The New Superman Thinks It's Pop Punk. It's Shitty Math Rock That Doesn't Add Up.

A review of James Gunn's Superman (2025)

A timeless question: What would be Superman’s favorite Jimmy Eat World song?

Begin by picturing the teenaged millennial Clark Kent, bullied towel boy for the Smallville High football team, plodding the dirt road back to his adoptive parents’ farm with no companion aside from an iPod Shuffle—what’s blaring in his corded headphones? Is it a track from Static Prevails or Clarity, Jimmy Eat World’s pre-crossover albums, something like “Goodbye Sky Harbor” because, to Clark, the 16-minute song feels like the only adequate container for his emotions? Or is a selection from the band’s more radio-friendly imperial period likelier? Does Clark prefer the deep-cuts off Bleed American to the singles on Futures? Would he argue that "‘Polaris’ is sneakily better than ‘23,’” or concede upon a re-listen to the fact that there are no songs better than “23” in the band’s discography? Is he weeping? Strumming an air guitar? Wait, is that goofy Midwestern lunk just playing “The Middle” on repeat?

“[Superman] listens to a lot of really positive music,” the writer-director James Gunn recently told Spotify. “Some music that he thinks is edgy…maybe it’s not quite as edgy as he thinks it is.” Gunn provided these revealing quotes as part of the 25-second intro to “Superman Official Playlist,” a 100-track collection of songs intended to reflect the hypothetical listening habits of Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, et al. as they are characterized in Superman, his adaptation of the fabled superhero intellectual property. Tellingly, Gunn claims he found assembling this promotional Superman playlist more enjoyable than actually making Superman. “I probably had more fun doing this than anything else I’ve done in the past couple of years,” he says. “I had to really think about who they were as people and imagine what kind of music they’d be into.”

Best known for helming Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, Gunn has harnessed the goodwill still surrounding those not-awful-for-their-genre movies, as well as the PR capital of getting very publicly canceled and un-canceled, to become the latest steward of “DC Studios,” Marvel’s chief rival in the superhero movie industrial complex. His Superman, in this regard, serves as a reboot in multiple respects. It’s a peppier, brighter reimagining of the last son of Krypton for the big screen, the coronation of Gunn as a bonafide Hollywood powerbroker, and a test flight for a wayward DC brand desperate to distance itself from the heartless, brainless, verging-on-psychopathic worldview espoused by the Zack Snyder Dark Age of Justice League movies.

Especially compared to Snyder, James Gunn gets Superman. He has a semi-fresh take, generally understands the assignment; as it should be, the first song Gunn selected for Superman’s section of his playlist is Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.” And what “The Middle” is to Jimmy Eat World’s song catalogue is kinda what Superman is to the comic book superhero landscape: he’s the best known if not the most interesting, so unabashedly mainstream he sometimes scans as transgressive. These are worthwhile, overdue insights into a 90-year-old character—if only James Gunn’s goofy Spotify playlist didn’t demonstrate these insights better than his $225-million blockbuster.

If Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel was Superman as Wolves-in-the-Throne-Room-style black metal, James Gunn’s Man of Steel is trying to make cinematic the open-hearted, saccharine-serious pop punk of bands like Florence + the Machine, The All-American Rejects, and Blink-182. In practice, though, the movie exhibits a misconception of the musical genre whose tone and effects it aims to mimic. While Gunn is correct in assuming that pop punk’s definitional qualities could successfully map onto Superman, the social world of Metropolis, and his mythos, the end product rings false and facile, as phony and under-realized as the latest single from The Mighty Crabjoys.

Where pop punk is satisfyingly formulaic, Gunn’s Superman is overcomplicated and unfocused. Where the verse-chorus-verse of pop punk builds to a cathartic crescendo, Superman compulsively resets its narrative, cycles characters in and out, forgets its basic thesis about the value of basic goodness in a society increasingly corrupted by technology and riven by senseless, unthinkable violence. Superman saving a squirrel from a rampaging kaiju? That’s pop punk-y. But it’s impossible to harmonize that wholesome playfulness with the off-putting cruelty of, say, Lex Luthor shooting an innocent civilian in the head with a magnum because he gives Clark Kent a discount at his halal cart.

This disharmony between Gunn’s good instincts and poor execution is present from Superman’s opening scene, which attempts to start in media res by presenting the audience with a convoluted, Star Wars-esque opening text crawl. Determined not to rehash the Superman origin story first told in Action Comics #1, Gunn does expedite the action and, arguably, puts faith in his audience to fill in the blanks. At the same time, he denies the viewer a workable grasp of this particular Superman, how his biography does and doesn’t align with the past depictions in Richard Donner’s Superman, Superman Returns, Smallville, Man of Steel, Justice League, or the countless comic book iterations printed and sold since 1938.

Gunn’s “brave” artistic choice to forego the origin story also excuses him from solving not just the greatest creative challenge of this one film, but the primary challenge of his takeover of DC Studios as a whole, which is making familiar material feel surprising and exciting again. But Gunn prefers not to, and the most consistent part of his Superman reboot may be the willful pride it takes in offering minimal context for its heroes, villains, their motivations and conflicts, the set pieces and political allegories that emerge therefrom. On the one hand, this no-handholding approach can be seen as Gunn empowering his actors to do the heavy lifting with their performances. On the other, it can read as condescending and lazy, a refusal to meet the essential demands of screenwriting, filmmaking, and brand-building.

The central paradox of this Superman is that it’s simultaneously under-explained and overcomplicated. We’re afforded almost no screen time with Clark Kent, yet we’re supposed to care about his relationship with his human parents in Kansas because he talks to them on the phone (once). The reasons behind Lex Luthor’s seething hatred of Superman are unclear, or unsubstantiated, or confusingly bound up in Superman preventing Luthor from selling weapons to a fictional country that is, depending on the scene, a stand-in for Israel and/or Russia. That hybridized aggressor country is on the precipice of committing genocide against a helpless proxy for Ukraine and/or Palestine, and Superman would otherwise stop this tragedy from happening but he’s too busy getting canceled on social media because Lex Luthor used his Latina nanobot hacker to unearth the second half of a decades-old video transmission in which Superman’s birth parents instruct him to assemble a #harem of sluts so he can sire a master race of superbabies, and of course that makes everyone mad at Superman even though the video was recorded when he was a newborn and he was unaware of the contents of its second half and also we know the video isn’t a deepfake because Mr. Terrific (?) of the Justice Gang tells Lois Lane that he verified its authenticity with dozens of expert video editors before he and Lois enter the pocket universe where Lex Luthor is holding Superman hostage in an ICE detention cell and poisoning him with kryptonite except since over-mining has resulted in there being no kryptonite left on this planet Lex Luthor has blackmailed a shapeshifting meta-human into turning one of his hands into a green-glowing outgrowth of kryptonite because, if he doesn’t, Lex Luthor is going to murder his baby son, Joey.

Who the hell is Mr. Terrific? Where does he come from, and what are his specific powers? Why does he play such a prominent role in a Superman reboot in which barely anything concrete is communicated about the title character? The same questions could be asked in regards to Green Lantern and Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific’s teammates in the Justice Gang, as well as Lex Luthor’s henchpeople of Ultraman, The Engineer, and “The Hammer of Boravia,” who defeats Superman in an off-screen fight and then is never mentioned again. Sequence after sequence these unanswered questions pile atop non-sequitur characters pile atop cheap thematic motifs, and what everything adds up to isn’t all that much. Does any of that sound like cinematic pop punk to you? No—that’s unlistenable math rock. That’s late-period Foals.

The closing moments of the film, set in the Fortress of Solitude, drive home the scattered-ness of this vision of Superman here (and presumably going forward). Set to Iggy Pop’s “I’m a Punk Rocker,” the scene thinks it’s moving, but it may not be as moving as it thinks it is. At the beginning of the movie, Clark had watched the first half of the video transmission from his dead birth parents on Krypton in order to feel a sense of peace and closeness to them. By the end—twist—he has replaced that video with a montage of him growing up with the Kents, the childless salt-of-the-earth farmers who took him in, raised him to uphold truth, justice, and the American way.

“Being kind is punk rock” is the mantra that’s meant to animate James Gunn’s Superman, but as far as filmmakers go, there is no act more unkind than burying your audience in bafflement for two hours and then foisting this type of brittle, unearned faux-poignancy on them just seconds before the credits roll. By refusing to retell the tired old origin story of Superman, James Gunn has told a less-than-encouraging origin story for himself as the co-CEO of DC Studios. But, hey, maybe don’t write the guy off yet. You can choose to find hope—or despair—in knowing that he has 30 more reboots, sequels, and spinoffs to get right the simplest formula in moviemaking.