Cape Fear

All last week conservatives attacked the new Superman movie. I assumed they knew what they were talking about. The ones I read on X—Peachy Keenan, Mark Hemingway—do know what they are talking about 95 percent of the time. Those I hear on radio and TV—Buck Sexton and others—have almost as high a batting average.

But they were all wrong this time.

Superman is not bisexual. Actor David Corenswet is beautiful (and married), and when wearing dress slacks as Clark Kent shows superhumanly perfect gluteus muscles. So many viewers may wish Kal El was at least a possible mate for them but in this movie he only likes one particular female human.

Superman and the movie plot aren’t about his being an “illegal immigrant.” Illegal immigrants are humans, and the plot here involves Lex Luthor framing him for crimes and then trying to get Superman incarcerated (or worse) without trial not for being from another country but for being an “it” that’s not a human being.

Superman isn’t anti-American. He chooses to remain in America and be an American citizen. I suppose one could think him as a liberal internationalist—he intervenes in a military conflict between two neighboring countries, one aggressive, Slavic and Caucasian and its weaker neighbor curiously populated by south Asians—but he’s stopping an invasion and a genocide not as a representative of his adopted country, its populace, or its government, but only himself, a volunteer, and what he thinks is right.

The invasion’s engineered by the military-industrial Deep State, run not by an amorphous blob of villains as the real Deep State, but by one CEO of a Pentagon contractor, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). The way Lex Luthor uses lawfare and the media (liberal comic Michael Ian Black plays a sycophantic mainstream media talking head) makes this movie very MAGA. Hardly “woke,” in a penultimate scene, Luthor gives a speech about how he’s engineered all of the lies and lawfare and social media bot farms and clones and technology and framing to destroy Superman not because Superman’s bad, but because Luthor envies his natural virtues. If it were a much longer speech it could’ve come straight out of an Ayn Rand novel.

There’s a lot of humor: a cameo appearance by a teen Super Girl; a loveable but badly-behaved cutie pie Krypton, the Super Dog, here as a Super Lassie who saves the boy and the day; a number of actors in addition to Hoult from other Syfy. Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk from Firefly were cast, Fillion as a douchey and unattractive Green Lantern leading a now corporate-sponsored Justice League (a less psychotic version of Anthony Starr’s Homelander character in The Boys), Tudyk as the voice of one of Superman’s robots in the Fortress of Solitude, a robot who just wants to be human (or at least to feel feelings). Hoult’s fellow cast member from X-Men: First Class, Edi Gathegi, plays another Justice League hero. (Gathegi is heroic, having survived playing Eddie Willers in the very bad production of Atlas Shrugged back in 2011).

The heterosexual romance is strong in this film. A traditionalist would quibble that when Luthor has Superman incarcerated in a special private prison he creates in a “pocket universe” outside of our normal reality, which he contracts out to the U.S. government to house prisoners who are mutants, aliens or metahumans (along with political prisoners from third-world hells), his lady helps rescue him. Rachael Brosnahan is so good as a feisty version of Lois Lane, recalling Margot Kidder, that I think I like her more than the Amy Adams version of Lois in two previous Superman films. Brosnahan—Irish but often cast as Jewish—isn’t a tomboy, but is never seen wearing a dress. It’s not the first time Lois has saved Superman though. The Amy Adams’ Lois did that too.

I think director James Gunn said some stereotypical stupid Hollywood liberal crap trying to make everyone think this movie has something to do with immigration policy just to troll everyone, get MAGA hate clicks and a lot of free social media coverage, and maybe also get anti-American progressives to buy tickets to what’s traditionally an all-American franchise they might avoid.  (Coincidentally Gunn’s production company is called Troll Court Entertainment.)

And he did get the right wing to pounce, as the Democrat regurgitation machine says. But red kryptonite isn’t lethal, just unpredictable. And I don’t think it’ll stop this movie.