As an 80s baby the Christopher Reeves portrayal of Superman is the one that stands out as my personal touchstone. I also have really fond memories of the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated versions. My only experience with modern Superman is probably Zach Snyder's Batman vs Superman movie, and maybe another one of the Henry Cavil films, they were either bad, forgettable, or both. I do remember having a problem with the way Snyder's Superman casually destroyed metropolis, there is no way he wasn't causing massive casualties. So I'm obviously not a huge fan of the man with the big S on his chest, but that said, I heard that this latest iteration of the franchise fixed a lot of the problems with the previous films so I figured I should check it out.
As usual, spoilers ahead.
The movie opens with Superman taking his first loss of his relatively short career at the hands of some mysterious masked super villain, skipping over his origin story with some brief text explaining where we are in the story. It's a bit awkward and my kids who were watching with me remarked that it felt like the movie started off in the middle, but no one wants yet another Superman origin retelling, so here we are. We get to meet Krypto the super dog right away, kind of anticlimactic because it's the scene that was in all of the trailers, but on the other hand it was nice for a change to not have the middle or end of the movie ruined by being used in a trailer, so this comes out even. Anyway, after getting his ass kicked big blue retreats to the fortress of solitude to heal up with the help of his cool robot doctors, not sure why he has a surgical suite since he's never lost before but whatever, he only needs 30 seconds of yellow sunlight and to quickly watch a damaged video message from his birth parents to heal up and get back to the fight.
We quickly learn that Lex Luthor is behind Supes new nemesis calling the shots, and that the whole attack is a ploy to get Superman to lead them to his hideout, also explaining at the same time why Supes needed to retreat here. We get to meet one of Luthor's unhinged henchmen, she controls nanobots to shapeshift her body into whatever she can imagine, basically an evil green lantern, they don't do a lot with this. She then uses her powers to jack into the fortress computer systems, they are looking for information that could be potentially damaging to Superman. Conveniently they find the other half of the video message from Superman's Kryptonian parents which is apparently a complete 180 from the first half. His parents allegedly urge him to lord over the simple people of earth, and create a secret harem to repopulate the planet. Oh, and they disable and capture Krypto for good measure.
I have a lot of complaints about this part.
The message was in Kryptonian, I can handwave away using nanotech integrated directly with your brain to hack into a computer, that's not new...but how did Luthor and The Engineer know to recover the damaged video message?
Once they recovered it and had it translated by "30 top linguists" why did the entire world believe that Superman's biggest hater didn't doctor the video, shit, even Superman was buying it. The movie never addresses it, and we're just supposed to take it for granted that Lex actually is being honest about this one thing.
Predictably, once Supes is made aware of the footage he realizes they must have accessed the fortress, he goes to confirm and check the damage and realizes the dog is gone, and again, predictably, flies off the handle on camera while Luthor calmly denies everything. It sort of feels like this scene is in the movie because they needed a scene where Superman was enraged, not because it actually makes sense for him to be enraged. Later we find out that it's not even his dog, so...yeah.
Next Supes decides to turn himself in, because maybe they'll send him to the same place they sent Krypto. As soon as he's arrested Luthor predictably pulls out some Kryptonite. Technically it's not a stick of Kryptonite, Lex has control of a metahuman who can turn himself into anything, including Krpytonite. How convenient!?
This sets up the second dumbest sequence in this movie. Okay, so imagine this, Superman is in a glass cube inside of a pocket universe that Luthor has control over. No, I'm not going to explain the pocket universe, the movie doesn't really bother so neither will I. There are hundreds of these cubes arranged Hollywood Squares style in two rows facing each other. Why is it setup this way you ask? We're in a pocket universe with basically infinite space, why keep these cubes together at all? Well obviously if they were spread out we couldn't easily setup a scenario where Superman is locked in a cage with the metahuman guy who can turn into Kryptonite, conveniently across from the cell/cube that is holding the infant baby of the metahuman who can turn into Kryptonite, do try to keep up, okay?
So, predictably, Supes convinces the guy to stop being kryptonite so that he can save his son. This is literally the only way this scenario could have played out.
The movie continues to be predictable for the remaining running time, Supes busts out, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane get the dirt on Luthor exposing his secret plans, Mr. Terrific hit's ctrl-z a few times on the doomsday device to undo the damage, cut to the credits.
There is a lot more dumb stuff in this movie, I'll hit a few highlights without digging in because this is already long.
Okay...I could probably go on, I was going to stop before I remembered the cyber monkeys and the doomsday machine.
I'm not even going to get into the other super heroes features in this movie except to say that Mr. Terrific was fantastic 🥁
Needless to say, I didn't really like this movie, but my kids thoroughly enjoyed it, so instead of 1 star, I'm going to give it 3.
Final word: I think this movie would have made a much better cartoon than a live action movie. It has the mix of slapstick and gravitas that very much reminded me of the Justice League Unlimited.