djonn | Thoughts on the new SUPERMAN

Based on early reviews, I went in predisposed to like the new Superman movie, and for the most part, I was very much not disappointed. David Corenswet stands out as excellent in a uniformly excellent cast, the script does a lot of very smart things with most of its characters, and Gunn's direction gives us a movie that moves along briskly and doesn't feel as long as its run time.

I do not like this Luthor at all. This is not a complaint about Nicholas Hoult's performance, which is spot on for the character that James Gunn wrote and directed. Rather, this is a complaint about the material Hoult is given to work with - which paints Lex Luthor as at once a brilliant scientist and a complete idiot, and I have real trouble with the latter half of that conception. (On one hand, if Gunn really did take Elon Musk as a model for Luthor, it may be more accurate than we'd like to admit. But there's no real room in the DC Universe for a cosmically stupid Lex Luthor, and that's what Gunn appears to have given us here.)

I mean, look at Luthor's idea of an Evil Plan. We have a couple of them in this film; one involves spending billions to promote a war so that he can buy half of the losing nation's land and establish his personal alt-Latveria, with himself as King. (If this is not meant as a straight-up Doctor Doom riff, I will eat one of my hats.) The other involves creating a set of dimensional portals in and out of a private "pocket universe", and then setting that mini-universe up as some combination of private prison and obscure mining operation. (I'm not sure what sort of resources he's mining, but it looked to me as if a fair bit of hard labor was going on in there in addition to the prison setup and the portal network.)

My problem with Evil Plan #1 is that unlike Victor von Doom, Luthor is profoundly uninterested in doing the right thing by his prospective subjects. All he seems to want is the title with none of the work involved - yet if that's his goal, why not just buy half of Jarhanpur outright with a tiny fraction of his personal wealth? Moreover, why think so very small? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to quietly buy up enough of Asia to establish himself as Emperor of a nation sufficiently large and powerful to challenge the US? The Boravian scheme seems more appropriate to the world of the 1960s' Batman universe, and its colorful but none-too-bright villains.

The scale of Evil Plan #2 is much more in line with proper Luthor villainy: he's built a network of portals that allow him to access and maintain a "pocket universe" (and as a side benefit, to travel almost instantly from one part of the world to another via dimensional shortcut). The problem here is that, per Mr. Terrific, the tech involved is inherently unstable and will, if not shut down properly, tear the Earth itself apart before the movie's run time is over.

My issue here is that Luthor, while portrayed as a scientific genius, seems wholly unaware that keeping his toys online will in fact destroy the planet he himself is living on if he keeps on playing with them. And he is dead set on playing with said toys as much as possible. This is not the Evil Plan of a responsible scientific genius with any sort of survival instinct. This is the Evil Plan of a five-year-old whose attention span mostly doesn't extend to finishing a project that's only half-done when Mom calls you in for dinner. Thus Luthor is not only a not-very-credible Doctor Doom, he's an all-too-credible iteration of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes...except that unlike nearly all of Calvin's, his inventions actually affect the Real World in which he lives.

There's also (unless I misinterpreted what I saw during the movie) a further problem with the imploding pocket universe: it's got a non-trivial number of people in it - most of them, at least by implication, either working for or imprisoned by Luthor. And again, unless I missed a key moment, most of them are still there when Mr. Terrific seals and/or implodes the pocket universe from the outside.

Which you'd think would be a Thing that Superman - especially this film's Superman - would want to Do Something About. And yet as far as I could tell, Superman seemed wholly unaware that those people were there and were in serious danger as a direct result of the (admittedly necessary) stuff Mr. Terrific was doing to keep Earth itself from falling apart on a planetary scale.

In almost any other Superman film, "he didn't know they were there" would be a defensible excuse for not acting. But in this one, because it makes a point of Superman being super-observant and sensitive to both large-scale and small-scale crises, it's a lot harder to justify. And for me, it means that while the film is 95% brilliant, the 5% that sets Superman up as being the kind of hero who saves everybody from the squirrels on up (and sets Luthor up as a sufficiently incompetent Evil Genius not to recognize the intrinsic dangers of his own tech) completely failed to stick the landing.

Note here that I would love to be proven wrong about my perception of the nature, population, and fate of the pocket universe. If there's crucial dialogue or action that I missed, do not hesitate to tell me about it. For now, though, as much as I like most of this movie, I really wish it hadn't misfired as badly as I think it did at the end.