The challenge of reimagining Superman in the twenty-first century lies not in making the character relevant—truth, justice, and a better tomorrow will always be relevant—but in making him feel human. In Superman (2025), director James Gunn, armed with both reverence and nerve, has done something daring: he has made Clark Kent vulnerable, not through kryptonite or cosmic threats, but through internal contradictions. He’s made Superman uncertain.
Davis Corenswet (“Twisters,” “Hollywood”) wears the cape with a surprising, almost haunted gravity. This isn’t the Boy Scout in red boots your parents and grandparents grew up with, nor is it the moody brooder of the Snyder era. Corenswet’s Superman exists somewhere in the gray expanse between mythology and modernity. His face is the same as the broad-jawed comic book icon, but with a quiet sadness of someone who can save everyone and yet still feels helpless in the face of what it means to belong. His Clark Kent is lean, tightly wound, occasionally awkward, and carefully polite. His Superman is quieter, too, less a superhero than a man trying to be one.
The film opens with Superman lying in the snow, bloody and injured. Defeated for the first time after stopping a war between two neighboring countries. The U.S. government questions his actions as interference in matters of state, and this vulnerability allows tech billionaire and “master deceiver” Lex Luthor to capitalize on the opportunity to eliminate Superman once and for all. Metropolis is now a modern city, and only the Daily Planet Building offers any of the Art Deco nostalgia of previous versions of Superman. Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) plays Lois Lane, the only one who knows her boyfriend’s true identity, who works alongside Clark Kent in a newsroom now filled with screens and monitors instead of typewriters and file cabinets. The Daily Planet hasn’t completely gone digital, but the story remains frustratingly analog.
Lex Luthor's persecution of Superman as an unwelcome immigrant feels uncomfortably close to home.
Gunn’s vision is rich with contradictions. The villain—Lex Luthor, as portrayed with slick-suited venom by Nicholas Hoult (the “X-Men” movies, “Juror #2”) —claims to offer salvation through order. He speaks in TED Talk cadences, but the menace is real. His genius is not only in invention, but in persuasion. Lex Luthor’s persecution of Superman as an unwelcome immigrant feels uncomfortably close to home.
The action sequences are cleanly rendered and mostly unshowy, which is saying something for a Superman film. Gunn favors practical effects where possible and holds the camera long enough for us to care who’s getting hit. Zimmer’s successors, composers John Murphy and David Fleming, provide a score that substitutes strings for brass, evoking a melancholy, celestial, and restrained atmosphere. Superman no longer announces himself with trumpets. He arrives quietly, almost apologetically, and departs the same way.
There are missteps, of course. The attempts at comic relief involving Krypto miss the mark, and the third act wobbles under the weight of too many climaxes. But these are minor faults in a film that dares to ask the old questions in new ways: What is strength? What is sacrifice? What does it mean to carry the world on your shoulders when no one asked you to?
Superman is a film less about heroism than about trying to be heroic. In that striving—in that failure, even—it may have delivered something the franchise has long forgotten: hope.
Final Thought
Corenswet, Brosnahan and Hoult shine in this somewhat lackluster film.