Three centuries ago, came the first stories of beings with impossible strength: gods, titans, monsters. They were warnings, wishes, and/or ways to make sense of the chaos and cruelty.
Three decades ago, superheroes took their place: vigilantes, orphaned billionaires, aliens in capes, radioactive teenagers who flooded comic books and movie screens with a moral clarity at 24 frames per second.
Three years ago, as caped crusaders overtook not just our screens, but our sense of who should solve the world’s problems, their promises began to ring hollow. ’Cause we didn’t just want to be rescued anymore. We wanted to be understood.
Three months ago, the buzz around James Gunn’s Superman reboot became inescapable; part nostalgia, part cultural referendum.
Three weeks ago, the film finally landed, arriving different from the usual superhero flicks, reflecting a war-weary planet’s projection of hope, dread, and moral confusion. Unleashing think pieces, fan wars, meme storms, and the usual minor internet collapse.
Three days ago, I started writing this piece, half out of obsession, half because I couldn’t stop thinking about the Superman monologue: “I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and, despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that’s my greatest strength.”
“The world may be going to hell,” writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker, “but the writer and director James Gunn has graced it with a sunshine ‘Superman.’” The long-awaited reboot of the Man of Steel has landed with both grace and controversy. The cape still flutters. The insignia remains unmistakable. But this is not your father’s Superman. Nor is it Zack Snyder’s. No, this is a Superman shot through with doubt, ethics, and something dangerously close to , God help us, vulnerability.”
If Barbie was Warner Bros.’ unexpected crash course in Feminism 101, Gunn’s Superman feels like the studio’s follow-up seminar: Healthy Masculinity 101. The syllabus swaps Malibu pink for Kansas blue, but the lesson plan is the same: strength without cruelty, power without domination, and vulnerability without apology.
David Corenswet’s Clark Kent, with his dimples, blue eyes, and a little curl on his forehead, doesn’t stride into frame with thunderclap certainty. He listens. He grieves. He falters. This is a Superman who reads the news (and not just The Daily Planet), who knows what “disinformation” means, and, as more than one fan has noted, probably goes to therapy. And so he wonders whether having the power to stop evil also gives him the right to intervene. And in that tension lies the whole story.
Reddit dismissed it as “peak cringe and woke.” Others, more forgiving, simply called it raw and real. ’Cause, to be honest, the term “woke” has become so flimsily defined in 2025 that its deployment tells us more about the speaker than the subject.
So here we are again: halfway through a billion dollars in global receipts, and back in the familiar arms of the pop debate as eternal as Krypton’s red sun: what is a hero, and who gets to define him?
Boravia and Jarhanpur: A War We’ve Seen Before
James Gunn’s Superman (2025) opens with a barrage of missiles, of metaphors, of political allegory. The Man of Steel’s latest outing drops him into a conveniently fictional war between two conveniently fictional countries: the affluent, U.S.-allied Boravia and its impoverished, perpetually rubble-dusted neighbor, Jarhanpur.
On-screen, Jarhanpur is coded as the underdog in every visual register. Its civilians, played by actors of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Black heritage, take up arms in the form of sticks, stones, and, yes, a fluttering Superman-logo flagmast.Scenes of bombed-out cities, displaced families, and children pulled from rubble reinforce a “hauntingly familiar” vibe.
Their enemies, the Boravians, are largely white and professionally fascist, marching through desert terrain in occupied territory. Boravia’s dictator is a kind of geopolitical smoothie: part Eastern European autocrat, part strongman cosplay, part SNL Trump impression left in the sun too long [theguardian.com]. As The Wrap’s William Bibbiani observes, with all the subtlety of a red laser beam to the chest, “The countries may be fictional, but we know he’s talking about Israel and Palestine”.
Gunn swears otherwise. He claims he wanted a “generic invasion scenario.” According to him, the screenplay was locked long before October 2023, and any resemblance to actual events, living or dead, is purely coincidental and, presumably, your fault for noticing. But filming began on February 29, 2024, several months after the October 7 attacks, which makes the protestations feel less like denial than plausible deniability.
For most of the film, the president of Boravia presides from the comfort of a high-ceilinged office, issuing pronouncements of war with the casual authority of a man confident he’ll never see the battlefield. Then Hawkgirl arrives, literally bursting through the roof, and, faced with the prospect that this time he’ll be the one doing the fighting, he flees. The beat plays like slapstick justice, but Gunn’s satire runs deeper: it’s a cartoon distillation of an old truth—wars are rarely waged by the men who declare them. The scene leaves you with a small, bitter question: if leaders are so sure of their causes, why don’t they simply duke it out themselves and spare the rest of us?
Lois Lane, still the sharpest tool in The Daily Planet’s belt, gets one of the film’s most contentious moments. In a single-take interview, “Miss Lane” protests that Jarhanpur “isn’t innocent either,” echoing every apology for collateral damage in civilian zones, while Superman refuses to let innocents die merely because their government is flawed. Neither side wins, but that’s not the point.
But anyways, now whether viewers see Gunn’s Jarhanpur as Palestine, Kashmir, Yemen, or just “Generic Brown Country #3” depends largely on their geopolitical bingo card. But the grammar of resistance onscreen , the occupied cities, the war-scarred children, the implied oil interests , is legible in every language. ’Cause in the crowded theater of 2025, where superhero movies often say less than the back of a cereal box, Superman dares to at least look like it’s saying something.
An Immigrant’s Burden in a Superhero’s Body
Superman has always been America’s most polite alien invasion, an undocumented extraterrestrial who landed in Kansas instead of Kabul, passed as white, Protestant, and hetero, and was swiftly handed citizenship via adoptive corn-fed parents. And yet, James Gunn’s Superman (2025) dusts off the subtext and pins it to the screen: this is not just a superhero; this is an immigrant.
In press interviews, Gunn says the quiet part out loud. “It’s the story of America,” he told The Wrap, “an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” Then, as if to make sure no one missed the civics lesson, he added that the film is about “basic human kindness… something we have lost.”
At the film’s L.A. premiere, Gunn was defended by his brother, Sean, who told Variety: “Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.”
The film’s clearest gesture comes via government classification: Superman is formally labeled an “extraterrestrial immigrant,” which in 2025 America is about as welcome a designation as “public health inspector at a meatpacking plant.” ’Cause Superman’s position , power without passport, action without approval ,is itself the flashpoint. In a world obsessed with sovereignty and suspicion, his very presence becomes its own geopolitical crisis. Should a being born elsewhere, raised here, and accountable to no institution be allowed to act on behalf of the planet? Is that heroism or imperialism in a cape?
In the apartment interview, Lois pins him with a simple, awful question: “People on social media are suspicious because you’re an alien.” Clark answers quietly, almost like a confession: “Yes. I’ve been very honest about that from the beginning. I come from a planet called Krypton, which is gone now, along with all my history, my parents. They sent me here as a baby to save my life.” When Lois asks the obvious follow-up, “Here , Where?” he shuts it down: “You know , I’m not going to say that.” Lois presses: “People say you’re here for more nefarious purposes… calling you a ‘super spy.’”
In two lines, Gunn turns exile into accusation: confession invited, empathy withheld; grief becomes a hashtag. It reads like an immigrant testimony. Gunn makes explicit what every displaced person knows instinctively: loss is criminalized. In that exchange, Superman’s exile and an immigrant’s deportable status become the same moral question: who is permitted the simple dignity of grief and another chance at restarting their lives?
This isn’t a stretch. Superman has long been a vessel for immigrant anxieties: invented by two Jewish sons of immigrants in the shadow of the Holocaust, “keenly aware of rising antisemitism and Nazi oppression, as well as the despair of a people saddled with economic depression. Superman took on corrupt politicians, unscrupulous businessmen and, in a story titled ‘How Superman Would End the War,’ Superman brought Hitler himself to justice.” In a cinematic universe usually preoccupied with multiverses and quantum timelines, Gunn’s Superman plants himself in a far more urgent reality: a world where origin stories matter not just for character arcs but for visa applications.
And in this context, Superman’s greatest power might not be flight or heat vision but his refusal to be claimed. Not by a country. Not by a creed. Not even by the very people he saves.
Capitalism’s Kryptonite: Lex Luthor’s Empire of Influence
Lex Luthor’s long, strange evolution—from mad scientist to real estate swindler to presidential candidate—has always reflected the anxieties of its age. James Gunn’s 2025 Superman doesn’t just update Luthor; it makes him inevitable. Nicholas Hoult plays him not as a supervillain but as a symptom: a tech oligarch with war portfolios, surveillance contracts, and the charm of a man who’s been on the cover of Wired one too many times.
Hoult’s Luthor is the smooth face of the algorithmic empire, equal parts influencer, weapons dealer, and philosopher king. He doesn’t wear armour; he wears wealth. His LuthorCorp sells arms to Boravia, stirs up war in Jarhanpur, and secures mining rights as both peacekeeper and provocateur. The geopolitical subplot isn’t subtext; it’s an IPO. Gunn makes explicit what was once a metaphor: Luthor isn’t funding the conflict; he is the conflict. Capitalism, after all, thrives on controlled collapse.
The film’s satire lands hardest in quiet horror. One scene shows Superman thrown into a LuthorCorp detention camp , his own “private correctional institution” , flanked by crying toddlers, jailed journalists, and “political agitators”. Gunn dares to say what blockbuster cinema often avoids: the billionaire doesn’t just influence the state; he is the state ; outsourcing violence, weaponising “disinformation”, controlling media and securing domination.
He programs an actual horde of virtual monkeys to unleash a coordinated torrent of disinformation online. The image is absurd, almost Looney Tunes-esque, but it lands: modern villainy doesn’t need kryptonite when it has clickbait and bots. In one scene, Luthor leaks a video of Superman’s infancy, suggesting that his alien parents sent him to conquer Earth. The message spreads like digital wildfire.
What might have been heavy-handed is instead laced with a kind of weary humor. “Funny, oddly whimsical,” writes Jesse Hassenger in The Guardian, noting that Superman’s greatest vulnerability isn’t kryptonite but “reading the comments.” And it shows. Gunn’s Superman isn’t brought to his knees by brute force, but by the slow, soul-eroding weight of public opinion. The collective doubt, mockery, and suspicion bleed into his psyche, not because he fears the people, but because he cares what they think.
This Luthor doesn’t merely reflect Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. He synthesises them all. The war profiteer, the data baron, the messianic disruptor—they’re no longer separate archetypes but overlapping functions of the same machine. He launches satellites and stokes nationalism. He clones Superman just to break him. He livestreams a coup.And still, he frames it all as progress. The most dangerous men don’t break the law; they write it.
By the end, what makes Luthor terrifying isn’t his hatred of Superman—it’s his ability to convince us that he’s saving us from him. In a film about metahumans and monsters, the scariest figure is the one who insists he’s just a man.
The Man of Steel as the Man of Choice.
The movie begins with Clark Kent wounded and listening to a holographic recording from his birth parents Jor-El and Lara. The first half of the message is soothing – Lara says “We love you more than heaven, our son… that hope is you, Kal-El.” reinforcing that he was sent to Earth to live. But Lex Luthor later recovers the damaged second half, which reveals a shocking truth: Jor-El and Lara actually intended Kal-El to conquer humanity. In the decoded message, the Kryptonians state that humans are “weak of mind and spirit,” and urge Superman to “lord over the planet… take as many wives as you can” so his Kryptonian legacy will thrive This twist utterly inverts the classic origin: unlike Brando’s noble Jor-El (who famously said he sent “my only son” to help a “great people” Gunn’s Jor-El has a despotic agenda. Clark’s initial comfort from his parents’ words turns to disillusionment when he learns their “final message” was one of domination, not hope.
In the film’s climax, Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, and instead of replaying Jor-El’s hologram, his robot servant plays a home video – a montage of Clark’s Christmases, cornfield games, and family moments with Ma and Pa Kent. This choice is deeply symbolic: it literally replaces the Kryptonian message of duty with the earthbound memories of love. As FilmColossus puts it, the film’s beginning uses the Kryptonian parents’ video as comfort, while the ending switches it to “footage from Clark’s childhood with Ma and Pa Kent,” shifting his identity “from Kryptonian to human”
In that moment Superman smiles, finally embracing that it’s his Earth-family’s love , not his alien birthright , that grounds him . Gunn’s Superman makes a clear thematic statement: You are who you choose to be, not just whose son you are. Jor-El’s message forces Clark to confront the fact that his birthright was dark. But Pa Kent’s guidance and the embrace of his human family reaffirm that Clark’s morality comes from choice.
In short, the film repeatedly contrasts legacy versus nurture. Gunn throws Superman’s ties to Krypton “out the window,” pushing him toward humanity
As the Christian Century analysis observes, Jonathan Kent explicitly reminds Clark that his identity isn’t fixed at birth: “parents aren’t for telling their children who they’re supposed to be…we are here to help you make fools of yourself all on your own… your choices… your actions…make you who you are”. Superman’s story here rejects destiny: he isn’t bound to conquer or rule as Jor-El wished; instead, he chooses compassion and justice. This emphasis on choice over fate is the film’s emotional core.
The theme of identity crisis is also reflected in the exchange between Lois and superman which is one of Gunn’s sharpest bits of writing because it works on three levels at once. First, Lois steps out of the “love interest” box and into the role of moral provocateur, grilling Superman like an investigative journalist who refuses to be dazzled by the cape. Her questions are rapid-fire, almost prosecutorial, stripping away his moral shorthand (“they were going to kill people”) until he’s left admitting he acted without democratic oversight. Second, Superman’s defense ; urgent, moral, but thin on legality, lays bare the film’s central tension: the gulf between doing the right thing in the moment and doing it within a system. He’s a man with godlike agency but no clear mandate, which makes him, depending on your lens, either heroic or dangerous. And third, the scene doubles as a quiet critique of the superhero flick itself. Instead of the usual unquestioned “drop into a war zone, stop the bad guys, cue applause” beat, Gunn makes us sit in the discomfort of whether that’s moral action or hubris dressed as virtue. By the end, it’s not a courtroom but Lois’s living room where Superman finds himself on trial, and his answers sound less like victory speeches and more like someone still working out what “doing good” really means.
Hope and Hot Takes
Officially, Superman (2025) is not about Gaza, or Yemen, or Kashmir. It is, James Gunn insists, a “moral allegory” , a term that here means definitely about politics, just not the one you’re thinking of.
Screenwriter Matthew Vaughn has likened the film to a clash of ideals, not a newsreel. Producers like Peter Safran and various actors have offered variations of the same talking point: this isn’t propaganda; it’s compassion. A cape for all people, if you will.
Outside the soundstage, however, nuance met a heat ray.
Fox News quickly dubbed the film “SuperWoke.” Greg Gutfeld accused it of “lecturing us on immigration,” Jesse Watters muttered darkly about “liberal guilt,” and Kellyanne Conway may or may not have compared Superman to Bernie Sanders in spandex. Ben Shapiro, wielding 280 characters like a kryptonite dagger, tweeted that only “left-wing brains” would see any Israel/Palestine allegory, and advised audiences to skip the film in favour of something less… allegorical.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the algorithm, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker declared it “two hours of fuck Israel the entire time,” while CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin christened it a “cultural moment” in solidarity with Palestine. Across social platforms, pro-Palestinian users hailed the film as a cinematic Intifada in a cape. Even the Israeli government got in on the fun: the L.A. consulate responded with a not-so-subtle meme of IDF soldiers labelled “the real superheroes.”
Thus, a film meant to revive Superman as a hopeful symbol instead became a Rorschach test for the planet’s ideological anxieties. One man’s global citizen is another man’s deep-state alien. And while Gunn tries to assure us it’s fiction, the world insists otherwise , because in 2025, everything is real, especially the things that aren’t.
The film, for all its costumed grandeur, resists triumphalism. Superman here is not alone, nor is he ever enough. He’s needed in a dozen places at once and fails, quietly, in most of them. No single battle is won completely. The villains never quite lose. He doesn’t liberate so much as intervene. And somewhere in that murky middle, between witness and war machine, messiah and migrant , the myth begins to fracture.
The truth is that every Superman is political. George Reeves, a postwar moralist. Christopher Reeve, an All-American idealist. Henry Cavill, a somber avatar of post-9/11 paranoia. And now, David Corenswet , a hero trying to find hope in a fragmented world.
To be “woke,” in the most charitable sense, is to be aware. James Gunn insists there is no singular allegory, no didactic sermon. “It’s about morality,” he says, “not messaging.” But morality is never abstract. It arrives embodied in drones and tweets and orphaned children. Gunn’s Superman is not indoctrinated, nor is he radical. He is simply awake: to suffering, to failure, to the limits of brute strength. He hears the cries and wonders if he’s worthy of answering them.
And if that, in 2025, is enough to spark outrage, then the film has done more than just reboot a franchise , it has held up a mirror.
In the end, what matters isn’t whether Superman cried. What matters is that we did.
Because the Man of Steel still flies. But his feet, we now see, are made of clay.
And maybe that’s the real punk rock.