By Michael Marano

Superman is overstuffed and bloated — so much so that it’s impossible to get an emotional toehold in the story being told.

Superman, written and directed by James Gunn. Screening at movie houses throughout New England.

David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan in a scene from Superman.

What a mess.

I’m speaking as a guy who loves comic books, and who loves Superman.

James Gunn’s Superman is a mess.

Picture going through the rubble left by a V2 dropped on a Tiffany’s. Among the twisted wreckage and warped rebar, you’re gonna find exquisite treasures.

But it’s still a mess.

Gunn was too busy creating the foundations for a whole new cinematic universe based on DC comics characters to make a good Superman movie. Consequently, his Superman is overstuffed and bloated — so much so, that it’s impossible to get an emotional toe-hold into the story he’s telling.

In contrast, let me remind you that in 1978 Richard Donner, director of Salt and Pepper, the best Peter Lawford/Sammy Davis Jr. vehicle ever, created the foundations for the entire genre of the superhero movie as we know it and loaded his Superman with unbelievable amounts of heart.

This is not to say Gunn’s take is devoid of heart. Like I said, among the rubble are gems. Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent horsing around in the Daily Planet offices. (Not kidding, the subplot involving Jimmy could have made a pretty good stand-alone “maverick journalist” movie, an All the President’s Men kind of thing with Lex Luthor as Nixon.) The romantic stuff with Clark/Supes and Lois is sweet without being mushy. Metamorpho, the Element Man, is made a tragic figure in a touching way. And one of my fave comic book characters, Mr. Terrific, is used in ways that even some of the best comic book writers haven’t thought of. But these undeniable gems are strewn among and embedded within the broken brickwork of that bombed-out Tiffany’s. It’s impossible to string them into the beautiful necklace they could’ve and should’ve been.

Gunn, rather brilliantly, starts his story and his rebooted DC movie universe in medias res. At the film’s start, superhumans, or “Metahumans,” to use DC’s parlance, have been around for centuries, and Superman has been active as a superhero for three years. The movie begins in mid-battle, or at least during a lull, and it’s a bold choice to introduce our new Superman while he’s vulnerable. But everything Gunn introduces in this Superman movie and in this new DC universe is in medias res. The audience is too busy catching up to be involved in the story. With more discipline, this could have been a fantastic narrative choice. Hey, in 1977 Star Wars (I’ll fucking die before I call it “A New Hope“) introduced a whole universe by beginning in medias res, amidst a space battle and a hostile boarding. But there was discipline to how Lucas began his universe in the middle. We were allowed to be in awe of Vader before he choked the starship captain. We were allowed to like the Droids ducking blaster fire before they made it to the escape pod. We were allowed to like Leia before she stood up to scary Vader and claimed diplomatic immunity. Heck, even later in the movie we were eased into the in medias res of the Galactic Senate being dissolved, when Tarkin and Vader waltzed in on the Imperial Officers while they were having a meeting.

David Corenswet in a scene from Superman.

Gunn — and I hate to use this turn of phrase, but I gotta — jumps the gun on his introductions of story elements, and on his world-and-DC-universe building. With no room to breathe, with no time made to be in awe of Vader, or to like the Droids and Leia, this Superman has no room to develop a sense of scope. When your vision is this crowded, when it’s this cluttered, there’s no way to use any kind of vista.

Superman has another problem — its main antagonist, Lex Luthor. We are living under the whims of real, insane, egomaniacal, profoundly insecure billionaire supervillains. 14 million people are likely to die because an incontinent, ketamine-addicted, apartheid nepo baby mutant with a breeding kink pulled the plug on USAID. How can any comic book narrative compete with that kind of real-life villainy? With a few exceptions, there are analogues in the news for each and every shitty thing Luthor does in this movie, perpetuated by real tech bros, oligarchs, and billionaires. Yeah, it might not be fair to blame Gunn for not having a crystal ball predicting all the nightmare shit that’s happened since January while he was writing and filming this movie. And there are moments when the movie nails the psychoses of these guys beautifully — including, but not limited to, a jab at Peter Thiel’s messianic/monarchic ambitions, as articulated by Gollum’s less-stable kid brother, Curtis Yarvin. But these don’t feel like extrapolations, in the way that, say, classic Star Trek made extrapolations from, and metaphors of, the real issues of its day. In Superman, these feel like elements of skits, without the weight needed to call our modern oligarchs out for their insane neediness and cruelty.

I don’t want to give the impression that Gunn’s Superman is devoid of enjoyability. I really meant it when I said that among the wreckage are absolute gems, pure and pristine moments of comic book delight. But I must point out that black hole singularities play a big part in Superman‘s plot. And this movie itself creates a narrative singularity, collapsing in on itself by trying to cram 60 years of comic book lore into two hours, while trying at the same time to create the kind of cinematic universe that took Marvel maybe six movies to lay down. As a devoted comic book geek, I know all of Clark Kent’s co-workers from the Daily Planet. As a film critic and writer of fiction, I know there is no reason at all for Gunn to include all of Kent’s co-workers in the climax of the movie. They’re unneeded ballast, adding to the weight of Superman as it folds into its own mass.

If you like comic books, and are patient enough to deal with the bad signal-to-noise ratio of this movie, check out Superman. Those gems among the rubble are really pretty. But they’re too few and far between for me to say that Gunn has given us a great night at the movies, or what looks like a sturdy foundation for a new cinematic universe.

For author, film critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano, the moment in Donner’s Superman when Supes catches Lois in one hand and a falling helicopter in the other is a defining, seminal cinematic moment, right up there with the Odessa Steps scene in Potemkin, the chess scene in The Seventh Seal, the mirage shot in Lawrence of Arabia, and Norma Desmond getting ready for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard. And he will fight anyone who challenges him on that. www.GetOffMyLawnFitness.com