I would give up a kingdom for Krypto, the superpowered canine, a good boy who is also, by any objective standards of pet ownership, a very bad dog. Krypto is scruffy and white and tends to cock one ear adorably when listening to commands he will then ignore. His recall’s actually not bad — whistle and he’ll come running — but he’s destructive, high energy, easily distracted, and prone to greeting people by bouncing up and down on top of them, a habit that could kill someone who isn’t a metahuman. Krypto could stand to go through a rigorous training program or two and definitely needs more stimulation and exercise. But given that his caretaker is busy learning how complex saving the world can be, a certain amount of neglect is inevitable.
Writer-director James Gunn puts Krypto front and center in his delightful new take on Superman, which opens with the hero (David Corenswet) crashing down in the Antarctic after losing a fight for the first time, then getting battered some more by his trusty pooch before being dragged home for help. This pride of place is due in part to Gunn’s being a dog lover — Krypto was inspired by and 3-D modeled on his own rescue, Ozu, and affection is suffused into every scene with the computer-generated animal. But Krypto’s prominence is also a declaration of intent. It is incredibly goofy for Superman to have a dog who is, like him, outrageously strong and capable of flight, the kind of comic-book lore that gets left out of big-screen adaptations for fear that normie audiences would rebel. The era of superhero-movie dominance has been accompanied by lots of solemn talk about how these stories are a form of American mythology and very little about all the extremely silly shit that decades of comics have also proposed. Krypto, who was introduced in 1955, is one of the latter, and Gunn uses him to emphasize how fallible his take on the Man of Steel is going to be, as well as to signal how wonderfully dorky and earnest his movie is about to get.
Gunn has basically been training for his current role as the head of DC Studios all his life. He started at legendary schlockhouse Troma, went on to direct subversive genre riffs like Slither and Super in between writing Scooby-Doo adaptations, then made the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, the best things the Marvel Cinematic Universe has birthed. He may love this source material, but he approaches it with a mixture of sincerity and irreverence that makes his new movie feel like a window being thrown open to a sunny day after years of oppressively dour DC action. He doesn’t politicize Superman, exactly. He just returns the character to his roots as the creation of two Jewish American men whose families fled the pogroms and who gave their extraterrestrial defender of the planet a background as a refugee himself. Superman and his reporter alter ego, Clark Kent, played ably by Corenswet with assurance and frustrated naïveté, is both an intensely American farm boy from Kansas and an alien survivor from a far-off civilization that has since been destroyed, an outsize version of the dual identities most immigrants balance. Superman finds the public turning against him after he intervenes to stop a war between two countries and wades into international relations. Gunn doesn’t need to turn this saga into an allegory for it to feel timely.
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Similarly, it doesn’t need to turn its take on Lex Luthor, played by a spectacularly compelling Nicholas Hoult, into some combination of Elon Musk, Trump, and someone actually smart for the comparison to come to mind. Those real-life figures have been accelerating into Luthor territory for years now. What Gunn’s take on the supervillain highlights is how much the character turns his own envy and resentment into a presumed public good, as though the world would of course benefit from the relentless pursuit of his interests, even if that means engineering global conflicts and ripping the fabric of the universe apart. Luthor believes he’s the most important person in the world, with the freedom to do whatever he wants — while Superman, who genuinely is singular, frets continually that he’s not living up to what he sees as the mandate left to him by his Kryptonian parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan, in a cameo). There’s a lot about how we complicate and obfuscate what should be obvious goods, such as saving the lives of children. But the film’s approach isn’t ham-fisted, and it makes room for gleefully fun stuff, too.
As star reporter Lois Lane, Rachel Brosnahan is a nicely grown-up love interest who spars with Clark over his secret identity’s actions and practically vibrates with excitement over chasing down stories. Edi Gathegi is a deadpan scene-stealer as Mister Terrific, part of a corporate-sponsored trio of superheroes that includes a preening Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern Guy Gardner and a blasé Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl. Skyler Gisondo is a standout as a ladies’-man version of Jimmy Olsen, while Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell are folksy versions of Superman’s adoptive parents, the Kents. The movie dives right into a reality in which Superman has been known to the public for years and dating Lois for months. Metahumans are already widespread enough that Luthor is lobbying the Pentagon to fund his own team. And Superman and Lois can have a heartfelt conversation in front of superpowered characters fighting a luminescent interdimensional sprite. Presuming our familiarity with superhero spectacle is a good call; we’ve all seen multiple iterations of this character in the past two decades alone. Instead of another origin story, it gives us sights we haven’t yet seen — like Krypto, bounding through the air after one of the many monkeys enlisted to rage-tweet from a Luthor-created pocket dimension. What a good, good boy.
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