This ‘Superman’ Will Make You Believe A Dog Can Fly

Do you remember the tagline for the 1978 edition of Superman starring Christopher Reeve? You Will Believe a Man Can Fly. Me and my nine-year-old buddies left the theater gobsmacked. It looked so real! How did they do that? Ah, the magic of movies. We went to see it as many times as we could because there was no home video. No DVDs. No Netflix.

All it took to get the hairs to stand up on your neck was Christopher Reeve launching into the air with a determined look on his face as that triumphant score by John Williams blasted through the theater. It didn’t hurt that I was nine and not a fifty-six-year-old film critic who’s been besieged by cartoonish, weightless CGI carnage for twenty years. Does this reboot from writer/director James Gunn rekindle my love of comic book movies? Not really. It’s weighed down by a lot of been there, done that. But from the laughter and applause in my promotional screening, it clearly hit the mark for its intended audience.

As this newest iteration of the Man of Steel opens, it’s clear we won’t be sitting through a soup-to-nuts origin story yet again. No baby Superman found in a cornfield. No learning to cope with superpowers as a teenager. No leaving Ma and Pa Kent to make his way as a journalist in the Big City.

The film begins mid-adventure. Superman (David Corenswet) has just been dealt a rare defeat by a super-powered rival who does the bidding of techno billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Holt). His somewhat hyper and slightly unreliable pooch, Krypto, drags him back to his icy Fortress of Solitude to recover and regroup. His alter-ego, Clark Kent, is already dating Lois Lane who knows his Super Secret.

All the table-setting is behind us, and the film is all the better for it. In our current pop culture universe where everyone knows the Superman myth, watching yet another thirty-minute origin story would’ve been a snoozefest, and Gunn wisely chooses to get right down to business.

The film feels like an old school comic book. No offense to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (the pinnacle of comic book cinema), but dark, angsty superheroes trudging through a gray landscape have worn out their welcome for now. To be honest, the real world is too bleak to spend our sparetime in a dour fictional wasteland. This Superman brings back the colorful visuals, the humor, the clever quips in the midst of battle, the lightheartedness of the vintage comics.

The film hops from action sequence to action sequence which gives it a sense of momentum, but you also quickly realize there are only so many ways to assemble these heavily CGI-laden battle scenes. Following the screening, a colleague of mine asked, “How many times have we seen skyscrapers collapse in these movies?” Indeed. I’m not sure you can technically say that Superman saves Metropolis in this one after this never-ending destruction of infrastructure.

There is one transcendent visual moment where Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) places a force field of sorts around Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) while he dispatches a collection of bad guys. The POV remains inside the protective bubble with Lois as combatants fly by and fight in the background. The sound is dampened to accentuate her safety inside her transparent cocoon. It’s as if she too is watching a comic book movie unfolding around her. It doesn’t quite reach the level of the “Time in a Bottle” Quicksilver sequence from X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it does prove that CGI action can be hugely effective if you have the time to think outside the box.

While CGI overkill is the modern day Achille’s Heel of all action movies, Superman succeeds on the human level by giving us characters we care about. Corenswet plays this youthful version of the Man of Steel with a sincerity that channels Gary Cooper more than Christopher Reeve. His moments of naivete are refreshing in this jaded, cynical, troll-filled world we find ourselves in. Superman has always been an idealist, and this film embraces that part of his character.

There’s also real chemistry between Corenswet and his Lois Lane, Rachel Brosnahan. The 1978 film was partly a romance. Every pre-teen girl from that era remembers Superman and Lois Lane flying hand-in-hand through the clouds. The perfect ending to a magical date. Corenswet and Brosnahan’s final scene (that I won’t reveal here) captures that same magic.

The two secret weapons in the cast are Krypto (largely, if not entirely, a CGI creation) and Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific. Superman’s canine companion is a super-charged version of an unruly puppy, knocking people down with his exuberant greetings. He’s a jumping, licking, chewing mess that even the Man of Steel can’t seem to control. Every dog owner in the audience will immediately see their own pooches in Krypto. (Just be happy that your dog’s greetings don’t knock you twenty feet through the air.)

Edi Gathegi, on the other hand, is the standout human performance in the film, playing Mr. Terrific like the protagonist in a 1970’s Blaxploitation film. His superhero is part Denzel Washington with a healthy dose of Richard Roundtree. Gathegi’s line readings are a riot. It’s like he was born to play the part. If DC wants to spin off a television show from this part of their universe, call Edi Gathegi.

The New York Times recently conducted a poll to determine the Top 10 films of the 21st century. I put The Dark Knight on my ballot. Is it actually one of the ten best films of the last twenty-five years? No, not really. But so far, this has been the century of the comic book film, and I felt the genre should be represented on any Best Of list. While Superman (2025) isn’t one of the best films of the 21st century, it represents the genre well. Despite my nitpicks, comic book fans will be excited by this addition to the DC canon.