Superman (2025): The S Gave Me Hope

I saw Supergirl (2026) last week, and it was fine, but the primary thing it motivated me to do is finally sit down and write about why I saw Superman (2025) five times in the theater last summer, including why I think it played a significant role in helping me get out of a funk I have been in since at least 2024. (Spoilers ahead for Superman, none for Supergirl.)

Some of it boils down to things like, “I like superheroes a lot, especially DC Comics superheroes.” But I skipped a whole lot of DC superhero movies over the last ten years. You can certainly add in, “I like superheroes a lot, especially superheroes written by James Gunn,” and you’ll get closer to the bullseye. I’ve been an enormous fan of Gunn’s superhero films since the opening credits of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and Gunn definitely explores a lot of his familiar tropes and themes in this movie.

I love that not only does this movie not start out with an origin story for its title character, it doesn’t feature an origin for the presence of superheroes at all. This is not a world mostly like ours where a superhero is appearing for the first time like Batman Begins or Iron Man. It’s a world where superheroes have been around for decades, and we’re expected to dive in and figure things out, just like I had to do when I started regularly reading DC Comics back in 1989.

I love that Gunn creates a colorful universe for the story – literally colorful, with vivid colors in the costumes and the backgrounds. I love the sense of humor amid a serious story, and the ability of the cast to pull off all of those shades. I love the way that the Daily Planet’s investigative work is as important as the Justice Gang’s superheroics. I love that there are exactly zero secret identity shenanigans getting in the way of a solid Clark-Lois relationship, even when that relationship hits its rough patches. There are a lot of things I love about this movie.

But there are two central themes in the movie that were so important to me that I have been Superman fanboying so hard for the last year that my students totally picked up on it. (They’ve picked up on the fanboying for years, but before this year, it was more about Star Wars or Batman or even Spider-Man.)

First is that the movie unapologetically celebrates active kindness and goodness. Superman doesn’t just want to be nice to people. He wants to help them. He knows he has the ability to make an enormous difference in people’s lives and, given that knowledge, he will not let his refusal to act cause harm. Choosing to refuse to act is still a choice, and when we make that choice, we are responsible for the outcome. Clark knows this. He feels it. That’s why he loses his composure and yells/pleads, “People were going to die!” when Lois confronts him about his actions against Boravia. He would hold himself responsible for those deaths, not because he made the choice to attack those people, but because he chose not to stop the attack. And so he does stop the attack, and accepts the consequences for doing so. To be kind is to act in the world with kindness.

While we’re on the topic of that interview, each time I saw the movie, I got more annoyed at Lois during that sequence. (This is not a criticism of the writing. In fact, I think it’s a good idea for sympathetic characters to have a point of view that they push to a point that some people in the audience will find fault with.) I think Lois is right to push Clark to make sure he thinks about what he’s doing and how people will perceive him, because that is also his responsibility given the power he holds. But I think that by the end of that question sequence she is trying to score points and justify her own cynical resignation. When Clark says, “We both know that’s very silly!” about Boravia’s claims that they are helping the people of Jarhanpur, that establishes that Lois agrees with Clark’s estimate of the Boravian government’s trustworthiness. But then Lois justifies the idea of not acting to protect Jarhanpur by saying she does not know that Boravia is acting in bad faith. This may be the philosopher in me speaking, but we can always invoke or create doubt to justify inaction. Sooner or later, we have to take a stand. We have to risk being wrong. At this point in the movie, Clark is willing to take this risk, and Lois is suggesting he’s foolish for doing so.

But notice that when Clark gets taken to the Pocket Universe, Lois tosses all that caution and inaction aside. She gets the Daily Planet to run the claim that Superman is imprisoned on the front page even though they don’t know that it’s true – we don’t see Lois get any confirmation of Jimmy’s source for the claim. She berates the Justice Gang when they say they’re not willing to go against the US government and take the risk of making matters worse. By her actions, Lois makes clear that to protect someone she cares about, she will risk her own safety, rely on uncertain information, go against the stated policy of her government, and choose to act, even if there are negative consequences.

The difference between Clark and Lois is that he cares so much that he extends this principle to everyone, up to and including squirrels.

Which brings me to the second big theme that resonates: putting yourself on the line to care about people is hard, but it’s worth doing. Clark gets beat up physically and emotionally throughout the movie. Things he thought he could count on get taken away from him, temporarily or permanently. And he doesn’t give up. As he says to Lex, he puts one foot in front of the other and he does the best he can.

John Murphy and David Fleming do something absolutely brilliant with the classic Superman (1978) theme that reinforces this throughout the movie, especially for those of us who have the Williams theme firmly embedded in our memories. The original arrangement of the theme in 1978 is heroic and triumphant. Richard Donner said that you can almost hear the music say “Superman!” I think around the 3 minute mark of this clip from 1978 you can hear what I’m talking about.

Dum da da da dum
Dum dum dum
Dum da da da dum
Dun da dah!

In 2025 Fleming and Murphy slow down the theme and they rarely let it fully resolve with that last “Dun da dah!” I think it appears once in the whole movie, when Superman is fighting the kaiju, right before everything falls apart. When the Williams theme appears in the 2025 movie, it takes longer to get where it’s going, and it never quite makes it all the way even in moments of triumph, but it’s still heroic. David Corenswet’s Superman keeps getting knocked down and he keeps getting back up. He doesn’t give up on people and he doesn’t give up on himself.

That’s the pep talk I needed last summer. There’s a lot of darkness in the world right now. A lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of people hurting each other. I was having a really hard time seeing past all of it. But this movie reminded me not just intellectually but emotionally that there’s a lot of good, too. Just as importantly, the reaction to the movie reminded me that there are a lot of people in the world who feel the same way, celebrating kindness and seeing the good in people as the real punk rock. There’s a bigger gap than I thought there was between the world we live in now and the world I want my daughter and my students and my nieces and nephews and everyone else to live in. But it’s worth holding on to hope and working to get even a little closer.