot directly into her Top 10 films of all time.  Something I was DEFINITELY not expecting from her.

Thing is, I felt equally as positive.  The 78 Superman film will always be #1 for me for sentimental reasons, but the 2025 film was outstanding.  One thing I quite liked is they didn’t do the entire Superman origin story we’ve seen a ton of times.  His arrival on earth and upbringing by human parents is there, but presented to the audience differently than taking the first half an hour setting it all up visually like has been done before.  I liked that.  It had humor, it had action, and I thought the chemistry between David Corenswet & Rachel Brosnahan worked really well as Superman & Lois Lane.  There’s also a dog in the trailers, and usually animal/comedic sidekicks tend to make things painful – as do most kid characters in films.  But this worked.  Even my daughter said the same thing on her own.  The dog was not an impediment.  It worked.

There’s also the issue of Lex Luthor.  The portrayal of Luthor has been all over the place in various incarnations.  Sometimes he’d be bad, sometimes he’d be a bit friendlier (not quite cuddly, but not a shithead).  This even goes all the way back to the Gene Hackman version in Superman 78 – while I recognized him as a the bad guy he didn’t play it super evil, really.  That changed here.  Nicholas Hoult’s take on Lex Luthor is played as a complete bastard.  I’m probably forgetting someone here, but I don’t know if Luthor has been portrayed as quite this much of a bastard before.  My favorite Lex from before was probably Jon Cryer’s version in the Arrowverse (Supergirl, the Flash, etc).  But even he was all over the place in his allegiances.  Hoult’s Lex I think is done QUITE well, and might be my favorite Lex of all of them – including the 78 version.  

I’ve seen a few reviews saying the film was a disjointed mess, and I don’t understand that – I had no problems following the plot.  It of course had a bunch of comic book goofiness – it *IS* a movie based on a comic book character, so that’s part of it.  You know that walking in, so I don’t understand the complaints on this one.  It seemed pretty straightforward to me.  I loved all the bits that were mixed in – the Kent farm, the Fortress of Solitude, Superman’s Kryptonian parents as an inspiration – all the usual things you’d expect in a Superman film are here, just not presented in the way you’d expect – and that’s down to James Gunn, I think.

I won’t ruin anything, but there’s a few staples on here – Gotham City gets a name check somewhere, there’s a reference to Big Belly Burger, and even the coffee shop Jitters is in here (and gets destroyed as it always does).   There’s also a lot of James Gunn style humor injected in here, and again I won’t give anything away but there were several moments that generated out loud laughter from the audience – and well timed too, working as a mood breaker.

There were a bunch of other Easter eggs and cameos, but nothing that takes you out of the film.  Except for one, and I admit it’s ME – not the film.  One of the workers at the Daily Planet was played by comedic actor Beck Bennett who I know from Saturday Night Live.  He’s a minor character, only a handful of lines, but whenever he was on screen, I was taken out of it a bit thinking of his SNL characters.  Now I FULLY admit this is my problem.  The film didn’t do anything wrong, but he’s someone I associate hard with SNL.  But that was the only thing.

A couple of the plot points were telegraphed WAY in advance – like the part that always happens when Luthor gets Superman down and out..  The way out seemed screamingly obvious to me, but it was OK, as the path to get there was well done.  There’s one thing presented in the first scenes with Lex that makes you go “Oh, this is gonna pay off later”, and it did – but definitely NOT in the way I was expecting it to, so that was good.  There’s quite a lot of sequences that can’t be shot properly and are obviously CGI, but they don’t LOOK CGI.  My only quibbles with the film are minor and as I said one of them was just me (Bennett), nothing the film did wrong. .

I also absolutely adored they kept John Williams’ 1978 Superman theme here.  It wasn’t copied directly or the main theme song, but it was used throughout the film during relevant musical cues.  That Williams score was SO well done it almost defines Superman as much as the blue suit and red cape with the giant “S” do.  That it was here was a major plus in my ind.

It is the first Superman ANYTHING since 1978 where I didn’t feel Christopher Reeve’s ghost looking over it going “Yeah, no, mine was better”.  That was a major accomplishment to me.