9 ComicsXF writers talk about James Gunn’s Superman, and whether Krypto is a good boy

Three hundred years ago, metahumans emerged on Earth, ushering in a new age of gods and monsters. Three years ago, a hero named Superman emerged as the most powerful metahuman to date. Three minutes ago, Superman lost for the first time.

With that opening crawl, a new era of DC films begins with Superman, starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult, and written and directed by James Gunn. Now that the entire ComicsXF team has had a chance to see it, we’re sitting down to talk about it.

WARNING: WE WILL BE TALKING SPOILERS. THIS IS YOUR FIRST AND ONLY WARNING.

Tony Thornley: Welcome, all! After months of hype, it’s nice to finally have Superman here. I got to see it this past week on IMAX, and I really enjoyed it, though I have quibbles. What did you think?

Adam Reck: James Gunn’s assignment was really an impossible one: follow the dour Snyder era with an upbeat story that toed the line between Silver Age goofiness and contemporary sensibilities, all while setting up a brand new shared universe/movie franchise. The fact that he pulled it off is pretty impressive. 

Dan Grote: Not a perfect meal, but a stuffed burrito with enough sugar in it (burritos have sugar, right?) to keep you engaged throughout. After years of bleak DC movies and same-y Marvel movies, this felt familiar and refreshing at the same time. It’ll probably pair well with Fantastic Four in a couple weeks.

Armaan Babu: I had fun — no, I had a blast! At this point in my life, that’s all I want from a superhero movie, and anything else is a bonus. This movie won’t be the most iconic portrayal of Superman we’ve had, but it gets the character right in a way that is so heartening, and there are a number of bonuses atop that that I’m looking forward to talking about.

Austin Gorton: To say this is at least the third — if not the second, and — possibly — the first — best Superman movie says more about the relative poor quality of Superman films than it does about the quality of this one. That said, I genuinely enjoyed this. Like nearly everyone else on the internet apparently, I feel the need to caveat that with a declaration of quibbles, but all in all, Gunn stuck the landing.

Anna Peppard: As someone who is generally underwhelmed by superhero movies (comics are just better, sorry/not sorry), and doesn’t always jive with the James Gunn experience, I expected to think this movie was fine but forgettable, but I ended up surprisingly moved by several scenes, even tearing up a little at the parts where you’re supposed to tear up. Like the rest of us, I have quibbles. But I was honestly shocked this movie was this good. 

Rasmus Skov Lykke: I’m entirely with Armaan here. I had a total blast with the movie, spellbound from the opening scene, for two reasons.

First of all, I loathe trailers. I find that they simply ruin movies, showing us all the great moments months in advance, so that when we go and see the film, we’re, consciously or not, just waiting for those moments to happen. We’re not scared what might happen to our heroes, because we’ve seen them punch a yeti in a trailer and that hasn’t happened yet, so we know everything will work out at least until the yeti punch. So I usually avoid them like the plague.

But when the Superman teaser dropped, I had a weak moment and watched it, knowing the cost it would have on my eventual enjoyment of the film. So I was thrilled that Superman opens with that moment with Krypto in the snow. And then the second reason is how it turned that on its head, with Krypto just being a really badly behaved dog, refusing to obey the simplest commands. Hilarious. And then the movie just didn’t let up from there. I loved it.

Latonya “Penn” Pennington: As a casual Superman fan with no prior experience with Superman movies other than the first Christopher Reeve film, I appreciated that this film was newcomer-friendly. I was especially impressed with Edi Gathegi’s performance as Mr. Terrific; he was an unexpected delight. I was also happy that this role redeemed Gathegi as an actor, after his infamous role as Darwin in Marvel’s X-Men: First Class.

The good, the bad and the busy

Tony: So here’s what I liked.

I heard over and over that the story felt like a comic book brought to life. And I think that was true in the sense of how it was a distinct story with individual parts (issues), A-plots and B-plots, a strong supporting cast and the prerequisite three minutes (pages) of punching every issue. The last comic book movie that captured that vibe was The Batman, but I think this was generally a lot more successful at it.

Rasmus: I couldn’t agree more. From the start, where, aside from the crawl, it felt like we had just picked up a random issue of Superman, not entirely sure what had happened in the last couple of issues, but the writer is talented enough to bring us up to speed quickly, it just flowed, with the various parts of the film feeling exactly like issues of a story arc. It really felt like a comic in movie form.

Austin: I am generally more a fan of the MCU than most around these parts, but one of the things that consistently bothers me about so many of them is that they so often tend to present a big turning point in the narrative of the title character, rather than “just” an adventure in the life of the character. So we see the Avengers form, then reorganize into another roster, then break up, then come back together. We never see the same roster start and end a film having done some stuff and fought the bad guys in the middle. 

All of which is to say, this movie felt like the kind of thing I’ve wanted in an MCU movie: a “day in the life” adventure. It still has stakes, but not status quo-altering stakes. It’s not introducing Superman, it’s not killing him or transforming him. It’s just chronicling one of his battles with Lex Luthor alongside a crisis of identity. 

Adam: I had issues with how bloated the movie felt. There were sequences I thought could have easily been written out to streamline the story and keep the pace of the plot going. That said, the detours it took were still largely interesting, especially in giving such a central role to Mr. Terrific, a character I’m betting most audiences will not have heard of before. And this speaks to the success of the movie that despite needing to keep up with The Daily Planet, LuthorCorp, the Justice Gang, a pocket universe and the Fortress of Solitude, Gunn still mainly holds it together and it doesn’t just become a jumble of confusion. 

Tony: And you know, I thought similarly, but the word I had in my head was BUSY. There was SO much going on all the time. Was it great to finally see Jimmy Olsen — one of the best supporting characters in comics — get an actual plotline in a Superman movie? Yes. Was it cool to see Guy Gardner, Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific on screen? Yes. But was it all too much? Probably in some places, and definitely in others.

Penn: Tony and Adam, I definitely agree with you both. It did feel bloated and busy as far as the secondary characters went. I didn’t particularly care for anyone else at The Daily Planet besides Lois and Jimmy, and yet there were characters besides them vying for my attention in addition to the main cast.

Dan: There are definitely cuts I’d make. Did we need Supergirl as Kal-El’s party-girl cousin to show up at the end? No. And of the “Justice Gang,” Hawkgirl really doesn’t get enough to do until she drops the president of Boravia toward the end. And while it’s nice to see Beck Bennett, there wasn’t enough time to develop the workplace-sitcom ensemble of The Daily Planet, though they clearly wanted to. Seriously, why were Steve Lombard, Cat Grant and Ron Troupe in the T-Car during that one scene besides nerds would know who they are? Ron didn’t even get a line! (That said, if they did spin out a Daily Planet TV show from this, I would watch that show.)

Adam: Oh that’s who that was? I couldn’t figure out why he was even in that scene.

Austin: The Supergirl scene DEFINITELY felt like a post-credits scene  tacked onto the movie itself (the Supergirl part of it, at least — the bit with his home movies was more connected to the arc of the film), which is odd since they still had post-credit scenes. 

Armaan: I feel like this movie had the best kind of problem — it had so many characters I wanted to see more of. It’s a hell of a way to start a rebooted DC Universe — forgo playing catch-up with a slow build, and show us a vibrant, complicated world we want to explore. I want to see more of the Justice Gang, and learn their stories. I want hours of Ma and Pa Kent. I want to see a whole series of the Daily Planet crew tackling big, impossible DC Universe stories. 

Rasmus: I felt exactly the same way. And it goes back to this film feeling like a comic book. When we all started reading comics, we didn’t know who half these people were. Sure, we might have heard about Aunt May and J. Jonah Jameson, but who the hell was Robbie Robertson? There’s a HOBgoblin too?! Wait, why is the Human Torch hanging out with Spider-Man?

But even if we might’ve been confused at first, we stuck with it and eventually we learned these things. And even if we didn’t know them at first, they made us believe that this was a real, fully fledged world, with people who had lives that were going on way before we turned up. And this is the same function that a lot of these characters have. I actually think that it’s because we’re nerds that we think about these characters. We know it’s Steve Lombard, Cat Grant and so on. For the rest of the moviegoing audience, it’s just Lois and Jimmy’s co-workers. I don’t think they register as important to them, and therefore they don’t add to the bloat.

As for the Justice Gang (such a delightfully awful name), I found it refreshing to have superheroes that were truly just supporting players. They weren’t being set up for their own franchise, they were just a part of the same world as Superman. Co-workers, like Jimmy and the rest. It felt honest and real. And like Armaan said, it made me want to actually spend more time with the characters.

That cast, tho

Tony: And that all goes to what I think was the high point of the movie — the casting.

The leads were all fantastic. Corenswet is the best Superman since Reeve, and with time and an opportunity to develop his performance and the character, I think he’ll rival that. But next movie, let’s tone down the New 52-ness of his costume.

Brosnahan is now easily my favorite live-action Lois to date, maybe my favorite Lois period. She captured her intelligence and feisty nature perfectly, and her moments of self-sabotage were SO good. 

And Hoult, holy shit, we might have an all-time great performance for Lex Luthor — especially the ego- and hatred-driven supergenius version of All-Star Superman.

Austin: I am that odd nerd that respects Superman ’78 more than I love it, and while Reeve remains pitch-perfect, I have never understood the appeal of Kidder and Hackman in that movie. Both Brosnahan and Hoult are outstanding. 

Armaan: Brosnahan was the best Lois Lane we could have asked for. That scene with her and Clark discussing journalistic ethics, bringing up some very valid concerns about Superman’s place in the world, and the glimpses we see into their relationship throughout that conversation — if that scene had been the entire movie I still would have loved it. She also finds her place perfectly in this world — she can’t fight, but she juggles being Clark’s girlfriend and a journalist by getting heroes to help save him in addition to gathering the information she needs to take Lex down. It’s great!

Anna: As a girl who once very badly wanted to be Teri Hatcher’s Lois Lane, she’ll always be the Lois of my heart. But Brosnahan absolutely nailed it, while unquestionably getting far, far better material to work with than Hatcher ever did. Seeing her actually get to articulate and practice her journalistic ethics, and push back at Clark when he disrespected them, was very gratifying. She’s got a perspective and flaws and heroic purpose, and I bought into the romance between her and Clark exactly as quickly as the movie needed me to. 

Adam: Where the movie soars is in its absolute spot-on casting and characterizations of these core iconic characters. Brosnahan is Lois Lane, Corenswet doesn’t get much Clark time, but sells both personas. Heck, even Jimmy Olsen, a character I believe was shot off-screen in Batman v. Superman, is performed with perfect pluck by Skyler Gisondo. Hoult immediately embodies Luthor. Everyone feels made for these roles. 

Tony: Jimmy was shot ON-screen in what Zack Snyder called … sigh … a fun Easter egg.

But holy cow, yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say next. Every role was so perfectly cast. Gisondo and Edi Gathegi (Mr. Terrific) were standouts, but I also really loved Sara Sampaio (Eve Teschmacher), Anthony Carrigan (Metamorpho) and Alan Tudyk (Robot #4/Gary).

Tudyk in particular just did great work with such a small role. How does that guy have the market cornered on humanizing inhuman things? K-2SO, Harry on Resident Alien, No. 4 — he’s so good at it. While I get casting a pretty face for Mike Flanagan’s Clayface movie, I’m a little bummed Tudyk isn’t playing him, too.

Dan: It’s why he’s legally obligated to voice a character in every Disney animated movie!

Austin: Shout out to Philly’s #1 son Bradley Cooper as everyone’s favorite space jerk dad!

Armaan: Hoult’s Lex is perfect for this movie. It’s not my favorite portrayal of Lex — I like him as a calm, measured villain, unflappable until he’s pushed to the brink — but this version is angry. Petty, to a near-superhuman degree. The movie made a choice and then delivered on it. He’s not just trying to invade nations and slaughter innocents, he’s torturing a dog! He’s making interns pick up pencils. He throws a pencil at a girlfriend he’s impatient with (Clancy Brown would never), and the way my blood boiled at that means that the movie accomplished exactly what it set out to do with that character, and they made it work for this film.

Anna: I was a bit surprised that they went all in on Lex hating Superman specifically because of racism (as in, he hates him because he’s an alien polluting the gene pool and whatnot). In my headcanon, I think about Lex as a guy who would absolutely use racism to his advantage, using it to manipulate a gullible public, while not necessarily buying into it on a personal level. But it’s a valid choice that’s canon-defensible and speaks to the moment. You needed Lex to be this guy to make the themes work. 

Dan: I’ll assume everyone else has Corenswet/Brosnahan/Hoult/Gathegi covered and shout out Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince as Ma and Pa Kent. I didn’t get got when Yondu died in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I didn’t get got when the otter cyborg voiced by Linda Cardellini calls Rocket to the afterlife in Guardians Vol. 3. But when Pa Kent tells Clark, “Parents aren’t for tellin’ their children who they’re supposed to be. We are here to give y’all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own,” my face went full waterfall. You got me, James Gunn, you fucking jerk. You finally got me.

Austin: That scene got me too, Dan, and so did the punctuation mark at the end where Clark is watching home movies. (Did I also wonder WHO was filming the home movies featuring Clark and both parents? Yes. I contain multitudes.)

That said, one of my quibbles with the film was the presentation of Clark’s parents outside that scene with his dad. Like, I get it; they’re comically old and Midwestern. But maybe tone it down a notch or two? Make the gag that Ma struggles with FaceTime (like my mom), not the concept of phones in general, for example. Also, I’m pretty sure TVs are ubiquitous enough even in the Midwest in 2025 that no one calls them “the box.” His parents are down-to-earth and pastoral, not simple-minded nitwits. 

Dan: Also, props on a lesser scale to Michael Ian Black’s smarmy newscaster, who I assumed was Jack Ryder but IMDb informs me is Cleavis Thornwaite. I always love seeing people from The State in things.

Oh, and I gasped out loud at the Peacemaker cameo. Season 2 coming soon!

Adam: Dan, I knew you’d get a kick out of seeing Michael Ian Black. Every time he popped on screen I was giggling.

Armaan: I am surprised by how well Nathan Fillion embodies Guy Gardner. It’s uncanny, it’s like Guy stepped right off the comics page. He’s clueless, he’s a jerk, but you can see that if you get to know him enough, he’s exactly the person you want getting you out of a corner when things are tough.

Tony: Also, I did not expect a Superman movie to make me a fan of Mr. Terrific. The LuthorCorp base fight, the pocket universe search, his entrance in the LuthorCorp control room — all of it was so fun.

Adam: It’s wild how much of a central role he has. For an X-Men fan like me, this is great revenge for the completely nonsensical way Gathegi’s Darwin was killed off in X-Men: First Class years ago. 

Mark Turetsky: Mr. Terrific was definitely a strong highlight of the movie for me, too. I can’t say I remember much about X-Men: First Class, but I’ve been loving Gathegi’s work on For All Mankind, and he does stellar work in this movie. When he said he doesn’t need help because he’s goddamn Mr. Terrific, I stood up and cheered. Flash entering the Speed Force can’t hold a candle to Gathegi’s cocky charisma.

Penn: Mark, that scene was my favorite Mr. Terrific scene as well. I went “Let’s fucking go!” in my head when I saw that part, and if I could’ve yelled it without disturbing other moviegoers, I would’ve!

Armaan: He’s a standout character, and let’s not overlook how much his charismatic performance made even the sciency exposition seem fun. His frustration with Lex’s pocket universe said so much about Lex, raised the stakes for the protomatter river scene and further illustrated what kind of scientist Terrific is, all in a few lines. It’s great work.

Anna: Some of the emotional impact of the movie faded pretty quickly for me after I watched it, but it’s the Mr. Terrific scenes I keep thinking about. He’s one of those DC characters who shows up in comics and I’m like, “Hey, this guy seems awesome, where can I see more of him being awesome?” and then it turns out he doesn’t appear as often as you’d think, which seems weird because he’s clearly awesome. Here, he got to be awesome. He was so well-visualized and acted, and really captured Gunn’s affinity for the stranger corners of the DC Universe, which can be so wonderful when done right. Mr. Terrific was like a comic book come to life in the absolute best way, where he just shows up and has this crazy deal but you completely buy into it because it’s presented so genuinely. He had some very funny lines without ever being a punchline, and was movingly heroic amid moments of almost slapstick chaos.

The aforementioned quibbles

Tony: Now, I have three issues. The first is what we mentioned above — it’s SO busy. There are so many plotlines, characters, everything, that it just made the whole thing messy at points. I really hope any sequel that comes out of it shifts focus purely to Superman and his core supporting cast.

Austin: Superman largely disappears from the middle act of the movie — which isn’t a problem limited to this movie and happens whenever the inevitable “incapacitated by Kryptonite” scene drops, but is still a problem in a movie called, Superman.

Armaan: I actually want to talk about the CW Arrowverse shows for a bit, because this movie recreated a lot of what made those shows work. (It also parallels a lot of what made Superman & Lois such a fantastic portrayal of those characters, but that’s a whole article’s worth of examination on its own).

 By and large, it’s better written than the CW shows tended to be, yes, but that feeling of a complex world where everyone has their own lives outside of this one story is one of my favorite things about a shared comics universe. This movie felt like a crossover from Season 4 of some fictional Justice Gang show, Season 2 of The Daily Planet while also introducing us to Superman as his own lead for the first time, and like the Arrowverse crossovers, it felt like a celebration of a world that is, above all else, absurd and fun.

Tony: I like that comparison a lot, Armaan. It’s very accurate.

Second issue: The in medias res opening made me feel like I missed 30 minutes of the movie for at least the first half. It was really disconcerting (though I couldn’t imagine adding another 30 minutes, and this was probably the time to cut it out).

Mark: See, I kind of enjoyed meeting up with Superman after he’s just gotten his ass kicked. It establishes so much right off the bat: This is a world that’s used to Superman, that’s used to having multiple superpowered figures around, and this is just a Tuesday in Metropolis.

Dan: We’re definitely using the fact that by this point everyone has seen a superhero movie to push past the origin stuff, to do the “Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple” page from All-Star Superman, as it were. The scene where we watch the Justice Gang fight that Starro-looking thing while Kal-El mopes in a hotel room is another good example of that.

Armaan: Yeah, I like that this world feels lived in already. We’ve had so many superhero origin movies. Taking the time to see more origins just drags down what could be really fun stories. Imagine if, instead of Mr. Terrific being around, we had the more conventional handful of scenes showing Michael Holt’s origins teeing him up for the next movie, or an appearance somewhere else he may or may not have gotten. Get right to the action (comics) of it all, I say.

Austin: Sorry, y’all, I have to disagree. What this movie was missing was 40 minutes of Russell Crowe riding a flying space dinosaur on Krypton, because we all know that’s the most interesting thing about Superman (I kid, my favorite thing about this movie is that it punted all the origin stuff entirely). 

Tony: I can’t disagree with Mark. I actually like the “he’s not invincible” part of the opening. It was just disorienting for a few minutes to have missed something like that fight. 

And last of all, it drove me nuts that they didn’t call the pocket universe the Phantom Zone. Even just off-handedly as an Easter egg. The Superman mythos already had this sort of area. Why did they not call it that?

Armaan: I actually enjoyed that plot point. It’s not the Phantom Zone, the realm discovered by meticulous Kryptonian scientists that houses their Kryptonian prisoners. It’s a shoddy, reckless temporary pocket universe Lex created out of pure spite and greed that was always going to collapse in on itself.

Anna: For some reason, I kept expecting the pocket universe to introduce some Fourth World shenanigans, but I agree with Armaan: The nature of the pocket universe as they described it here works very well with the Lex story.

Adam: This was such a James Gunn movie, and his marks are all over this. We had animals overstaying their welcome, critiques about social media, even an attempt to make Lois and Superman “punk” that didn’t really jive for me.

Dan: That’s it, I’m selling your ticket to the Mighty Crabjoys show at the Stone Pony!

Adam: Did I not just text you about going to see Bad Religion at Summer Stage like two weeks ago? Aside from the content of the film, I did get a teensy bit frustrated with some of the filmmaking. The neverending swirling of the camera in 360-degree twirls, the swooning score during quiet scenes like the conversation between Clark and Pa Kent — I get what Gunn was after, but some of these tricks just became repetitious after a while and made me long for one sustained shot that didn’t require a pan on an arc.

Anna: I’ve said a lot of nice things, so I’m going to be That Guy and say there was too much Krypto. You didn’t need to try this hard to sell this dog. I like this dog. It’s a good dog. But I didn’t necessarily need them repeating the central joke (“Krypto is a badly behaved dog, and it’s funny because he has superpowers”) as many times as they did. 

Rasmus: I’ll agree with you there, Anna. Even if I enjoyed the opening scene, with the first instance of this joke, by the end of it, I really wanted it to be turned on its head, and for Krypto to actually be a good dog, but instead they doubled down on it, and then blamed it all on Supergirl, which just bummed me out a bit and made me less excited for the future, even as I greatly enjoyed this film. Honestly, that scene might’ve been the biggest misstep of the entire thing.

Austin: I heart Krypto, but I definitely could have used one less Krypto scene (at least). 

Tony: Oh, you know what, I thought of another thing, and this is a little on the minor side, but with the rest of the movie being a soft PG-13, the Justice Gang being crude and sweary and “hard PG-13” was a tough swerve for me. I mean, I’m enjoying that this is a movie I’m comfortable seeing with my kids … then Guy Gardner spends five minutes flipping off Boravians, and Hawkgirl murders their leader. So four things.

Meanwhile, this isn’t a quibble, but something worth discussing: What did everyone think of the revelation that Jor-El and Lara sent baby Kal-El as a conqueror? I think it’s an interesting twist on the Superman mythos (one I believe My Adventures with Superman used as well). But there’s a big part of me that’s surprised by how much Clark believed it, considering it was Lex that outed him. I get Luthor’s “computer programmers and linguists verified it” thing, but those are human beings who can be bought. So how on Earth did Clark just accept that?

Penn: Tony, I too was confused as to how Clark just accepted that so easily and felt like deeper exploration was handwaved because Superman had to fight Lex. I expected the movie to go Smallville‘s route for dealing with this, which involved Clark affirming his identity through his adopted parents as well as the connections he made on Earth.

Adam: This is still the biggest question mark of the movie. Was Supes sent to Earth to conquer? I think the movie as is, especially given its ending, suggests yes, he was. That’s a pretty big status quo shift for the character.

Anna: The revelation about Kal-El being sent as a conqueror, which required Clark to basically completely disown his birth family and heritage, definitely didn’t sit quite right with me. 

While this is a story that has some big things to say about immigration and prejudice, it’s also a story that very explicitly says that in order to be a good person, you must renounce your foreign roots in favor of embracing the objectively much better values of white Americans from rural Kansas. I kept thinking about the contrast between this and Gene Luen Yang’s treatment of these themes in Superman Smashes the Klan, where Clark feels the loss of his Kryptonian heritage like physical pain, and has to reconnect with that past to fully accept the complexity of his identity. And I think that for me personally, that’s a more realistic, and more empathetic, treatment of how it feels to be an immigrant.

Adam: I think the bigger issue for this movie, and movies in general circa 2025, is that the media is treated as infallible and capable of making an instant shift in public opinion at a moment’s notice. That is not the world we live in. So having the entire population turn on Superman after Lex’s sabotage, and then flipping that dynamic at the end because of a single Daily Planet story really means we’re living in a comic book world.

Austin: This is honestly my biggest issue with the film. The most unbelievable sci-fi aspect of this movie about solar powered god-like space aliens, building-sized Kaiju and pocket universes is the idea that print media is alive and thriving. Putting on my psychoanalysis hat, I wonder how much of this is Gunn projecting his own experiences with (social) media and filtering it through the lens of the Superman mythos? The way he was brought down by “the media” in a relatively quick fashion before climbing back up to where he is now? There’s an entire read of this movie that is all about Gunn processing his experiences (even beyond the angry social media monkeys bit).

Dan: As a newspaper editor, can confirm, the media doesn’t have that kind of power. Just as fantastical: Jimmy writing the Lex-damning story that helps take him down IN the Daily Planet’s content management system. If I had a nickel for every time a writer kept their story in Word or a Google doc and filed an update by reuploading their typo-riddled draft into the CMS for me to have to go through again, I’d have so many nickels!

Mark: The twist about Kal-El’s parents definitely had me wondering if we’d see Robert Kirkman in the Special Thanks section among comic book creators in the end credits. I think if it turns out to be a lie, it’d weaken the movie overall considerably. Then it’s not a question of Superman making a conscious decision to do the right thing instead of the expected thing. Because at the end of the day, who really cares if the movie’s sullied the good name of Jor-El? I think the movie goes to great pains to tell us it’s not fake. Mr. Terrific says so.

(As an aside, my lovely spouse points out that if the Superman of 1978 was a Christlike figure sent by a benevolent Jor-El to save the world, the Superman of 2025 is a Marcionic Christ sent to subvert the will of an evil Jor-El-as-demiurge.) 

Armaan: The main reason it worked for me is that the movie set up how much of Superman’s identity was tied to his belief that his parents essentially wanted him to be a superhero. He listens to the broken version of that message over and over again. For his crisis of faith to be real, to have any stakes, then the corruption of that ideal had to be real. It paid off the talk he had with Pa Kent and that ending of Superman embracing his human side even further, watching videos of himself growing up with his parents.

Was the reveal rushed, and did it expect us as an audience to suspend more disbelief than usual? Absolutely, but I feel the movie works better if you accept it as is – though how much an audience can believe something like that is still up in the air.

Austin: I was definitely more bothered by the speed with which the public turned on Superman than the fact that Superman turned on himself. THAT works for me, and is both believable and key to his arc in the story. It just seems like a quick turn to have people flinging milkshakes at him before the initial expose is even done airing. 

Tony: Yeah, exactly. It’s sweet to have Clark embrace the Kent side of his persona at the end, but it’s such a shift. And what does this mean for Supergirl, who we get a cameo of at the end of the film. Is she no longer a teen when blasted into space? Does she not know that the Kryptonians were conquerors? Or was it simply that Jor-El and Lara are bad guys while her parents (Zor-El and Alura) are good guys?

Mark: It would make sense, because she’s clearly turned to alcohol and partying to deal with the trauma of her home planet being destroyed. Whereas with Clark, he was just a baby, he’s got no memory of Krypton and he had what seems to be a great childhood. But that is an interesting point I hadn’t considered. Is she in on the El family’s plan to carry on their genetic dynasty on Earth?

Dan: I smell a sequel. Hopefully one with dialogue for Ron Troupe.

Post-credit scenes

Adam: I really appreciated the restraint of the post-credits scenes. Normally the Supergirl reveal would have happened mid- or post-. By putting it in the movie, you get people excited for what’s next without making them wait through all the credits. (Which we did, and the last little gag was funny.)

Penn: Mark, I would love a Supergirl movie showing Kara learn to face the trauma of losing her home planet while coming into her own as a superhero. It would be poignant and powerful. For now though, I appreciated that little glimpse of her at the end, and those post-credit scenes were the cherry on top, as others have said.

Tony: Yeah, what a perfect hat on the events of the whole movie. Especially with Terrific continuing to be grouchy and Clark’s golly-gee-whiz dialogue. It was perfect … and better than meeting the new DCU Batman.

Rasmus: I think the post-credits scenes nailed it. As I said earlier, I loved this film, for a lot of reasons. The comic book feel of it all ranks high, but the most important thing is that it was just a really good time. Entertaining, action packed, hopeful, but most importantly fun. And instead of teasing future movies, it simply gave us a little bit more and made sure we left the cinema with a smile on our faces. Perfect for a Superman film.