The Last Superhero Movie

With the new “Superman” (⭐, in theaters), the modern superhero movie has at last reached a thundering dead end, collapsing under its own weight like a bloated evolutionary mistake. It’s pure end-stage studio filmmaking, the product of a cargo-culture capitalism in which a good idea is recycled so often in the pursuit of profits that the parent DNA has become a tattered rag by the 27th cloning. The movie is a disaster – a snarky, jokey, overdesigned, overwritten, over-digitized, over-everything misreading of all we think the cultural property called “Superman” stands for.

And I don’t even like superhero movies.

We can agree on one thing: The 1978 “Superman” starring the late Christopher Reeve remains the real deal – the movie that reintroduced and updated the comic book character by having him be the one sincere straight arrow in all of the 1970s. That’s part of what made him super: The character’s naivete sprang from an idealistic sense of right and wrong that we mortals can only entertain in spurts, and then usually to mock it. Reeve’s Superman was incapable of irony, and the result was something unfashionable and lasting in the culture: A truly good movie hero, untarnished amid the pandering circus of entertainment around him.

Every movie to feature the Son of Krypton since has tried to match that tone and has tripped over its big-budget shoelaces. The Reeve sequels are farcical misfires save for “Superman II” in 1980, the 2006 “Superman Returns” with Brandon Routh is weak tea, and the rebooted DCU “Man of Steel” series for Warner Bros. in the early 2010s are deadly serious bores, hamstrung by the front office’s need to compete with the Marvel juggernaut over at Disney. Henry Cavill did a decent approximation of Reeve’s chiseled rectitude in those movies, but Ben Affleck was more interesting as a flabby, insecure Batman in “Batman v Superman” (2016) and “Justice League” (2017) – a bridge-and-tunnel superhero to Cavill’s sleek urban warrior. (The revelation of “Batman v Superman” is that Metropolis is Manhattan and Gotham City is … Newark.) Sure, the “Snyder Cut” of “Justice League” is a “better movie,” all four hours of it, but by then the simple joys of what Superman is supposed to be about – he’s a man, but he’s a super one, see – were obliterated by the need to destroy CGI skyscrapers in fetishistic detail and Dolby surround-sound. It was time to go back to the basics. Instead, we got... this.