Spoilers for Superman

It’s taken me a while to write about this, but ah well. The new DC film universe is officially underway, and I’m endlessly excited.

James Gunn’s Superman was released in July, and it’s a lot of fun. I’ll confess my expectations were impossibly high and did leave me slightly disappointed at first. I still enjoyed it, it just didn’t grab me quite as much as I thought it would. But that’s on me, I was anticipating the film to an unreasonable degree. On rewatching, I enjoyed it even more.

A sole criticism

My only real grievance is that the film has a lot of exposition. Pretty much everything is explained and it regularly interrupts the pacing and coming off as a little awkward. To be fair, there’s nothing inherently bad about exposition. Sometimes it’s required and I can’t think of any film that doesn’t have at least a bit. ‘Show don’t tell’ takes time and can, in certain cases, interrupt a stories flow.

The key with exposition is to make it feel natural. The characters need a legitimate reason for saying it, and it usually shouldn’t contain superfluous information. Otherwise it can quickly become a lore dump. Generally, the audience should only be provided with the information they need, and then be trusted to assume that irregularities have in-universe explanations. There’s probably a better way of framing that, I don’t know. My point is, so long as the unanswered questions aren’t too glaring, they don’t necessarily need to be explained (unless you can sneak it in naturally). At least in my uniformed opinion.

The Superman film does, unfortunately, run afoul of this. For instance, there’s a moment near the end, after Superman defeats Ultraman (loving that comic book reference) in which Mr. Terrific tells the collapsed Superman to get up, and then explains that they need to deal with Luthor and the rift. The first part of the exchange (and Superman’s response) is a good moment, and could have served as the scene transition. The explanation about needing to stop Luthor was unnecessary and felt unnatural. The audience knows they need to stop Luthor and close the rift.

There are moments like this throughout. At the very end, after Supergirl’s cameo (another great moment), Superman tells his robots that she likes to party on other planets because Kryptonians can only get drunk on planets with a red sun. That last part, about the red sun, is unneeded and unnatural exposition. In-universe, the Superman robots would know about the red sun stuff and, out of universe, the audience is unlikely to think about it. You only need to say that Supergirl likes partying on other planets.

I’m comparing too much. The surplus of exposition is a minor issue within a film that I otherwise really liked.

Superman Stories

A mistake I think is often made with Superman stories, which this film avoids, is to treat them as standard ‘overwhelming odds’ and/or ‘self-sacrifice’ superhero stories. In these stories, Superman invariably runs into the issue that, being the most powerful being in the planet, he can’t really be challenged. In turn necessitating extreme threats, that Superman still proves capable of dealing with. In short, how do you have stakes when the main character is all powerful? This is one of the issues I think 2013’s Man of Steel ran into.

That’s not to say Superman shouldn’t be challenged. He should, ideally by de powering him (which this film does). Rather, it require a change of focus. The best Superman stories are the ones which ask: if a genuinely good person had that much power, what would they do? The earliest Superman comics (in the 30s and 40s) saw him rescuing people from death row and confronting corrupt business owners. Lex Luthor is a legacy of this. This film, however, fully embraces the main Superman theme. It starts with Superman intervening to prevent a war, in direct violation of US government policy.

Everything that happens in the film is a consequence of this, and this later turns out be Lex Luthor’s plan. It made for a great Superman story.

Full Comic Book

To briefly contradict myself, by defending exposition, I do understand why they had so much. This is arguably the first superhero movie, I think, to go full comic book.

Comic books can often get weird and convoluted, and they have a ton of strange and highly creative stuff in them. Most superhero films appear a little ashamed of this, and often try to downplay it. This is especially true of DC and, even after several centuries of the MCU, still appears a little true of Marvel. The world or Iron Man 1 is fairly grounded and required dozens of origin movies to justify every mildly weird comic book idea. The only consistent exception to all this, to my mind, is James Gunn’s prior Superhero films.

But again, Superman went full comic book and made no long winded excuses. It just unapologetically did it. During the film, Superman fights a Kaiju, the technology is crazy advanced, Guy Gardner has a terrible hair cut and the general public are so accustomed to the existence of superpowers that they barely acknowledge it. The film even uses the weird 90s Justice League (the best Justice League) that had almost no A-tier characters and was written as a sitcom.

James Gunn has said that this film was his love letter to comic books. It absolutely is, and I am so there for it. I read the comics a lot, and I’ve always wanted the films to go full comic. This is everything I have ever wanted a superhero film to be.

All that said, I suspect this is the reason they included so much exposition. I can see that general audiences may find this level of comic-book-ness a little jarring at first, especially after successive superhero films have tried to play it down.

The Future of Superhero Movies

Nevertheless, if this is the future of superhero films, I will be very happy. It will be good for the superhero genre as well.

People are increasingly sick of superhero movies, and I get why. Marvel movies have come to dominate the film industry and are increasingly formulaic. Previous DC films meanwhile have, with some notable exceptions, been terrible. But superhero stories are not inherently bad. On the contrary, there are hundreds of incredible superhero stories that explore an enormous number of interesting themes and ideas. There’s a reason they’ve been sustained the comic book industry for a century. Not to mention how much creativity they’ve amalgamated, with generations of writers and artists building on each other’s ideas (hence why comic books are so weird).

The issue is, most superhero films don’t take advantage of that. They are, as many have noticed, formulaic executive mandates. They play it safe, avoid the weird stuff and, by extension, most of the creativity. James Gunn’s Superman is a welcome corrective. It fully embraces comic book weirdness and actually explores the main themes of Superman. It can also stand on its own, without requiring other films to justify its weirdness.

If that’s the formula for James Gunn’s DC Cinematic Universe, then there’s a lot to look forward to, and that does seem to be his intention. Films are only getting green lit when their scripts are ready (in direct contrast to Marvel). With any luck, a slew of creator led superhero movies will quickly recapture the century long magic of the comic book superhero. Though it would also be good if they started making films that aren’t superhero movies or Star Wars spinoffs.

Prior to uploading this, James Gunn announced that he’s finished writing the next Superman movie (wow, he works fast). Hopefully, they’ll begin filming in short order, and we won’t have to wait too long.

-Dexter