The newest Superman is here, but with a difference. Director James Gunn’s hero flies when performing the monumental tasks, but the hero with fantasized power also lives in the real world with real-life challenges. The hero is powerful, but he also gets challenged with fierce attacks.
Perhaps, more importantly as a performing art production, the new Superman movie appears to wade into America’s cultural wars – an illegal alien serving and saving the people of the country he is living in.
After watching the movie, I feel it would not be wrong to credit the cast, the producer and the director with having made the film resonate with some modern-day realities in Trump’s America, without engaging in the unnecessarily extreme portrayals and representations.
The film is set in a world of global AI arms race and has been called a “tech-noir prophecy, and a cinematic Molotov cocktail lobbed straight into the heart of 21st-century America.”
We find the hero, Clark Kent intercepted at the border by drones and detained, suspected of being an “unregistered extraterrestrial without valid papers” with setting that includes a concrete cage, tagged as a “biometric threat” by a government powered by facial recognition and fear.
“The metaphor was always there,” Gunn said during the production phase but “the irony of Superman being literally an illegal alien is no longer subtle. It’s unavoidable.
The ultimate immigrant success story also sounds like a tragic echo of those left out in the cold, detained, or deported.
“He’s not leaping tall buildings anymore,” Gunn said. “He’s leaping digital firewalls.”
The hero’s fights are multiple, not only against politicians but also against AI-charged systems that predict, prevent, and preempt his every move.
Is there an Elon Musk in the story. I tend to think yes. Perhaps part a “real-world tech messiah, part narrative oracle.”
A thought-provoking point is that Superman doesn’t even know he’s Superman. “He flies, he saves, he dreams — all within code. Outside, the world burns.”
The real Superman is a “digital fugitive, a refugee of the mind.” When he finally awakens, the line between reality and simulation is so blurred that he asks: “Am I saving them or am I just entertaining them?”
In the golden age of cinema, Superman stood alone — a mythic savior who wrestled with humanity’s flaws while standing for truth and justice.
But in today’s Hollywood, saturated with endless multiverses, CGI battles, and quippy ensemble casts, even the Man of Steel is being downsized.
But Gunn’s Superman is not the all-powerful character.
For lifelong fans, this erosion feels personal.
I still remember watching the original black-and-white Superman serials at the cinema as a child — all 24 parts, week after week, breath held, heart racing.
That Superman was bold, bright, and pure. A symbol of good, simple and powerful. I have watched every Superman film since then, even Supergirl.
I held on through the costume changes and cinematic reinventions. But now, I don’t know anymore.
This doesn’t feel like Superman. It feels like something else.
Critics are already calling Gunn’s take “The 1984 of superhero cinema,” a story where immigration, identity, and AI collide in a war of surveillance and self-erasure. “It’s Man of Steel meets Black Mirror meets The Trial,” sounds right.
Some people called Superman a man without a country, a name, or a planet, facing a nation that treats him suspiciously.
So, who is the new Superman? A symbol of hope and goodness, too woke, not so-powerful or just a transformed character?
Today’s Superman faces super challenges, escalating fears of the other and an AI-charged environment.
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