Is this a perfect movie? No, but I didn’t think there were any perfect movies this year, and this was the one I liked the best. This is the one I rushed to rewatch as soon as it was on Blu-Ray and liked it even more on a second watch.
The ending of this movie, watching the tape of his Earth parents, hit me like a cannonball both times I watched it. It’s very powerful, and my favorite movie moment of the year. I’m tearing up as I type this, in fact.
(But the movies biggest flaw was, once again, that it didn’t have something for everybody to do in the finale. The Daily Planet folks are flying around in a ship but they don’t go anywhere. This was fixable: Lex should have been operating Ultraman from hiding. Then the Daily Planet folks should have tracked him down and led Superman there.)
Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always New Stories to Tell
The movie’s first twist, which I will now spoil, is that Superman belatedly finds out that his Kryptonian birth parents intended for him to conquer earth and to repopulate his species by taking a harem. I was impressed by this new take and wondered what comic it was from (presumably an Elseworlds graphic novel?) Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was original to the movie. It’s amazing that, after 87 years of Superman comics (with sometimes as much as 8 issues a month) (not to mention the daily comic strip and weekly radio and TV shows) no one had told this one.
Gunn had the choice of thousands of stories to adapt, but instead he asked, what is the worst thing that could happen to this hero emotionally. It also helps that it’s entirely logical his Kryptonian parents would have wanted this of him.
There have been a lot of character-similar-to-Superman-but-he’s-a-bad-guy comics in recent years (two of which, “The Boys” and “Invincible,” have been successfully adapted to TV), but no one had asked “What if the real Superman was supposed to be bad, but chose to be good because of his good Earth parents?” That’s an original take.
(I did find one source online claiming the storyline was from a comic, but I’ve read that comic and it’s really something very different, so I’m counting it as original to Gunn)
(Now of course, you’re probably thinking: Wait, Matt, doesn’t this obligate you to choose this movie when you get to 2025 in “What Should’ve Won that Could’ve Won”. This is when I tell you that no, you can’t go through my lists since 2011 and figure out what movies I’ll say should have won. The criteria are different. My picks will be surprising.)
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