Truth, Justice, and the Minnesota Get Together (Patreon)

Beth and I have tickets to see Indigo Girls and Melissa Ethridge at the Minnesota State Fair, this weekend - purchased months ago. To accommodate that, my in-laws are taking the kids to their place for much of the weekend; Baby Metal they enjoyed, but lovely folk music was less likely to be their thing. Also, we didn't have extra tickets for them.

The state fair is a big deal around here - like a weeks-long convention and sports tournament that attracts a considerable cross-section of the local population. They call it "the great Minnesota Get Together" around here, and they do it without any evidence of sarcasm and nary a tongue in a cheek. That this will only be the second time I've been there since moving to Minneapolis in 2023 is as much a tell that I wasn't born here as anything else. And the last time was for a Weird Al Yankovic concert, which is only more damning - not because of Weird Al, mind you, but because what kind of a weirdo requires a mere concert to give him a reason to rub elbows with local politicians and eat fried sticks of butter or whatever?

Beth and I finally got around to seeing Superman, which we mostly enjoyed.

(Some moderate spoilers up ahead.)

As superheroes go, Superman is tough material to work with. He has a long history of being an unabashed good guy, beyond reproach and above human pettiness. Also, he's practically invincible and has an absurd number of ancillary superpowers that all go to 11. I grew up with the Christopher Reeve Superman, which fully embodied that, but as I got older, I found I enjoyed more complicated and vulnerable heroes more - from the X-Men to Watchmen to Mystery Men to the MCU.

And yet, when an attempt was made to make Superman gritty, tortured, and alien, I really wasn't interested. That, for me, was missing the point - removing a fundamental part of the Superman mythology. It would be like re-imagining Frodo Baggins as a six-foot-tall warrior who goes toe-to-toe with one of the Nine at the edge of the Shire and wins.

This Superman is a deliberate return to the do-gooder of the Christopher Reeve portrayal of the character, complete with reusing its theme music. It remembers that Superman's greatest weakness isn't kryptonite, it's his inability to be in more than one place at a time. Granted, that comes with the usual Superman warts. The antagonists are all horrible people with no redeeming qualities. The brown people in the ambiguously defined foreign country are united in their faith that Superman will protect them.

And for all that, it isn't entirely without nuance. The scene where Lois Lane interviews Superman (and the whole "how do people/governments respond to superheroes unilaterally intervening in geopolitics" plot) acknowledges a question widely explored in Captain America: Civil War and appropriate to ask here. The Krypton reveal, although heavy-handed, provokes the sort of crisis of faith Superman rarely suffers. Superman's inability to rest, to stop, to plan even a moment further in time than addressing the current crisis is a non-trivial source of problems for him, and his enemies exploit his predictable nature to devastating effect throughout.

The writing of the characters really sells this movie for me. Superman is the sort of Superman I think of when I think of Superman, with a touch of human fallibility. The Daily Planet crew are all great, as is Astro. The villains are so over-the-top that they'd be completely unbelievable if it weren't for the existence of Elon Musk (speaking of "secret harems"); the Russian roulette interrogation was just fucking awful (in a good way), even down to the tech bro's confusion when his clever gambit both fails to get him what he wants and hurts someone completely unnecessarily. And the trio of Hawkgirl, Green Lantern, and (especially) Mr. Terrific - including the corporate sponsorship gag - are pretty terrific.

Mostly, I'm glad we didn't get a loving and extended treatment of Superman's origin story, trivially minor threats (there was only one squirrel rescued, but that was in the heat of the moment and not the main point of the scene), or superdicking around with Jimmy and Lois, and instead start in medias res with something that actually matters: Superman just got his ass kicked for the first time, and now we get to see the story of how he confronts that.

I wouldn't consider Superman (2025) high art or something that will radically change moviegoers' expectations of the superhero genre, but it does a good job with a hero who is extraordinarily difficult to both get right and make interesting.