'Superman': The bad guy in the movie is you (well, and Elon Musk)

According to the Collins Dictionary , in English, the word alien can refer to: a) a person belonging to a foreign country, race, or group, usually one you dislike or are afraid of; b) an adjective used to describe something that is strange and perhaps frightening because it is not part of your normal experience; c) something that is different or strange from your way of feeling or your normal behavior; d) in science fiction, a creature from outer space . In the latest and umpteenth Superman installment, director James Gunn ( Guardians of the Galaxy , Suicide Squad ) plays with the polysemy of the word alien to place America's favorite superhero in a complicated bureaucratic situation: if Kal-El - Superman's real name - comes from Krypton and Krypton is a planet outside the Milky Way, ergo, outside the United States, Superman is actually an illegal immigrant - where are his papers? -. That is, an alien in all its meanings.

Superman has been conceived as the most political of his installments - and that despite the fact that the comic book character was born in 1938, with the world on the brink of the Second World War -, at a time when Metropolis - the urban alter ego of New York, if cities have souls - faces countless threats, from fake news and the populism of its politicians to interdimensional monsters and villains made from nanobots. In this petty world of twisted reality and language, of a citizenry alienated by technology and submissive to the surreptitious wills of the powerful, Superman represents the power of unfaltering kindness , pure innocence, unconditional sacrifice. In case the viewer doesn't understand, James Gunn's script verbalizes it: " let's make kindness the new punk ." Or something like that. As illustrator Mauro Entrialgo has already pointed out, we have entered the era of evilism, and Gunn proposes to combat it with good intentions.

Good intentions are... fine. But the reduction of complex and painful problems to simple childish entertainment is outrageous in a superhero movie in which we see a child (of Arab appearance) invoking Superman to prevent the genocide that a professional army supported by tanks and missiles and the like is about to carry out against his people (armed with sticks and stones). Wow. Or wow. I don't know if the totally frivolous entertainment of Jurassic World: Reborn (one of the worst films these eyes have seen in recent times) is preferable to the infantilizing reductionism of Superman , the use of an extermination in progress as the setting for the season's patriotic blockbuster , in which the United States (albeit through its illegal metahuman citizens) once again saves the world. It's hard to avoid the obscenity of a scene in which the Gazans (a demonym implied, not explicit) are aided by a superhero who dishes out beatings with giant crazy hands . In the end.

The studio blockbuster has lost its capacity for metaphor. Cinema spits its ideas in the viewer's face. But Superman isn't entirely clear about who the viewer is: is it a little girl or boy, the father or mother of those little children, or a young adult? Because Superman seems to speak , on the one hand, to a child audience who enjoys flying dogs and kaiju fights and, in short, rather white entertainment, and, on the other, to an adult audience of voting age who must react to the global political situation, who are warned about the malicious alliances between politicians and millionaires, and who are urged to have a critical spirit that the film doesn't exactly encourage. Oh, and who witnesses one of the characters being blown up by the storm.

The metaphor does not exist because the characters almost literally transfer the villains from the real world to the fantastic imaginary . Lex Luthor ( Nicholas Hoult , the Juror number 2 ) is now a technobro - a technology mogul - hell-bent on destroying Superman's reputation, accusing him of being an illegal immigrant and hiding his autocratic intentions, in order to turn public opinion against him and lock him up in an interdimensional prison forever. He is supported by an army of flying robots reminiscent of the Starlink satellite network with which Musk controls global communications. And also a couple of metahumans, The Engineer ( María Gabriela de Faría ) and a certain Boravia Hammer, a flying masked man with a psychoanalytic backstory under his mask.

On the other hand, the president of the fictional country of Boravia, Vasil Ghurkos (played by Croatian Zlatko Buric , who we saw in Triangle of Sadness and Copenhagen Cowboy ), a petty dictator with Donald Trump 's hair and Vladimir Putin 's tongue, gets the US government to accuse Superman of interfering in its diplomatic relations... and of being an alien, the term used by the infamous ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to refer to deportable foreigners. So the world turns against Superman , so the main villain of the film... might be you, the average citizen, the one sharing hoaxes on social media, the one pointing the finger among the crowd.

James Gunn's Superman starts in medias res, with the superhero, played by David Corenswet - taking over from Henry Cavill - losing his first fight at the hands of The Engineer. He even has to ask the super-dog Krypto to help him take shelter in his polar refuge, where he can use the help of several robots, sunlight, and the message his parents (played briefly by Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan ) left recorded when they sent him to Earth. However, Superman still has to discover that his greatest enemies are not monsters, but the American public, which is beginning to question the damage he causes in each of his fights.

Superman continues to balance his life as a hero with his work as a journalist, and shares an office with the incisive Lois Lane ( Rachel Brosnahan ), with whom he also shares a budding romance. However, this saintly Superman is seen by his surroundings as too saccharine, and the fellow citizens of Metropolis believe he could be a danger to them, despite his constant acts of magnanimity—such as saving a squirrel about to be crushed by a kaiju—simply because he comes from another planet. Superman 's main problem is the overwhelming number of climaxes and characters, which turn the film into a succession of catastrophic events that, all so important, become less important. The universe is once again at risk of disappearing, but the solution could be as simple as hacking your grandmother's Facebook account. The CGI-designed spaces are so... digital that it doesn't matter if a hundred-story building crashes into your head. And the way superhero groups work, their hierarchies and loyalties , is also not very well understood. Of course, for technofascism to triumph, many minions are needed—that is, many interns pushing the buttons.

Not even Gunn exploits the sly humor he's known for : the gags are rather candid. The kind of humor Elon Musk would like if he weren't the butt of the jokes. The slow, violent camerawork here is nothing more than a couple of accents in otherwise unmemorable fights. The script is also lazy in resolving the obstacles it itself proposes: "Take my ship, the controls are easy and intuitive," one of the superhumans suggests to Lois Lane, as if piloting a flying saucer were as simple as riding a bike. Problem solved!

All that said, the film is elevated by David Corenswet's commitment to his character. With a strong comedic wit and a battle-hardened physique, the best thing about Superman is the construction of a hero with deep emotional ties , who is scolded by his Earthly mother for not calling home. Corenswet combines both facets and brings lightness and humanity to a film that, without him, would be a string of stereotypes and back-to-back fights. Fortunately or unfortunately, Superman isn't the disaster the gossips predicted, but he's not the lifeline of the DC Universe either. It's just another film, with a bit more personality, in a market saturated with supermen and superwomen trying to prevent the end of the world... again.