Meh

My son and I saw Superman last night.

It is not woke like so many were expecting. In fact, one of the villains is a Hispanic female — something a woke movie probably would take a pass on.

The movie was just not great. It might not even be good. It was immemorable. My son liked it more than me.

I liked it more than others. But it just was not great. Superman’s human parents come off as country bumbling hicks to the extent they are featured. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to make his father come across as mentally handicapped or that’s just how the actor played the character. I did appreciate we didn’t have to re-live the Superman origin story or watch his father die. Again.

The actor for Superman was okay, but Henry Cavill was far better and should still be Superman, just not in the James Gunn version.

This movie leaned heavily on comic book campiness and comic book colors. It had lots of inside jokes for the comic book nerds. I’m sure if someone really wants to read their politics into the movie, they can, but it was just a campy comic book superhero movie.

My theory is that because it was not as political as, perhaps, those involved wanted it to be that they let their progressivism spill out into how they talked about the movie. The director needed to virtue signal to the left, including arranging on the IMDB page instead of “truth, justice, and the American way,” this:

Superman must reconcile his alien Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as reporter Clark Kent. As the embodiment of truth, justice and the human way he soon finds himself in a world that views these as old-fashioned.

That line was not in the movie, but they felt the need to virtue signal on IMDB. They had to get it out of their system.

Surely there is a compelling Superman movie to be made. This was not it. It was not even as good as some of the post Avengers: End Game movies from Marvel. If you’ve got older kids, they’ll probably like it. My sixteen year old, who went in expecting something awful, came away enjoying it. But even he said it was not one you’d watch multiple times and it could wait for streaming.

I’m wasting your time this morning with a movie review of a not-spectacular movie, more to make a point about the present culture. A lot of people rushed to read politics into the movie. James Gunn, the Director, was guilty of this too and wanted to define the movie as some sort of ode to immigrants.

Entertainment, done well, takes us out of our present political environment. But too many people across the political spectrum want to roll around and wallow in the politics of the day. There are fewer and fewer release valves from non-stop politics now, and that is not a good or healthy situation for the country.

By the way, I noted on Twitter the other day that there is a way to make a good Superman movie — make it about Clark Kent as an investigative journalist solving a mystery, and the superpowers, until the final act, are ancillary to what is happening. We don’t need a retelling of his origins. And a pure Superman movie, given how powerful he is, gets kind of boring. But there is a way to make it work.

My opening is pretty straightforward. The opening scene is Clark Kent leaving the Daily Planet at the end of a hard day’s work. He gets on his bike to pedal off home, and as he goes through an intersection, a woman runs a red light, smashing into Kent. The car is damaged. The woman, not wearing a seatbelt, is killed. Clark Kent is declared the luckiest man alive. Investigating who hit him, Superman discovers the woman was high as a kite. Checking on her family, he discovers the woman had no history of drugs. It becomes apparent that someone drugged the woman, inducing her to run the stoplight just as Superman was riding his bike through, in an effort to kill him. Some villain was smart enough to coordinate it all, not to kill Superman, but to kill Clark Kent. Why?

I just think that’d be more compelling than super villain wrecks Gotham and proves a foil to Superman’s super strength, take nine thousand nine hundred eighty two. But that’s just me.