Genre: Superhero
Premise: When Lex Luthor tries to take over a country in Eastern Europe, it will be up to Superman to stop him.
About: It’s finally here, James Gunn’s Superman, the movie that will launch an entire reboot of DC. Estimates for the opening weekend box office were all over the place. In the end, Superman settled for 120 million dollars. It is currently at an 82% RT score and a 95% Audience score.
Writer: James Gunn (Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster)
Details: 2 hours 9 minutes
It’s been a while since I’ve sat and stared at the blank page this long before a review.
I’m not really sure what to say about this movie.
I guess if you pushed me to give you a definitive verdict, I would say it’s good.
But the more I delve into the specifics, the more hesitant I am to endorse it.
With that said, there are some fun screenwriting discussions to emerge from this movie. So let’s get into it.
Superman has been here on earth for many years and he’s recently gotten into some controversy. He showed up on the border of Boravia and destroyed a lot of stuff to prevent a war. A lot of people around the world are wondering if he’s allowed to do that.
Including Lois Lane! Oh yeah, Clark and Lois are already together. Actually, they’re in a situationship. And she already knows he’s Superman.
A remote-controlled dude who recently beat Superman up was controlled by Lex Luthor and a bunch of his minions. They’ve developed an AI app that’s logged all of Superman’s moves from his past fights and can, therefore, predict what he’s going to do ahead of time, giving them a huge advantage over Supes in any fight.
Meanwhile, Lex is trying to gain control of half of Boravia. Once he gets Superman out of the way, it should be a cakewalk. Especially because Lex has created a “pocket universe” for his secret hideout. Lex eventually snags Superman and places him in a prison in his pocket universe, leaving it up to Lois and the Justice Gang to save him. But once they save him, will it be too late?
The first big screenwriting risk Gunn took here was starting deep into the story. This is not new to screenwriting. It’s known as “in media res.” You throw the reader into a story that’s already going on.
When you do this well, it’s fun because the reader has to play catch-up, which gets their minds spinning right away. However, it’s easy to do poorly. If you’re too far ahead of the reader and you don’t give them enough information about what’s happening, they can get left behind and never catch up. Be ready for the scorn of the reader if that happens.
I know exactly what James Gunn was thinking here. He thought: the audience knows who Superman is. They know who Lex Luthor is. They know this whole mythology like the back of their hand. So he realized he COULD start the move in media res, and it would be easy for the reader to catch up.
But a bigger question emerges here. Did we start too deep into the story in general? James Gunn loves the original Superman, as do a lot of us. One of the best things about that movie was the interplay between Lois Lane and Clark Kent due to the fact that she didn’t know he was Superman and we did. There are very few opportunities as a screenwriter to play with a dynamic that powerful. And Gunn just threw that all away by having Lois already know Clark was Superman AND to already have them dating.
I think this was a really poor choice as it turned Clark and Lois’s relationship into one of the worst things about the movie. It wasn’t bad. But it was BORING. Which is way worse in my opinion. I did not care about these two AT ALL. And it clearly goes back to that choice. Think about their kiss in the movie. WHO CARES! They’ve been kissing for months. Bad decision here by Gunn.
What’s weird about screenwriting is that a bad choice can, ironically, give you good writing opportunities. We all know how challenging exposition can be. Well, by having Clark and Lois already be together, it allowed for this scene where Lois interviews Clark as Superman. It’s one of the better exposition scenes I’ve read all year because it cleverly uses Superman’s dual-identity to add details we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. During the interview, if a question was tough, Superman would stop the recorder, transition to Clark, and talk to Lois as her boyfriend (for instance, he might say, “Hey, we talked about this with each other – you agree with me!” And she’d say, “Yeah, but I’m not talking to Clark. I’m talking to Superman.”).
I advocate for scenes like this in my dialogue book. Interview-type scenarios (or therapy scenarios) are perfect for covertly disseminating exposition.
Regardless of any reservations I had early in the script, I liked the opening act. I thought it was the best act in the script.
From there, things got sloppy. I know a lot of people have said that this story was overstuffed. I disagree. I didn’t think that was the case at all. I never once couldn’t follow what was going on. Contrast that with the last three Mission Impossible movies where I lost track of what was going on within half an hour.
The problem with this movie was not that it was overstuffed. It was that the storyline was lightweight. Maybe this is because I’m too “inside” to see this objectively. I know that this movie isn’t just a Superman movie. It’s a movie that needs to launch a 20-film franchise. And, for that reason, I was expecting way higher stakes.
Lex Luthor wants half of some tiny third rate Eastern European country? Who cares? Even if the argument is that that was a decoy move to take out Superman, it still feels small.
James Gunn must navigate a very tricky reality here. He’s trying to go back to basics and tell a great simple superhero story about the greatest superhero ever. But, unfortunately, that’s not the movie world we live in. We’ve seen every superhero imaginable over the last 15 years, many of which raised the stakes from previous films. The audience doesn’t understand going backwards on that.
Another screenwriting paradigm Gunn went up against was how strong to make your hero. This is something we’ve discussed many times on the site. Do you make your hero Robert McCall, in The Equalizer, where he’s so powerful nobody can so much as scratch him? Or do you make your hero Indiana Jones, who constantly fails and gets beaten up and has to work for every inch of what he gets?
Traditional screenwriting thinking says the latter is the better way to go. The more uncertain the reader is that the hero can survive in any moment, the more drama there’s going to be. Think about it. How much drama is there when you know your hero is going to easily win every single time?
So, technically, by making Superman so easy to beat up in this movie (heck, we meet him having been beaten up), you’re making the “right” screenwriting choice.
The problem is that Superman is different. He’s supposed to be THE MOST POWERFUL SUPERHERO OF ALL TIME! And yet he’s getting his ass whipped by predictive AI. It just feels… wrong.
And the thing is, Superman stories have always had this ace up their sleeve to counteract Superman being too powerful. Kryptonite! Kryptonite makes it so he’s got to be more clever in how he wins. But, in this movie, he’s already getting his ass kicked multiple times by the time kryptonite enters the equation.
Here’s why it’s a big deal for DC Films. One of the coolest moments in Superman sequels is when Superman finally meets somebody who’s stronger than he is. We didn’t think that was possible. So when the situation arrives, we’re shocked and scared.
But with this Superman not even being able to defeat a glorified robot, you can’t make this moment happen. No matter who you bring in, it’s now embraced with a shoulder shrug (another super villain who’s going to beat Superman’s ass). It’s a controversial choice Gunn has made because, again, in a vacuum, it’s the right choice. But for a Superman movie, it’s probably the wrong choice.
I mean, there are two superheroes in this movie, Mr. Terrific and Green Lantern, who are way more powerful than Superman! Is that the smartest creative choice to make?
If you want to make it as a big-budget screenwriter, one of the things that will be required of you is great imagination. Your imagination cannot be on par with everyone else. You need to prove that you are MORE IMAGINATIVE than the average scribe.
Gunn’s big imagination play here was the pocket universe. From a writing perspective, I thought it was clever. But from a movie perspective, it was a fail. It’s a fail because superhero movies have become terrible at creating totally made-up locations. They’re all CGI vomit at this point. But the bigger problem it creates is that we (the audience) have no bearing for what we’re looking at.
It’s like the microscopic universe in Ant-Man 3. We don’t have a single constant to latch onto so it all seems like muck. And when you layer on top of that bad CGI effects, it just feels like we’re in a computer. Superman completely lost me when he was floating down a horrifically fake-looking rainbow river, holding a badly modeled CGI baby. It was the kind of CGI scene you’d expect in a film from 2003. It was just bad. And when something is that poorly constructed, it takes the audience out of the movie.
Contrast this with the fight against the dragon earlier in the film. We have actual bearings in that scene. We see buildings. We see parks. We understand the mechanics of a city. We’re familiar with enough elements in the set piece that we can play along. I wish Gunn had stayed more “real world” with this story. Because it’s Superman. It’s supposed to be pure and simple. It’s not supposed to be pocket universes.
Truth?
The new DC universe is in trouble.
I thought this movie was going to open like gangbusters at 170-180. 120 is not embarrassing but it’s definitely not the number you needed to be at to launch a 20-film franchise. When Iron Man came out, it massively overperformed, which gave Marvel the confidence to go all in with their plan. 120 is the same number as Man of Steel. May I remind you that Man of Steel never even got a sequel.
Maybe that number is just the ceiling for Superman. This is as big as it gets no matter what you do.
I still think this is a good movie. I just wish it had been better.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Playing with the sexual tension of a potential relationship is one of the more powerful scene engines out there. So, assuming all else is equal, if you have the choice between that or already placing your characters together, go with the sexual tension.
