We get that young man who just wants to help everyone, but we also get a more intersectional vision of the world he is helping. He might be American, but he isn’t just interested in the well-being of Americans. In fact, the incident, which starts the movie, but actually happens before the movie starts, is him stopping a foreign war.

The movie starts very much in medias res. The backstory is handwaved with handful of lines of text after which we see the scene from the first teasers. That’s it. Everyone knows who Superman is, even if they haven’t ever seen a movie with him or a comic about him. He is just ubiquitous. I tend to prefer the Stan Lee approach of every comic book being someone’s first and thus explaining everything, but on the other hand, this is the level of explanation you would usually get in the old Marvel Comics when I was actively reading them.

The movie is not subtle. For example, Superman is often called an alien and it is also key to the story as a whole. Again, quite heavy-handed, but at the same time, that works in comics. You don’t need nuance. It can be helpful like Gunn’s earlier work, but Superman is not complicated, so in order to kickstart this new version of DC in cinema (although I’m not quite sure what has survived from the old version as Peacemaker made a cameo), that is the correct way to approach the character.

(Gunn has stated that while there is some kind of an overarching plan, each character gets their own approach from a different team of people. We get a taste of this at the very end of the movie. Next we’re getting a Clayface movie Gunn described as body horror, is co-written by Mike Flanagan and the director had made a few pretty gruesome horror movies.)

Superman (the movie) is also less violent then these movies tend to be. Gunn kind of has fun with the action scenes and doesn’t feel beholden to having them at specific points in the movie. This is very good as the big climactic action scene at the end is the weak point of the movie (and not really that weak) and it is so hard to do anything really novel these days, so getting something different is refreshing.

The trouble with Superman (the character) is often that it is hard to work with a character that is known to be and even in the movie stated to be the most powerful metahuman. What do you do with that? How do you challenge a character like that? They definitely do very good work with that and find ways to make him interesting as a protagonist as well as a character.

The world of the movie is much more like a comic book world then we are used to seeing. Or maybe it’s more like my days as a reader. The characters are in similar vein to the characters from Gunn’s The Suicide Squad: Weird, but taken seriously within the world and the movie. This is exactly the way I like it. Well, it isn’t the only way I like it, but Superman is just the character to do this with.

The Kents were a nice take on a nice, elderly couple living on their farm.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the movie. I don’t know if this will actually save the property as people are clearly tired of superhero movies, but I would gladly see what’s going to happen next in this Gunn’s and Safran’s world.