I’m not a comic books guy, and I’m increasingly not a comic-book movies guy. Including superhero movies. As a kid, I’d watch Christopher Reeves’s Superman whenever I happened upon it channel surfing. In adulthood, I’ve enjoyed Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, and really liked the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. But beyond that, not so much.
Perhaps there’s a distinction here between movies drawn from comic-book stories, and movies made for people who read a lot of comic books. Stories that are at some level about humans first-encountering and then grappling with the existence of alien or supernatural life transcend genre—they’re cinema friendly and can be profound. Stories about worlds where comic book shit just happens all the time and everyone’s inured to it are drained of that tension.
In any case, if you asked me to critique the Superman reboot, that’s what I’d point to as a drawback. It’s for nerds more than for people with my cool-dude sensibilities.
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And yet I really liked it.
I liked it despite not having the first clue about most of the non-Superman characters drawn from the larger DC Comics universe, and despite finding it hard to suspend disbelief—to imagine a major American city carrying on ho-hum while plagued by science-fictional menace week in, week out. And I liked it despite the fact that it’s fairly drained of nostalgia. Lois and Clark are well past the honeymoon phase and into petty bickering. Jimmy Olsen’s apparently got a weird thing going with women who look like Mar-a-Lago groupies. Ma and Pa Kent are practically bit characters. It’s set in modern times, so everyone’s suffering viral media mania.
But the political allegory is important. It’s unsubtle and lib, as you might expect in a Superman movie, but it’s also very au courant. I understand why conservative elites hate it and don’t want people to see it. But I don’t think their fixation on the movie’s “wokeness” and pro-immigrant sentiment has much to do with their scorn. Those are classic Superman themes, and it’s hard to credit, say, former Superman actor turned right-wing crank Dean Cain with simply not recognizing them before 2025.
No, Republicans have glommed on to those old thematic elements in this case because they’re close at hand. They provide a convenient, topical way to signal to Trump supporters that they should not see or support this movie. But they wanted it to fail at the box office not because it’s a Superman movie, per se, but because it’s a doctrinaire resistance-style takedown of modern right-wing tech-fascism. And saying “don’t see this movie, because it really cuts to the chase about how evil we are,” isn’t a very impressive critique.
