Superman, Starring David Corenswet, is a different type of movie than we've seen from Director James Gunn. Gunn is known for ensemble casts and group dynamics carrying a movie. This wasn't that. This was indeed a solo Superman movie, despite what many, including myself, thought.

This movie isn't a grim or grounded take on the man of steel. Superman knows it is a superhero movie and embraces it with both arms the way a grandma hugs her grandchild. The monsters are fantastical, the science is mad, and the stakes match. We haven't gotten an on-screen Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult; this is on point since Superman TAS. He is a manic genius driven by hatred of the other and wasting his intelligence on ways to get richer. He isn't the only one. The entire cast, from Rachel Brosnahan to Wendell Pierce, delivers an outstanding performance as their on-screen characters. Case in point, anyone familiar with Jimmy Olsen, played by Skyler Gisondo, knows he ends up in the kinds of situations that make you say, "How did you do this, Jimmy?"  In this movie, Jimmy finds himself in a love triangle with Lex Luthor. This is the type of subplot that would be an entire issue of Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen.

Are there any dark spots, though? It couldn't be a masterpiece in the Superhero genre of movies, could it? To that, yeah, there are flaws. As the film approaches the climax, there is a massive tone shift, and it really catches you off guard, but in a way, it serves the theme of the movie, hope. When the tone shift happens, it looks like Lex has won. Superman is locked away with kryptonite, and there is no sun to be seen. He is slowly dying, and he watches as Lex kills an innocent man to torture him. These scenes are the hopeless ones, and so the tonal shift fits. There are also scenes where it seems like The engineer, played by María Gabriela de Faría, is in a totally different movie. She shares this hatred of Superman to the point of giving up her humanity, and that kind of character is a big contrast to everything else happening. Even the Supergirl cameo at the end feels out of place. These scenes have depth and add a different type of stakes, but when the overall movie doesn't carry those stakes, it just falls flat after the scenes end.

Final thoughts

This movie wasn't what I was expecting at all. Putting it bluntly, I didn't think this was going to be good. No, I'm not a Snyder stan or some comic purist. I'm just a fan of Big Blue. A fan who has been burned before. That said, I had hope and gave this movie a chance, and I found that it was better than I could have imagined. This was an excellent Superman movie, and it hit all the right notes.

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