Do I Need To See James Gunn’s ‘Superman’?
(ANALYSIS) Let’s face it. I’m old.
Thus, I have absolutely zero desire to open my wallet and see James Gunn’s “Superman” in a theater. I’m pretty sure that I will have no desire to see it when it shows up for free on Amazon Prime in a few months or even chopped into pieces someday on basic-cable channels.
Based on the many reviews that I have read and the YouTube commentaries I have watched, it sounds like this movie was “written” — scare quotes are intentional — for folks much, much younger and more video-game oriented than me.
One critic, somewhere, suggested that this is basically TikTok “Superman,” with editing and a frantic pace that would make music-video-era MTV seem like the Turner Classic Movies Channel.
By the way, is the name of this movie “Superman” or “James Gunn’s Superman”? I had trouble telling during a weekend of research.
If there is an overarching theme in this reluctant post, this is it: Even when dealing with super-flicks, I care about the quality of the screenplay and the basic plot, as opposed to the endless digital blitz of whiz-bang special effects.
At the same time, let me stress that — while I love the 1978 “Superman,” with Christopher Reeve’s iconic performance — I am perfectly willing to see writers make changes in the “Superman” canon. We are not dealing with holy writ, with page after page of revealed truths that cannot be tweaked.
However, I prefer to see comic-book material deepened, in some way, but in a way that is consistent with the original characters. Why make stories of his kind even more shallow?
You can read the rest of Terry Mattingly’s post at Rational Sheep on Substack.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.