{"id":7011,"date":"2025-07-13T15:56:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-13T15:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/7011\/"},"modified":"2025-07-13T15:56:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-13T15:56:03","slug":"the-new-superman-movie-is-being-called-woke-by-conservatives-its-something-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/7011\/","title":{"rendered":"The new Superman movie is being called \u201cwoke\u201d by conservatives. It’s something else."},"content":{"rendered":"

This article contains spoilers for Superman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a field outside a small American town, a mysterious object falls from the sky. A childless couple witnesses the impact from the windows of their farmhouse and rushes to investigate, and they find an infant nestled in the crater, miraculously unharmed. They raise the child as their own, always knowing he is different, and gradually realizing that he may be the most powerful man who has ever lived, but they try to instill in him a sense of humility and homespun decency, as well as the responsibility that he bears to all of humanity.<\/p>\n

This sequence doesn\u2019t appear in Superman, but only because writer-director James Gunn reckons it doesn\u2019t have to<\/a>. \u201cWe have seen a million movies with characters who don\u2019t need to have their upbringing explained,\u201d he told the Times of London. \u201cWho cares?\u201d Gunn, who has the task of rebooting not just the Man of Steel but the entire fictional universe around him, starts his movie in a rush, with a flurry of text that squishes his version of the character\u2019s first three decades into a few seconds of screen time. But a twist on that emblematic origin story does appear in a movie Gunn made in 2019, years before he was charged with reinventing the most recognizable superhero on the planet.<\/p>\n

That movie is Brightburn, and although Gunn\u2019s name only appears as its producer, it was written by his brothers Brian and Mark and features several actors drawn from his previous projects, including a brief appearance by his wife, Jennifer Holland. (The director, David Yarovesky, also worked with Gunn for more than a decade.) More to the point, the movie\u2019s gruesome, subversive take on superhero mythology is very much in line with the sensibility of Gunn\u2019s early career<\/a>, before middle age and the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy<\/a> movies softened his resentments and his penchant for provocation. In Brightburn, a superpowered infant crash-lands outside the home of a kindly Kansas couple, who, like the endless iterations of Ma and Pa Kent before them, take him in and raise him as their own. But the story diverges drastically once the boy hits puberty, and his impulses turn dark, and, in every sense, uncontrollable. This version of the character was sent not to save Earth but to conquer it. One night, he hears strange sounds coming from the family\u2019s barn, where the spaceship that carried him has been, like the true nature of his parentage, hidden away for years. The jagged, twisted hunk of metal pulses with a dark-red light, along with an ominous, snarling voice that eventually resolves into a three-word command: Take the world.<\/p>\n

When Gunn was named the co-head of DC Studios, I took a certain smug pleasure in knowing he\u2019d recently been involved in a riff on the studio\u2019s most iconic character that presents him as a budding serial killer. I never expected that Gunn would wind up reusing one of Brightburn\u2019s plot points\u2014and making it his movie\u2019s biggest bombshell.<\/p>\n

Superman (or Kal-El or Clark Kent or whatever you want to call him) has long since left Krypton by the time Gunn\u2019s movie picks up the thread. But we\u2019re reminded early on what he\u2019s doing on Earth. As David Corenswet\u2019s Supes recovers from his wounds\u2014one of the opening text\u2019s other revelations is that he\u2019s just lost his first fight, to someone or something called the Hammer of Boravia\u2014his robot attendants soothe him by playing the holographic message his parents sent with him to Earth. Like Marlon Brando\u2019s Jor-El in the 1978 movie, this Superman\u2019s parents, played by Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan, remind him that he is special, that he has a destiny unlike that of the weaker beings to whose planet he has been sent. But these Kryptonians speak a tongue we cannot understand, and their words, too, seem strange. Their son\u2019s job, they tell him, is not to fight for truth and justice but to \u201clive out Krypton\u2019s truth,\u201d and even the way they express their affection for their only child lands a little oddly: \u201cWe love you more than land.\u201d<\/p>\n

Damaged in transit, the parents\u2019 message cuts off midway through, and though every single person in the theater knows that the rest is bound to be unscrambled in the movie\u2019s back half, they are unlikely to foresee what it turns out to be. Superman\u2019s parents, in this telling, are not beatific souls spreading their gospel to less enlightened corners of the universe, and their son\u2019s true task is not to protect humanity. Instead, according to his parents, his duty is to dominate it\u2014to preserve his superior race by impregnating as many women as he can, and if any leader should try to stand in his way, he is to conquer them without hesitation or remorse. In other words: Take the world.<\/p>\n

This is as much of a shock to Superman as it is to the audience, especially because of how the information is unveiled: on a cable-news show by his archenemy Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). Hoult\u2019s Luthor is a resentful tech bro who has spent years cooking up a plan to destroy his nemesis once and for all. (The Hammer of Boravia turns out to be, among other things, a paid employee of LuthorCorp.) He\u2019s even assembled an army of social-media posters to skew online sentiment, so that when Luthor eventually does kill Superman, the public will applaud him for it. But in what, from a villain\u2019s point of view, turns out to be an enormous stroke of luck, he doesn\u2019t need to manufacture evidence that Superman is up to no good. His own parents\u2019 words are all it takes.<\/p>\n

In the past week, Gunn has faced a trumped-up online backlash of his own for referring to Superman as \u201can immigrant,\u201d even though that has always been a part of the character\u2019s origins, both on and off the page. (The character\u2019s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were both part of the first generation born in North America after their families fled the rise of antisemitism in Europe, and Superman himself is as not-from-here as it gets.) Although they don\u2019t use Gunn\u2019s word, Superman\u2019s bad guys, who include several high-ranking members of the U.S. military, are at pains to underline their adversary\u2019s foreign origins: He\u2019s \u201cthe Kryptonian,\u201d or \u201cthe alien,\u201d or \u201can extraterrestrial organism.\u201d As Luthor says, \u201cHe\u2019s not a man.
He\u2019s an it.\u201d And as it turns out, they\u2019re not wrong to be suspicious. Superman does come from a place whose values are not like our own\u2014or at least, not like the values we profess ourselves to hold. And if there\u2019s even a chance he might follow his parents\u2019 instructions, he\u2019s too dangerous to run free.<\/p>\n

As Siegel and Shuster initially conceived of him, Superman was, indeed, a super-man: stronger and faster than a normal human, but not in an entirely different category. As the years passed, though, he was no longer simply foiling bank robbers and purse snatchers, and his powers grew accordingly. The less like a circus strongman and the more like a god he became, the thought became inevitable: What if he changed his mind? Might not an all-powerful being come to conclude that the only way to stifle humanity\u2019s propensity for bloody conflict was to install himself as its ruler? And if he did, how would we stop him? Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen<\/a> and V for Vendetta<\/a>, played this scenario out to its ultimate end in his 1980s comic-book series Miracleman<\/a>, which ends with its title character ruling Earth as a benevolent tyrant. Ever since, it\u2019s felt like other versions of the story are just trying to dodge the question.<\/p>\n

Gunn, however, runs right at it. As his story begins, Superman has just prevented a war from breaking out between the countries of Boravia and Jarhanpur\u2014partly by smashing up their tanks and planes, and partly by grabbing Boravia\u2019s bellicose leader and flying him out into the desert, with a warning that he might not let him down so easy next time. Perhaps not surprisingly, the world\u2019s most powerful country and its richest man take this as a threat. And while Corenswet\u2019s guileless do-gooder seems incapable of forming so much as a malevolent thought, not even his girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is sure he\u2019s done the right thing. What gives him the authority to intervene in world affairs without so much as a word to anyone? Who is he to decide what\u2019s best? And isn\u2019t it a little terrifying that one person can wield so much power, even if, or especially because, he believes he\u2019s always in the right?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Why Did a Ph.D. Candidate Murder Four College Students in Idaho? We May Never Know Now\u2014but There Are Plenty of Theories.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The New Superman Is Involved in Several Controversies at Once. Someone Saw It All Coming.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Are Men\u2019s Tattoos Getting Worse? Case in Point: The Ink on This Summer\u2019s Hottest Show.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Lena Dunham\u2019s Netflix Show Is About an American in London. As a Brit, I Have Thoughts.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

The thing is, though, this Superman isn\u2019t always in the right\u2014and more importantly, he knows it. As he tells Lex Luthor in his climactic speech, what makes him human isn\u2019t that he was raised on Earth, but that he screws up\u2014constantly\u2014and keeps going anyway. Like his faithful dog, Krypto, he means well but doesn\u2019t always know what he\u2019s doing, and he\u2019s so strong that the slightest misstep can cause chaos and destruction. And, like Krypto, he\u2019s a mutt (as well as a very, very good boy). Superman isn\u2019t just an immigrant, he\u2019s an adoptee, born on one world and raised in another, and that cross-cultural mixture is the key to who he becomes. He draws his superpowers from being out of place, made invincible by the switch from Krypton\u2019s red sun to Earth\u2019s yellow one, and both the original Superman and Gunn\u2019s movie hinge on whose example he will follow: his birth parents\u2019 or his adoptive family\u2019s. \u201cYour choices, your actions,\u201d Gunn\u2019s Pa Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince) tells his son. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes you who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Dana Stevens
\n The New Superman Is a Corrective to the Modern Superhero Movie
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Superman is a fundamentally lighthearted movie, more so than any since Christopher Reeve hung up his cape. But Gunn also understands, better than any director in the field, how comic-book stories can tap into social currents without trivializing them or tripping over their own profundities. Superman\u2019s birth parents are racial supremacists, and Luthor is a tech billionaire who believes his superior intellect entitles him to govern the fate of whole nations. But Superman chooses to be a part of the world rather than try to control it, and embraces the idea that it matters far less where you come from than who you choose to be once you\u2019re there.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains spoilers for Superman. In a field outside a small American town, a mysterious object falls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[7413,5577,88,6842,206,7412],"class_list":["post-7011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-action","tag-comics","tag-entertainment","tag-horror","tag-movies","tag-superheroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}