A Review of Superman (2025)
Don’t take it too seriously. It’s about a flying man in a red cape. It would be unwise to reduce Superman to a social allegory — stories have multi-layered meanings. But Superman 2025 begins our work for us by very laboriously outlining the geopolitical problem that Superman inherently presents: he is an invincible sovereign power who can intervene unilaterally for peace. So is he a stand-in for NATO? The atomic bomb? Maybe in some ways. I think the case could be made quite easily that in this film, Superman is presented as the archetypal Jewish American neoconservative.
Consider the origin story presented: out of a homeland torn apart by war and genocide, a baby is sent, Moses-like, in a basket across the void of space to a land of peace and simplicity: heartland America. Adopted by the naive but caring hobbit-like folk of Kansas, young Clark is inculturated with civic virtues of decency and a wide-eyed innocence, yet also gifted with a hereditary excellence that destines him for greater horizons than his small hometown. So he moves to the big city where (in this film) he takes on evil authoritarian forces in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, both as a journalist and as a supersonic pugilist.
This origin story describes not just Clark Kent but (aside from the space travel and giant monsters) most of the origin stories of the neoconservative commentariat, and weirdly mirrors liberals’ push for global American interventionism, defending the freedoms of every “potential American” around the globe.
In this film, the corrupt Slavic nation of Boravia is invading the South Asian third-world village people of Jarhanpur. (This scenario basically collapses the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and India-Pakistan conflicts into one simple cartoon.) Superman intervenes because he doesn’t want people to get killed. He wants peace. But everyone reviles him for this. People say he’s getting in over his head. He’s beaten up by mysterious Slavic super agents collaborating with xenophobic billionaires. One more experience that every neoconservative deeply empathizes with: thousands of cybernetic monkeys botfarm mean comments about him on the internet.
There’s a further twist — spoilers — a shocking hologram sent by Superman’s biological parents is uncovered by his archnemesis Lex Luthor: his father Jor-El intended all along for Superman to rule this planet of inferior earthlings. “We love you more than heaven; we love you more than land,” his parents intone solemnly. They explicitly charge their son with starting a Solomonic scale harem to pass on his genes and establish a worldwide dominion founded on Kryptonian eugenic supremacy. (This is presented in the film as a bad thing.) Superman is shocked and disgusted by this. He cares about human rights and world peace. He disavows the supremacist vision of his biological parents and reaffirms the simple innocence of his adoptive parents.
Yet the American people are generally portrayed as sheep. Ma and Pa Kent have good hearts but are clueless bumpkins. Bystanders in Metropolis record giant monsters on their phones, oblivious to their impending deaths. Their opinions drift this way and that according to the latest media propaganda, whether manufactured by LuthorCorp or the Daily Planet. They need protection and leadership.
You could see this, allegorically, as an attempt to emotionally process the way liberal cultural elites, neoconservatives, and Jews in general are feeling under attack these days. Zionism is under fiercer criticism in the public square than ever before. Coalitions on the left and right, once very favorable to them, are growing feeble and gray. Among the young, they’re being clawed at from both the left and the right. Not just anti-Zionist, but utterly anti-Jewish sentiment is now completely ubiquitous in youth culture, if you care to survey the memes or Instagram comment sections. One gets a sense that liberal cultural dominance of baby boomer America has been diluted in this next generation. Many are seriously re-evaluating their political stances in the changing climate and trying to understand what their role will be going forward in this country. This year’s Superman is for the liberal cultural elite, the neoconservative, and the concerned Jew — really, anyone troubled both by the populist left and the populist right, unnerved both by the Trump era and the Antifa-Intifada coalition, and wondering what of America is going to be left in the middle.
In this film, Superman is characterized in an especially naive and nebbish manner, uneasy about violence, not wanting to kill any villains, stopping to save squirrels, and wanting to treat even Godzilla-sized monsters humanely. He is mocked by other heroes, thin-skinned about mean comments, and emotionally crushed by other people’s lack of confidence in him. The hopefulness is somewhat refreshing, given the dark and gritty rut superhero fiction has been trapped in for years.
They go a bit overboard by making Superman a pushover, always getting beaten up, never disciplining his dog, and letting everyone else walk all over him. It seems a bit disingenuous since he is literally the most powerful being on the planet. But at least the film is deeply concerned with the nature of unavoidable, hereditary inequality, and the inherent difficulties that emerge when unlimited strength is paired with a complete lack of the will to rule. These are themes that we all wish pop culture took more seriously.
In contrast, Lex Luthor, head of LuthorCorp (which we could translate as “The Protestant Work Ethic”), symbolically represents the man of industry, the obsessive capitalist. In this film, he embodies the inventor, the striver, the nerd, the internet troll, the gamer, the libertarian, the private military contractor, the Donald Trump, the Peter Thiel, the isolationist, the classic American paranoiac.
“Superman is grooming us!” he declares. He hates the Alien simply because he is an Alien, and doesn’t believe he can truly be of Earth (that is, America). In other words, Lex Luthor is all that is most loathed by the liberal humanitarian, because Lex Luthor is obsessed with sovereignty. He admits he orchestrated a geopolitical crisis not because he cared about colonizing a third-world country, but simply to provide an excuse to destroy his greatest fear, Superman. Lex Luthor’s Planetwatch, a thinly veiled stand-in for Palantir, experiments with nanobots, drones, and black hole technology that literally begins tearing a rift through America.
We might roll our eyes at this. A literal rift? But it’s not unreasonable. Paranoia can create unnecessary rifts. In a time of limitless accusation, we should be careful not to hate the wrong people, and in our fervor, turn ourselves into a generation of schismatics and sadists.
Still, the billionaire is all too safe a scapegoat for the liberal conscience. Why is it exclusively billionaires portrayed as sociopaths, when in real life we see the Daily Planet-style journalists, the media class, and subversive academics, always deranged, frothing at the mouth, demanding the dispossession and queering of the Ma and Pa Kents of the world? Superman declares Luthor is driven only by envy. But what if it’s not envy?
The core moral lesson of the film, uttered by Pa Kent in a tender front porch moment with his adoptive son, is that your parents aren’t there to burden you with obligations of global dominion — they are there to provide you the tools needed to live a free life and make your own foolish choices.
That perfectly distills the liberal view of parenting. And I genuinely believe this is a moral that Christian reactionaries shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. We should weigh the possible goods of this liberal outlook seriously. Consider the opposite ditch: it is all too easy for stern, dominionist, striver parents to crush their children with ambition — trying to set them up for worldly success at the loss of freedom and innocence. We need wisdom.
Nevertheless, we note that Ma and Pa Kent have no biological offspring. And their bucolic heartland innocence only carries on defended by forces that they can’t understand or take responsibility for. Their peace requires superhuman specimens, otherworldly technology, and a military-industrial complex to maintain. Their morality is incomplete because it cannot help us prepare an inheritance wisely or exercise true justice if granted dominion. We should love innocence, but also discern shrewdly the demands of liberty. Most of all, we should be thankful for what graces God has given us freely.
For the Christian reactionary who craves sovereignty, we must see that our attempts to seize or defend an earthly inheritance are never at the cost of our spiritual inheritance, the true love taught by Christ.
Still, reactionaries perceive the abyssal rift growing in our culture. We see the black hole beginning to emerge. We feel urged more and more to hate that which is alien. So, we need to seriously take stock of our identity, who is truly of us and who is other and why, and what it means to show hospitality to a stranger in need, nor to be threatened by any excellence found among them, while still maintaining what sovereignty we have. We need to be very careful that in our desire for dominion, we do not sacrifice our innocence. We must love greatness, both in making war and in making peace. Anything less will lead to catastrophe.
I appreciate that Superman 2025 brings all these considerations to mind, even if it is ill-equipped to provide us with a promising way forward, reconciling all these tensions: heredity, national identity, interventionism, and sovereignty. It is still too ensconced in a liberal cosmology to offer anything further than “love freedom, resist hate.” But I have hope God will show the next generation the way forward, even when movies can’t.
The film ends with this image: Superman lying on his back, his robots tending to his many wounds, as he is surrounded by a 360-degree giant halo of a television screen. It plays folksy soothing clips of his childhood as a super baby reared by Ma and Pa Kent. The robots comment on how much they wish to “soothe” Superman — much like how the moviemakers must want to soothe us. The movie is saying: just lie back, godlike super soldier. You belong here in America. Ignore the call of your biological inheritance.
I think that is a sentiment many people should ponder. For a Hollywood film, it’s not an entirely evil, subversive message — it’s good to love the innocent; it’s good to love America.
The film is onto something. We do need an omnipotent, entirely benevolent hegemon to bring peace between different nations and strangers. I deny that a vague sentiment of liberal humanitarianism will satisfy — good intentions can’t save us. Journalism can’t save us. Military supremacy goes a long way, but not eternally. The only one capable of bringing about such a peace as we desire is Christ on his throne. So, what do you believe about how Christ exercises sovereignty on this earth? Who is his body, and in what way do his saints reign among the nations?
Image Credit: Unplash
