Superman Represents the Post-Satire World, and It’s Not Good

I finally got around to watching the new Superman movie, and oh boy, what a mess. But it does have some useful lessons for us.

My first kneejerk reaction during the watch was that everything just seems… off. Like someone snuck into your house while you were gone and slightly rearranged the furniture. Enough for you to notice, but not enough to be absolutely sure someone had broken in. That’s how I felt during this movie. All the characters felt a bit weird, but not weird enough to be like an intentional parody. But it does for sure fall short for a movie that cost $225 million to make. Honestly, if someone had presented this to me as a 1997 made-for-TV movie on the Syfy channel, I would have believed him.

Look at the “Justice Gang.” Understand what I mean about everything seeming a little off?

I liked Nathan Fillion in Firefly but he’s not a proper Green Lantern, sorry. And the unflattering and poorly tailored costume makes Fillion look heavier and sloppier than he actually is.

This odd feeling of low effort was apparent in the marketing material too. Look at this poster, the sloppy slouch of the main character and underwhelming graphic design make this seem like a TV movie from the 90s, not a big budget blockbuster from 2025:

Lex Luthor, like the heroes of this movie, seems like a 19 year old film student’s hasty imitation of Lex Luthor, not Lex Luthor himself:

He reminds me of any number of real life post-industrial billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. This image is further reinforced by his staff of lame office workers who clap like seals for him. It’s actually interesting to see a comic book villain doing cartoonishly evil things with the meek approval of his office flunkies, not unlike how Google and Meta help the US military do evil things in real life. The fictional bad guy president of “Boravia” is drawn in a similar fashion. Boravia and their evil war of conquest against the peaceful Jarhanpur people is specific enough to appeal to whatever political leanings that particular audience has, but also vague so no one is offended and the movie isn’t banned from any international markets.

The president of Boravia looks like an AI mashup of several different world leaders, like a Rorschach test that reminds the audience of the world leader they don’t like, but also doesn’t resemble a real person closely enough to trigger complaints.

But I do not consider this good filmmaking or an effective message. Just vaguely mimicking stuff in real life is not a message. Lex Luthor vaguely resembles real-life CEOs and billionaires, and Boravia vaguely resembles real countries that fight unjust wars. Okay and what are we supposed to do with this information? By being so intentionally vague, it’s not possible to walk away from this movie with any useful conclusions or calls to action.

The lack of a useful moral is further compounded by the plot being paper-thin and unable to withstand any scrutiny. For example, Lex Luthor has this entire conspiracy to discredit Superman so he is removed from the playing field long enough to allow Boravia to kill all the peaceful Jarhanpur people. But this plan is foiled by the Justice Gang, with Green Lantern joking “Superman was busy, so you got an upgrade.” That’s a very funny line, but why would the bad guys think getting rid of one super hero would work in a cinematic universe that has more than one superhero? It’s a plan that fails immediately if you think about it for more than one second, so why did anyone think it would work? Lex Luthor also has a “pocket universe.” I think the writers of this movie just wanted to reference a pocket universe because it is in the comics and some other already-existing media, even though there is no actual use for it in the plot. So Lex uses it as a prison, which dumb and makes no sense. Especially since it is explained that even the slightest mistake could destroy the entire planet. Imagine a real-world prison that might destroy the world every time someone opens the door.

Superman also commits the crime of forcing the characters to be stupid in moments when being smart would cause the rest of the movie to not happen. Like in the scene when Lex Luthor releases a giant lizard to destroy Metropolis, then breaks into the fortress of solitude while Superman is busy fighting. Then right after the lizard is defeated, Lex publishes a message from Superman’s parents saying that they want him to conquer the humans and basically be a bad guy. The only way for this plan to work is for everyone to be stupid and just trust that Lex wasn’t lying. If even one person suggested that the video might be doctored, or that it’s just really suspicious that a giant monster appeared in the city right at the moment Lex needed Superman to be distracted, then the whole plan would fail.

Another thing that bothered me is that the movie makes very specific and extraordinary points but doesn’t address the consequences in any meaningful way, and sometimes doesn’t even acknowledge there would be consequences at all. For example, Hawkgirl kills the president of Boravia. Great, but giving superheroes the right to kill world leaders effectively makes them the world leaders. After that precedent is established, anyone who contradicts the superheroes’ idea of fairness can just be executed. There’s no one else strong enough to fight superheroes, so how are they not the de facto rulers of the world? Oh and this contradicts the movie’s own theme of Superman rejecting a message from his parents to conquer and rule the humans. Whether or not Superman and his friends intended to conquer the humans, that’s what they effectively did in the end.

This world leader problem ties into Lex’s plan too, as he seems to have an extraordinary amount of power in the US government, allowing him to whatever he wants, no matter how evil or destructive it is. So if you think about the situation for more than one second, the US government is no better than Boravia’s, just as complicit in the war and other on-screen atrocities, and the US president should be pulled out of his window and executed the same way. But that would require a character thinking for more than one second, which never happens.

Superman is a mish-mash of things that look vaguely familiar, like you have seen in the news, or maybe an old comic book you read as a kid, or a different movie, but nothing familiar or concrete enough to be quite sure what you saw, and leaves you with a vague nostalgic feeling, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

That’s why I consider Superman the perfect movie for 2025, and the culmination of a long journey. In the 80s and 90s movies were well filmed and acted, well written, and had a coherent message. Then in the 2000s movies were well filmed and usually well acted, but the writing was sloppier and the message more incoherent, but you could feel there was a message even if you weren’t sure what it was. Now movies are poorly filmed and acted, badly written, and so muddled and incoherent it’s just slop.

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Ian Kummer

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