Perhaps because my expectations weren’t too high, I was won over by the latest Superman film. I suspected James Gunn would be too edgy for an iconic hero so defined by wholesomeness, as he seems to feel much more at home with flawed, eccentric outcasts like those in his Suicide Squad and in Guardians of the Galaxy (and, indeed, this film comes especially alive every time Guy Gardner enters the scene), so I suppose I feared we could just get a snarkier version of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. Instead, Gunn finds a nice balance through the notion that Superman can be punk-rock… as long as it’s radio-friendly pop punk.
As for the politics, they manage to feel topical while at the same mapping quite organically onto Superman’s themes. After all, this has always been a franchise about immigration, in one way or another, and the character of Lex Luthor is such a quintessential egomaniacal tech billionaire that he may as well have inspired the current breed of oligarchs (one of the things I really liked in Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead was precisely the way it captured the characters’ constant rationalization of their morals and actions along lines similar to several incarnations of Luthor). Even the Palestine allegory has precedents in comics, which have frequently used Supes to explore dilemmas about US interventionism abroad.
Above all, though, I enjoyed the Grant Morrison-esque approach of picking the best from different eras, applying a modern slickness to Silver Age concepts while, crucially, retaining their sense of fun.
And speaking of weird science fiction/fantasy: before AI fully takes over poster art, it’s worth recalling the heights of this medium, with craft and imagination put in the service of gripping compositions, so this week Gotham Calling pays a small tribute to the posters of old-school sci-fi B-movies:
