Cinemagraphe

Superman, 2025

This is, unfortunately, kind of a stupid movie. The special effects are often spectacular, though not always, and there are performances from the cast that are really quite good, but, again, not always. But, in the end the film is doomed by its script. Superhero films are not exactly renowned for adherence to reality, but even with the acceptance of the extraordinary physical powers of Superman, something easy enough to do after many decades of superhero movies (a cycle kicked off by the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeves), it is the actions of the human cast that bogs down this movie into a Saturday morning cartoon level of storytelling.

For example, villain Lex Luthor finds a video recording of Superman's parents after he burglarizes Supe's secret Fortress of Solitude. The video file indicates Superman has a nefarious plan for conquering earth, or that is, we have to accept Luthor's translation of the unknown Krypton language as conveying this. Luthor soon presents the recording on a television talk show with English translation showing the world the message that Supe's parents from Krypton had instructed him (before their demise when Krypton blew up) to "take many wives" and to "rule the earth without mercy."

The crowd around Superman, as he stands in a park, observing this talk show on a giant television screen, which is hanging off of the side of a fifty-story building and the TV itself is probably the size of a 20 story building, immediately believes everything on said giant TV. As Luthor opines that this is proof that Superman has secret orders to conquer the earth, the crowd begins hurling insults and objects at Superman, meanwhile, they are all, along with Superman, standing near a gigantic Kaiju monster that was just defeated and is laying prone in the park like King Kong after "beauty slew the beast." The problem is that the entire sequence, from the part when Superman first begins fighting the Kaiju to the end when the crowd turns on Superman and assaults him, is steeped in ridiculous behaviors. During the fight, the crowd is shown standing beneath the giant Kaiju and filming and taking pictures with their camera phones instead of running for their lives, in fact they generally act as if they are impervious to the CGI debris flying through the air and the giant stomping feet and tail of the Kaiju.

The script wants us to take the awesome battle of Superman (and the arriving group of supporting superheroes referred to as "the Justice Gang" who pitch in to help fight the Kaiju) seriously as a real fight to save the city, yet the crowd generally does not, they act as implacable observing NPCs from within a video game. When the crowd incredibly turns against Superman within moments of seeing the Lex Luthor supplied info on the giant TV, they're not actually people, and certainly not the typical cynical and questioning American, they're instead robots who instantly change programming because of a giant TV, but of course they're only "changing" attitude because the script needs them to. Plenty of movie heroes have been framed by bad guys and had people turn against them, but the information would be persuasive within the story and would involve the the calculating working of some mental mechanism of thought. Here in Superman the crowd jerks around to a wholly new attitude instantly against the hero (and amazingly after he just been watched by the lot of them saving the city from getting trampled) and it as if they're zombies.

When Lex breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, his squad of Henchmen and a Henchwoman trash the place and fight down a squad of robots working inside the structure. As debris flies back and forth from explosions and things breaking apart, Lex walks calmly through it all without even a reflexive flinch as objects flit right past his noggin. The script is showing us how cool and powerful Lex is by not reacting, but instead it shows us that the poor actor (Nicholas Hoult) was presumably strutting through a green-screen room with the CGI objects added later. In one little second-long part it looks like an object actually passed through Lex's head.

However it is that they sandwich together CGI and the live human actors, in both the sequences described above there's simply too much unrealism. The otherwise good looking CGI effects don't match to real human behaviors happening simultaneously, and in the end it makes the actual live human actors seem like just more CGI creations.

There are nice sections of dialogue in the film and Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher has a background presence that provides a nice twist in the overall story that was enjoyable. David Corenswet as Superman is fine, enough so that you wonder what it could have been like if the script had been examined by a few outside observers who could have strongly pointed out the inhuman incongruities.

Original page May 16, 2026

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