Among the many benefits of seeing James Gunn’s Superman in theaters, you no longer have to worry about internet spoilers and you’ll be able to tell which culture-war blowhards haven’t actually left their Silicon Valley work-from-home basements and their soulless private-equity offices to at least hate-watch it for themselves and are mouthing off based only on misinformation and overreactions from other blowhards.

While the rage-harvesters gorge on clicks and dare opponents to quote-tweet them for reach-broadening clique domination and/or barroom-brawl “fun”, you’ll potentially earn the advantage of a more informed opinion and might just see the world’s finest Superman film to date without Christopher Reeve in it. Heck, if you’re under 40 and never got past “YOU CANNOT JUST REVERSE TIME BY SPINNING THE WORLD BACKWARDS!”, you might even like this one more. I wouldn’t know! You have the power over your own opinions. Don’t cede it to anyone, not even me.

(Not that you would. And I’m aware of the irony of declaring opinions about other people’s opinions of how to have opinions, so you needn’t point it out.)

I was skeptical going in, and not just because of DC Comics’ disappointing Hollywood track record apart from the gems that were the first Wonder Woman and the first Aquaman. Granted, Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was my favorite film of 2023 — the culmination of the team’s evolution from naughty edgelord antiheroes to a three-dimensional, weirdly loving found-family within the context of a crowded superhero blockbuster universe. But with his jump from Marvel-movie contributor to DC-movie co-manager, his initial works — The Suicide Squad, its Peacemaker spinoff, the animated Creature Commandos — have each been entertaining in their own ways, but catered to a preexisting, moody, “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” fan base with cravings for snarky antiheroes and extremely NSFW content. Some of the characters’ interior lives grew added dimensions as they went (especially Commandos, to my surprise), but didn’t prove Gunn could write a benevolent icon traditionally revered worldwide as a capital-H Hero with a moral compass and no “anti-” modifier.

Could Gunn forgo those reflex bad-boy tendencies and write Superman as fans over 40 best remember him? Or are we back to Grimdark Man of Steel again? Would we see him punch through bank robbers’ skulls and pitch Toyman into the sun? Grimace and snarl so scarily that Batman has to emerge from the shadows and tell him to lighten up? Don’t we have Homelander for this reason now? How would this even be different from Zack Snyder’s take? Besides undoubtedly being funnier?

Surprise! Gunn passed the writing challenge he seemingly imposed on himself, located that old-fashioned Good Guy core, and pushed in the opposite tonal direction: his Superman is an earnest, wide-eyed Goody Two-Shoes who never cusses. He’s occasionally naive, but not an idiot bumpkin, though he might seem like one to biggest-city audience members for whom everyday rudeness is a virtue. (Post-Crisis comics fans may be reminded of Captain Marvel from the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run, who acted so hokey his teammate Guy Gardner nicknamed him “Captain Whitebread”.) Gunn’s idealistic throwback is not a version that would’ve suited Henry Cavill, whose specific kind of charisma worked well for superheroics but was almost too leading-man handsome to capture Clark’s down-to-Earth humility.

As our new Man of Tomorrow, Twisters villain David Corenswet sells the outlandish proposal that anyone in today’s broken world could or should grow up to become the “big blue Boy Scout” of yesteryear. Credit is naturally owed to good ol’ Ma and Pa Kent, both still alive in this rebooted canon down in Smallville (which, judging by their accents, is now at Kansas’ southernmost tip, possibly on a farmland isthmus annexed from Arkansas). Looming nearly a foot taller than nearly all the other characters, his Clark Kent is a gangling, tousle-haired goofball (an update of Reeves’ 1950s-looking, weak-kneed, slicked-back Mama’s-boy) who represents for those mighty few of us who aren’t afraid to use “darn” and “heck” in conversation. At last we feel seen. WE’RE HERE! WE’RE SQUARE! GET USED TO IT!

And I do mean “we”. As a kid my wife Anne watched 1978’s Superman: The Movie so many times that she memorized it. All of it. She can recite every line of dialogue in order from beginning to end. It was more than a party trick: it was the form her fandom took, her way of expressing and honoring what the film and its hero meant to her. Reeve’s ultimate Good Samaritan of course remains the perfect Superman, so if anyone in our family were to mistrust Clark’s back-to-basics personality overhaul or detect false notes here, it’d be her. To my relief, apart from some minor bits, she was thrilled with the results.

Gunn surrounds Corenswet with an ensemble comprising numerous veterans from other superhuman works and from other Gunn projects across his career. He devotes ample space to much of the cast, though not all of them, for the sake of a manageable runtime. The narrative picks up in media res, three years into Superman’s superheroing days. The backstory foundation remains in place — Kal-El was still a baby refugee from an eradicated birthplace (not an immigrant per se) who grew up and moved to the city of Metropolis to become a mild-mannered reporter at the Daily Planet, which in this optimistic alternate reality is a news site whose newsprint edition is still robustly thriving. Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, House of Cards) is fellow reporter Lois Lane, whom he’s been dating for a few months and who knows his secret identity.

Former X-Man Nicholas Hoult is our latest Lex Luthor, an evil billionaire tech-whiz exactly as he’s been in the comics throughout the decades — sometimes more of one than the other — who doesn’t have to be stretched out of shape to resemble any real evil billionaire tech-whizzes living or dead. He still super-hates Superman and wants him out of the picture by any means necessary, preferably painfully. Hoult revels in the part, particularly near the end with a soliloquy about that very hatred whose topic sentence is basically “Envy is good.” His Deadly Sin of choice may differ, but he’s aptly positioned as the Gordon Gekko of an even shallower new generation.

From that classic premise Gunn sends the plot in untested directions. Our Hero sparks headline-news controversy when he takes it upon himself to stop a potential war single-handedly between two tiny Middle Eastern countries that of course are totally fictional and bear no resemblance to any real-world neighboring enmities whatsoever. Among the crucial differences, the targeted nation of Innocencia appears to have no government or armed forces or buildings whatsoever, and is just a lot of innocent crowds mingling in the desert; and the leader of the greedy aggressor nation of Schmisrael is bald. (Love seeing the typecast Zlatko Burić again, who was also a morally deficient tycoon in 2012 and Triangle of Sadness.)

Presumably this Earth was pretty war-free for at least the last three years, so this is the first times Supes has ever felt compelled by the pure, understandable motive of saving lives no matter the location or the scale or the cause, but his flagrant violation of the Logan Act (a real law, not a make-believe one that politely asks Wolverine not to conquer Canada) is the perfect opportunity for Luthor to launch his latest Master Plan. He jumps on this diplomatic crisis as an excuse to take down Our Hero with the American government’s conflicted backing — offering his top-secret super-prison for double-maximum security holding, as well as two super-minions to make the arrest — María Gabriela de Faría (Syfy’s Deadly Class) as the Engineer, a nanobot-wielding weapons master thus far bereft of her role in The Authority; and a silent flying strongman introduced as the mysterious Hammer of Boravia, who then changes into a monogrammed costume and another name more familiar to longtime DC readers.

As if Clark weren’t already smarting from Lois lecturing him rightly on the ethical violation of submitting imaginary interviews with himself for publication, now he has to face the consequences of becoming an international lawbreaker, which, if addressed through the established court process, would amount at most to a three-year jail sentence. Given his clean record, how beloved he is (Metropolis loves loves loves Superman), and his past three years’ community service, even a defense attorney like Bill Oakley could negotiate that down to two hours’ probation and time served. But this pretext is more than enough to spark an epic battle of Good Versus Evil that will test our new Superman’s mettle and his rigid moral code. Also at stake is the very fate of Earth itself, because of course eventually it all escalates into a possible worldwide disaster. When Lex errs, he never errs small. On the other hand, Lex also unearths a Major Secret that Clark himself doesn’t even know, one that rattles him to the bone.

The film comes off a bit frenetic at times as Gunn aims to cover entire parsecs of ground in his All-New All-Different DC Universe setup. Per Warner Bros tradition extra superheroes are stuffed into the works. The Suicide Squad casualty Nathan Fillion practically walks out of the pages of my comics collection as Green Lantern Guy Gardner, that obnoxious space cop whose hard-light VFX have come a long way since the Ryan Reynolds fiasco we all agreed never to speak of again. Anthony Carrigan (Gotham, the amazing Barry), covered in tons of makeup as Metamorpho the Element Man, plays a version more vulnerable and less confident than the walking periodic table I dug as a kid. But the runaway best new hero is X-Men: First Class chump Edi Gathegi (treated far better on For All Mankind) as the millionaire tech-whiz Mr. Terrific, who has actual smarts and chooses to use his fortune for good, like a slightly less rich Batman. Gunn knows his way around deliriously giddy tracking-shot fight scenes, all of which are tremendous fun here, but Mr. T gets one of the sprightliest (set to some obscure song, as is the Gunn way).

The canniest new addition to the Super-film canon from the comics, as sampled in the trailer and blessedly expanded here, is the live-action debut of Krypto the Super-Dog! Supes refuses to consider him a “pet”, but he’s a mostly-CGI and yet stunningly realistic depiction of a rambunctious, sometimes clueless dog that you have to yell at several times before it gets through his thick very-good-doggo skull that you are asking him to obey a frickin’ command just once in his life, pretty please Superman is BEGGING YOU. Gunn does not skimp on the Krypto.

By the final act some points do get left behind. A predictable cop-out of moral luck saves Superman from any further side effects of his brief interventionist dalliance, so we never exactly see him vowing to the U.N. he shall henceforth observe the Prime Directive toward other nations’ wars. The powers given to him by the rays of Earth’s yellow sun work at varying speeds, accelerating nicely when some glaring final-battle wounds completely vanish in the denouement. Any jaded viewers weary of endless Easter eggs and callbacks in every single superhero film should steel themselves for the panoply here — numerous shout-outs to other Super-works, which I’ll not be listing here in their entirety even though I did catch some and Anne rattled off a really long list as we drove home. (Dan Jurgens gets a street! Simon Stagg’s company! Eve’s cold-weather headgear! Central City’s coffee shop is a chain now! And so on.)

Not a perfect film by any means, Gunn’s kick-off of the all-new DCU delivers what I’d hoped for most: a corporate rebuttal to the DCEU’s ultimately unpleasant Superman. Corenswet’s Strange Visitor from Another Planet doesn’t necessarily form-fit the entire mold of anyone’s hot-topic poster-idol needs, but the key ingredient that was missing for so long was actual demonstrations of his unconditional love of life and humanity — not just as a collective mass, but individual by individual. Again and again and again we thrill as he saves lives wherever possible, more so than the Randian Übermensch in our rear-view mirrors (sometimes to an absurd extreme by our mere human standards, to the relief of one stray squirrel). I delight in the irony of one such life-saving moment — in all the trailers and one car commercial — that Gunn chose to shoot with pumped-up Zack Snyder Speed-Ramping™. It isn’t the film’s only middle finger, but the figurative gesture is noted.

Such is the joy of our new Superman. He’s a farm kid with a heart ten sizes too big, taught by his adopted parents at an early age about the values of truth, justice, and ye olde concept of an “American way”, regardless of how drastically short we 340 million have fallen together as a country. Such sentimentality may come off as cheesy to today’s inured, extremely online pop-culture addicts, particularly to those so preoccupied with the world’s myriad forms of awfulness that they’ve been convinced that awfulness is all there is. Gunn’s impassioned Superman is a much-needed oasis of sincerity in that overwhelming ocean of fatalism and surrender.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Skyler Gisondo (Licorice Pizza, The Righteous Gemstones) is the new Jimmy Olsen, accurately geeky as the sidekick whose sometimes awkward contributions do indeed make a difference. (I’d be okay with him starring in an adaptation of the Matt Fraction/Steve Lieber maxiseries.) Bradley Cooper (Rocket himself!) and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld, Reminiscence) appear in Kryptonian baby-rocket video footage as the late Jor-El and Lara.

Returnees from Creature Commandos include The Winter Soldier‘s Frank Grillo making his first live-action appearance as Rick Flag Sr.; and Alan Tudyk, that beloved robot-voice vet (Rogue One, Andor, The Electric State), switching to play the head robot at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, which is slightly remodeled from the Richard Donner rendition.

The Wire‘s Wendell Pierce gets crowded out as a promising Perry White, as does Madame Web survivor Isabela Merced (last seen in The Last of Us season 2) as Hawkgirl. Other Daily Planet staffers include ex-SNLer Beck Bennett as sports-section bro Steve Lombard. Comedian Michael Ian Black is a talk-show host who’s had Lex on as a guest many times.

Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Sean Gunn cameos as Maxwell Lord, grabbing the baton that started with Peter Facinelli in The CW’s Supergirl and Pedro Pascal fumbled in Wonder Woman 1984. I trust his brother the director will give him more face time in DC’s future.

Naturally there’re at least two cameos from actors who’ll appear in future DC projects, as well as Easter-egg roles for pals of Gunn and other Superman veterans, but I’ve only named the ones we caught without having to look them up later. We’ll leave the rest be.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there indeed are scenes during and after the Superman end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…after the main credits conclude (in a truncated form of the original Superman: The Movie star-trail font!), we cut to a quiet glimpse of Superman and Krypto sitting together in outer space (on an asteroid or something?) and looking down on Earth, where America’s all lit up for nighttime.

Besides Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the remaining end credits name 45 other comics creators whose creations and stories factored into these proceedings, only three of whom are strangers to me that I plan to look up later. They confirm at least one scene was shot on location in Cincinnati, home of the building that was the real-life template for the Super-Friends’ Hall of Justice, which we visited in 2016 while the beautiful flowerbeds presently out front were still under construction at the time. Tunes along the way including one of Clark’s favorite bands, the Mighty CrabJoys, singing their very own theme song, which could be labeled “punk” only by his own Radio Disney standards.

Once all the names have rolled away, we return to the denouement: Superman and Mr. Terrific examine one of the cleaved skyscrapers that were reassembled at the end through careful application of gadget-based Movie Magic. The crack did not magically seal itself, and the building’s two halves are off by a fraction of an inch. Supes looks at Terrific, who’s bugged by the infinitesimal error and annoyed that Supes is looking at him expectantly, as if they can do anything about it. Terrific storms off, kicking a pile of rubble as he goes.

Supes turns back to the crack, looks down and sighs. “Darn it, I can be such a jerk sometimes.”