NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Entertainment

‘Superman’: The original superhero is back with a brisk new attitude

NZ Herald
9 Jul, 2025 05:00 AM6 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane (left), Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy and David Corenswet as Clark Kent. Photo / Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Comics

Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane (left), Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy and David Corenswet as Clark Kent. Photo / Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Comics

It’s been almost 50 years since Christopher Reeve starred in Superman, the 1978 movie that opened what is now an endless spigot of superhero movies.

It didn’t invent the tropes of messiah-like figures with supernatural powers or the building of elaborate on-screen worlds only to reduce them to apocalyptic rubble, but its contours have now been imitated, elaborated, iterated and just plain stolen so often that the original looks wan and generic by comparison.

Superman has been remade since then, with different actors in the role, and often with directors seeking to contemporise the hopelessly square Clark Kent and his upright alter ego by giving them a brooding, existential sense of solemnity.

The impulse was understandable – hey, it worked for Batman! But the tone was all wrong for a protagonist who, since his inception in World War II-era comic books and then in an iconic 1950s television series, embodied American ideals at their most forthright, wholesome and optimistic.

In Superman, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn’s latest instalment, David Corenswet comes closest to matching Reeve’s inimitable – and still definitive – combination of innocence and casual brute strength. (Until now, Corenswet has been best known for TV roles in shows such as House of Cards and We Own This City.)

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

As the human and humane anchor of a movie that is often awash in frenetic action, jump-cutty narrative and pulverising violence, he exudes his own brand of centred, self-confident calm: the Man of Steel as Man of Stillness.

This 21st-century Superman is fighting all the evils of the era – technology, tribalism, fake news and his own messianic myth – but Corenswet keeps it all reassuringly old-school, making a convincing case that nice guys not only can finish first but can do so without bluster, bellicosity or constant bleating into the manosphere.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on Superman, banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favour of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humour.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

He starts the movie in the middle of the hero’s journey: Clark has already arrived in Metropolis, where he works as a reporter for the Daily Planet; he’s dating a colleague, Lois Lane (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan), who knows all about his red-caped persona.

As Superman opens, Gunn dispenses with the backstory in a refreshingly efficient few lines of on-screen text that bring the audience up to the present moment, when the otherwise indefatigable Superman has suffered his first genuine beat-down, from a hulking, armoured monster called the Hammer of Boravia. (Although Supe’s origin story is recapped throughout the movie, it helps to know the begats going in.)

What ensues is a two-hour battle between good and evil, the latter personified by the dependably venal Lex Luthor, here played as a swaggering tech-bro by a startlingly bald Nicholas Hoult.

Luthor rarely refers to Superman by name – he calls him “the Kryptonian” or “the alien”, at one point convincing the Pentagon that the guy sent from another planet to save the world was really sent to control it.

Meanwhile, Luthor is masterminding a military operation overseas reminiscent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gunn doesn’t overplay present-day political echoes, but he makes sure they’re unmistakable.

In one of his most clever asides, he reveals Luthor’s fake-news farm to be a room full of monkeys, typing manically into keyboards and sending increasingly preposterous lies straight into the social media hive mind. (“Superman doesn’t have time for selfies,” the stalwart Clark declares sanctimoniously in one of the film’s most amusing scenes.)

Gunn’s de-mopeification of Superman is undeniably welcome, although the zigging, zagging and bouncing around begins to feel like being trapped in an Adderall-fuelled pinball game: one moment, Lois and Clark are having a tartly amusing argument-slash-interview in her apartment, the next they’re in Luthor’s “pocket universe” being guarded by Bermuda-shorts-and-aloha-shirt-wearing minions.

Characters appear out of nowhere, only to be ignored until they come in handy later; fans who know about the Justice Gang will recognise the Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mister Terrific (a scene-stealing Edi Gathegi), but others might need a crib sheet.

Major plot points occur in a matter of minutes in Superman, which blithely dispenses with the details in the time it takes for Superman’s legions of fans to turn into haters; blink twice and they’re back, asking for his help to repair crumbling buildings, mass panic and a world-splitting rift in the time-space continuum. Or, you know: another Tuesday in Metropolis.

The manic sound and fury of Superman don’t signify much, and the constant visual, verbal and sonic barrage feels like being pinned to the floor by Krypto, Superman’s Milk Dud-eyed, cock-eared dog whom Gunn shamelessly enlists to recruit the audience at every conveniently adorable turn. (Alan Tudyk is just as cute as 4, Superman’s C-3PO-esque robot helper.)

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

But just when the movie threatens to pummel viewers into a hyperstimulated pulp, it locks into something genuinely enjoyable: the random mayhem and playfulness merge harmoniously enough to allow Corenswet’s sincerity to take hold and for some fizzily satisfying chemistry to develop with Brosnahan, who infuses Lois with an appealing measure of scepticism, even when she’s literally being swept off her feet.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore that, somehow, it all feels rote and regurgitated. And Gunn has only himself to blame: the quippy, sometimes snarky attitude he injected into The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy at first invigorated the comic book form; now they feel played out. (The naughty bits he delights in sneaking into his movies also feel off-kilter for a character as wholesome as Superman: when he says the s-word, it’s as if the world really might be crumbling.)

By the end of Superman, the title character has cheated death more than once, repairing body and soul by way of the yellow sun that gives him renewed life and vigour. He has battled a megalomaniac, a Kaiju-like monster, myriad bots and at least one semi-human buzz saw. And in a moment that earned appreciative guffaws at a recent screening, he has helpfully set up at least one more movie in the DC Comics not-so-pocket universe.

In Corenswet, Brosnahan, Hoult and their co-stars, Gunn has clearly found a capable, congenial ensemble to usher Clark, Lois and Lex into a new era. The question is whether there are any new stories left under that yellow sun to tell.

Two and one-half stars out of four.

Superman is in NZ cinemas from Thursday, July 10.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Save

    Share this article

Latest from Entertainment

Entertainment

'Hate him': Paul Simon's daughter chastises Richard Gere, hopes her dead pets will haunt him

10 Jul 02:09 AM
Entertainment

Stay or leave? The most surprising Mafs couple switch-ups of 2025

10 Jul 02:00 AM
Entertainment

Horner's future with Halliwell unclear after Red Bull dismissal

10 Jul 12:37 AM

Get your kids involved in your reno

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Entertainment

'Hate him': Paul Simon's daughter chastises Richard Gere, hopes her dead pets will haunt him

'Hate him': Paul Simon's daughter chastises Richard Gere, hopes her dead pets will haunt him

10 Jul 02:09 AM

Lulu Simon says Richard Gere will demolish her childhood home after promising not to.

Stay or leave? The most surprising Mafs couple switch-ups of 2025

Stay or leave? The most surprising Mafs couple switch-ups of 2025

10 Jul 02:00 AM
Horner's future with Halliwell unclear after Red Bull dismissal

Horner's future with Halliwell unclear after Red Bull dismissal

10 Jul 12:37 AM
Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry reunite for family photos amid split

Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry reunite for family photos amid split

09 Jul 10:03 PM
Sponsored: Why heat pumps make winter cheaper
sponsored

Sponsored: Why heat pumps make winter cheaper

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP