Here’s a question: Are superheroes fundamentally silly? A hardcore coalition maintains that costumed vigilantes are tragic symbols of mature philosophies, and that Batman should only be sad and drive a colorless tank. But absurdity is the genre’s default setting — bright underwear, statue-steroid muscles, glam masks. The first scene of the new Superman movie picks a side. Superman lies battered in Antarctica. He whistles. A dog arrives. His cape is red, he flies, and his fur is white as snow. He is probably not hypoallergenic, according to my wife.
It’s Krypto, and Krypto is chaos. When Superman asks for help, the superdog jumps on his super-broken ribs. The dog has a habit of biting things he should not bite. He wrecks the Fortress of Solitude regularly. At best, his bad habits can be redirected to the cause of good. It’s not helpful when Krypto eats Mr. Terrific’s little flying machines, but it is helpful when he eats Lex Luthor’s little flying machines. Krypto’s presence is a statement of purpose for the third Superman reboot this century. Dog + Cape = Funny. But Krypto, appearing in a live-action feature for the first time ever, represents more than just a thaw in this franchise’s recent policy against tomfoolery. His ridiculousness is charming — and sneakily profound.
When I was a kid reading ’90s comics, superdogs were verboten. The mainstream mood leaned intense, heavy metal, Mortal Kombat–level gory. Superman got killed and never played fetch. Fortunately, my wife’s late uncle left behind a collection of classic comics. Krypto is on two covers and flutters through several stories. “This is a job for Superboy!” proclaims Superboy on the cover of 1957’s Superboy No. 56. The hero’s rescuing a blond kid from a burning house. Krypto flies next to him, holding a box of five puppies, thinking, And this is a job for Superdog! The tale finds Krypto striking off on his own solo mission. He wants to rescue canines the way Superboy rescues humans. He saves a seeing-eye dog from a time bomb. He saves a stunt dog on a movie set from a runaway car. He saves Sir Rajah, the pet of the richest man in Smallville, from dognappers.
But every canine solution creates a human problem. Krypto flying the time bomb into the sky causes an explosion that sends a plane veering out of control. He stops the car only by knocking a water main askew. The dognappers fire bullets at him, causing a fiery gas leak. Superboy begs his pet to stop operating independently. The surface point, I guess, is Krypto Must Obey. Very Eisenhower, very Father Knows Best. (Superboy is Krypto’s “master,” because nobody in 1957 was a dog dad.) Except, wait. Who’s leaving time bombs around Smallville? Are there no security protocols on this film set? The dognappers have guns? All this in, like, one small-town afternoon? Krypto is chaos, but so is everything else.
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Superman (2025) trusts a modern viewer can handle chaos. And writer-director James Gunn is unusually confident that he can make weird comic stuff palatable to a mass audience. (He is, after all, the reason Disney sells plushies of a talking alien tree.) So Mr. Terrific defeats an army with flying circles. The Fortress of Solitude has a sun bath. Superman really wants to bring a rampaging kaiju to an intergalactic zoo. And there is Krypto, repeatedly rocketing into the middle of action scenes after Superman calls him with a Super-whistle.
The instant conventional wisdom about Gunn’s interpretation is that he’s brought silly back to Superman after a very serious decade. But those binaries have always been unhelpful. I think Gunn recognizes how to hide subversive drama beneath the cake frosting of superpowers. So this is the first Superman movie in which Krypto playfully tackles a very drunk Supergirl. But it’s also a Superman movie in which Zlatko Burić, Triangle of Sadness’s rich Russian, plays a villainous dictator leading a country that’s obviously Fake Russia. And the movie’s version of Lex Luthor is a billionaire weaponizing social media to turn the public against Superman — an obvious cancellation allegory, I think, for the conservative hit job that caused Gunn’s own Twitter scandal in 2018.
So while you’re giggling over Krypto, don’t miss the surprising dimensions hiding inside that CGI fur. It would always be wrong for Superman to beat up a human, obviously — even one as evil as this film’s Lex Luthor, who you understand is the most villainous ever put on film because he fucks with the dog. When Krypto attacks Lex in the grand finale, though, and breaks the arm of the malevolent tech billionaire? It’s funny and righteous. Good boy.
