Superman Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Movie review: Superman (2025)

David Corenswet

I had initially decided not to watch the new movie Superman, in large part because seeing sequels and reboots is exhausting. Also, I’m not a big DC movie fan, having seen the first two Superman movies with Christopher Reeve, and a couple of Batman films, not counting the LEGO pieces.

I did happen across the Justice League movie from 2017, which utterly confounded me. Superman (Henry Cavill) was dead, but he wasn’t. What the heck?

Two things pushed me into seeing the new flick: my wife wanted to see it, remembering fondly the first Christopher Reeve film from 1978. Also, many people on social media suggested that the new movie was too “woke.” I wondered what that possibly meant. So we attended a Wednesday matinee at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

I saw many comments from fans thinking that this Superman (David Corenswet) was too physically weak; he even bleeds! As somebody who’s known comic books for a long time, part of the problem with Superman historically is that he was too darn powerful. If he could change time and fly to different planets at will, what would keep him humble and “human”? It is a statement when you see Superman lose in the movie’s first battle, to be rescued by his robots and the unruly dog Krypto.

Villainy

This Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) reminded me A LOT of the tech bros who are “too confident about their ability”. This mixed review: “We are living under the whims of real, insane, egomaniacal, profoundly insecure billionaire supervillains… How can any comic book narrative compete with that kind of real-life villainy?” As the writer notes, “Yeah, it might not be fair to blame Gunn for not having a crystal ball predicting all the nightmare sh*t that’s happened since January while he was writing and filming this movie.” So, I don’t, and the crap coming down in 2025 America makes the film feel “real,” if not prescient.

I like Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and many of the supporting characters quite a bit.

Much to my surprise, there was a point in the latter quarter of the film when I got emotionally attached. Interestingly, Wendy Pini of Elfquest fame, whom I knew from my FantaCo days, made a cogent observation:

“What if this new Supes movie is VERY good for boys and men?… I’ve seen dozens and dozens of comments from [my male friends who are comics industry pros] in my feed, which are universally positive. This movie is creating joy for them. They’re using words like hope, kindness, helpfulness, compassion, and light.”

The film is a bit unbalanced here and a little sloppy there, but I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed the movie. On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 83% positive reviews from critics and 93% positive reviews from audiences.

Myths retconned to advance diversity

multiverse

Uthaclena poses a question for Ask Roger Anything.

Should icons, legends, and myths be retconned to advance diversity and inclusiveness? Is creating new stories and characters stifled or advanced by doing so?

Maybe. And maybe. A post by Mark Evanier this year addresses this.

“Among the pro-social requirements at that moment was that every [cartoon] show that particular year [1980] had to have minority representation. Someone in it had to not be a white guy.

“As it was explained to me, Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities, and it was kind of like ‘Pick one.’ Joe Ruby, one of the producers of the show, looked it over and picked ‘Hawaiian.’ He and Norman had previously invented a sidekick for Plas, who had perpetual bad luck and whose voice would be based somewhat on Lou Costello’s.”

So I asked him, “I was wondering if you thought that was a good thing, a bad thing?” He replied, “In this world — or in my world, at least — one often finds situations that fall under the category of ‘Doing the right thing for the wrong reason’ or maybe ‘Achieving the proper goal in an improper way.'”

I agree with him that ABC was hamfisted about this. Thus, the inclusiveness checkmark was achieved but at a creative cost.

A better solution would be to create situations that reflect the characters portrayed. To achieve that, one needs to have more writers who are black, Hispanic, gay, women, fat et al. You know, people who have some experience with being what the stories are trying to portray rather than having a white character in blackface.

MCU

To the specifics of the question, when I was growing up reading comics, DC came up with different “earths” to explain the difference between the Golden Age and Silver Age heroes.

Someone recently wrote that there were too many characters named Superman. I can’t speak to this because I’m not following the comic books. The marketplace, I reckon, will decide.

I’ll point to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As you know, Sgt. Fury, fighting in WWII, was a white guy in the comics. But movie fans now can’t think of anyone but Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

Here’s the problem with comic books that are more than a quarter-century old. You always have to retcon the storyline, or it doesn’t make any sense. The Lee/Ditko Spider-Man is in his 70s. Reed Richards and Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four fought in World War II, so the Lee/Kirby characters are centenarians.

I’m cool with the changes because we’re dealing with the multiverse, which was used to tremendous effect in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME and especially Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Heck, anyone who has ever watched soap operas for any length of time knows that babies suddenly age for storyline reasons.

If you’re going to alter something, having media that reflects our evolving understanding of the world makes sense to me.

And if someone is pearl-clutching over people of color in the Tolkien universe, for instance, they can write off the finished projects as bad fan fiction.

Christopher Reeve would have been 70

Paralysis Research

Lots of people have mused why Christopher Reeve, born September 25, 1952, was the perfect Superman. Part of it is that perfect early scene:
Supes: Easy miss, I’ve got you
Lois Lane states: You–you’ve got me? Who’s got you?
And it’s that little chuckle that I loved.

But also, he was my favorite Clark Kent. If you don’t accept Clark as distinct, it’s difficult to buy the secret identity of the superhero. I saw the first two films, and even though the second film is a lesser effort, it was not the failure of the actor in the lead. Here was his workout regimen.

I didn’t see him in much else. Remains of the Day (1993) and Noises Off (1992) I liked. Also Somewhere in Time (1980), during which Jane Seymour says she and Christopher Reeve were “falling in love.”

Then, “on May 27, 1995, the actor injured his spinal cord after falling off his horse in an equestrian competition… The blow left him paralyzed from the neck down and forever in a wheelchair. Reeve was only 42 years old. The doctors took away any hope of improvement, assuring him that it was ‘impossible’ to recover movement…

“As The New York Times revealed, if the actor had fallen one centimeter further to the left, he would have died on the spot. If he had done so to the right, he would most likely walk out with less than a concussion.

“Reeve reappeared in public at the 1996 Oscar Awards, a surprise remembered as one of the most exciting moments in the history of the awards.” I’m very sure I got a lot verklempt at that moment. Christopher quipped, “What you may not know is that I left New York in September and just arrived in Los Angeles this morning [March 25, 1996].”

The Foundation

The above paragraphs were from a piece on the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1999.

Even before then, both Christopher and Dana were involved with activism. “In the years following his injury, Christopher did more to promote research on spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders than any other person before or since.”

As the AmeriDisability page notes: “Originally created in 1982 in response to the injury of Henry Stifel, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation – first conceived as the Stifel Paralysis Research Foundation, a community-driven nonprofit dedicated to curing spinal cord injury (SCI) – marks its 40th anniversary (2022). Over the last four decades, the Reeve Foundation has evolved to become the premier national, paralysis-focused nonprofit organization working to address a dual care-cure mission – providing free, comprehensive resources to help those impacted by SCI and paralysis as it advances the most promising scientific advances toward cures.”

Check out the Give.org page.

The most recent Charity Navigator listing for the Foundation gives it a “score is 87.31, earning it a 3-Star rating. Donors can ‘Give with Confidence’ to this charity.” Note that “this score represents Form 990 data from 2019, the latest year published by the IRS,” because the agency “is significantly delayed in processing nonprofits’ annual tax filings.”

Passing

In 1998, Reeve produced and starred in Rear Window. It is, of course, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s great 1954 film. “He was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance.” Of course, it doesn’t compare with the original. But one scene actually terrified me. When the villain disconnected the Reeve character’s breathing tube, it was impossible for me to separate the role from the guy playing it.

On October 9, 2004, Reeve went into cardiac arrest after receiving an antibiotic for an infection. He fell into a coma and was taken to a hospital in Mount Kisco, New York. He died on October 10 at the age of 52, quite possibly as the result of an adverse reaction to a drug, something he had experienced in the past.

Dana Reeve married Christopher in 1992. Less than a year after his death, Dana announced that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. “She had never smoked but in her early career often sang in smoky bars and hotel lobbies.” She died on March 6, 2006, at the age of 44, at NYC’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

But their work lives on.

N is for nativism versus immigration

“Illegal” immigration has always been a red herring.

There have have always been nativism movements in the United States. Seldom has been as blatant as it’s been the past year and a quarter. In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna announced that the agency changed its mission statement from:

“USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”

To now:

“U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”

The aspirational angle has been lost.

By contrast, “During the 1940s, America basically underwent a nationwide sensitivity training program. Zoe Burkholder, a historian of education, writes… that a ‘forced tolerance’ movement had begun frothing a decade earlier as educators feared that scientific racism—the pseudoscientific ‘Master Race’ theories brewing in Germany—could waft overseas.” A reasonable worry, evidently.

Thus the story about the Superman pic shown. (Hey, wasn’t he an illegal alien?) What I do know is that the current regime’s attitude is troublesome.

Fran Rossi Szpylczyn notes: “The part where Jesus says to welcome the stranger is not a suggestion, it is a directive.”

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes that Ronald Reagan “not only celebrating the concept of welcoming people from all sorts of places during his kickoff of the fall campaign, but arguing that it was immigrants who helped build the country and it was the dream that they embodied that was what made America great.” The GOP icon didn’t believe in nativism.

In other words, the US Needs ‘sh*thole’ countries, not the other way around. “America’s prosperity and security are greatly dependent on the goodwill and cooperation of other nations, developed and emerging markets alike.”

That would include chain migration, or family reunification.

Read former President Obama on immigration from September 2017

A pastor friend of mine noted recently, “I am thinking this morning of good people, great Americans I know, who have come here from Haiti, [various African countries], Pakistan, Philippines. These Americans contribute to the greater good of the US… [they] have worked hard, learned to live in an often-less-than-friendly new place, raised strong families, and sent their kids to college so they can also contribute to society… You ARE the American People.”

As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting.

The Weekly Sift guy nailed it when he wrote about The Real Immigration Issue: “‘Illegal’ immigration has always been a red herring. The more fundamental question is whether the United States will continue to be a country dominated by English-speaking white Christians.” Will nativism continue to push back?

For a brief historic perspective, read Becoming a Citizen: Naturalization Records, 1850 – 1930

For ABC Wednesday

October rambling #2: monotasking

Bob Dylan isn’t the first lyricist to win the Nobel

Christ’s Burial Place Exposed for First Time in Centuries

John Green explains the tax plans of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and the differences between Donald Trump’s plans for healthcare in the United States and Hillary Clinton’s proposals

Political ads: Jason Kander for US Senate from Missouri and Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty

SNL: ‘Black Jeopardy’ with Tom Hanks

‘What Kind of Mother Is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?’

‘Marquis,’ YouthFX film about Marquis Dixon; a state appeals court has rejected the original nine-year sentence for Marquis Dixon, the Albany youth convicted as an adult for a sneaker robbery

H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. Long Before ‘Patient Zero’ and Mythology of ‘Patient Zero’ and how AIDS virus traveled to the United States is all wrong

We are intersex people, and we don’t need to be ‘fixed’ by surgeries

Surviving the intersection of fear and recklessness

Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?) – I did not know monotasking was a word

Tom Hayden, protester-turned-politician, dies at 76

NFL Ratings Just Fell Off a Cliff: Why?

Taryn Huber Named RMAC Volleyball Academic Player of the Year; daughter of one of my oldest, dearest friends

Maine’s Penobscots tell Cleveland: Win the Series, great, but lose the logo

Remember When The Chicago White Sox Won The World Series?

5 Things Millennials Are Trying To Render Extinct

Winnie the Pooh is still the best bear in the world

Now I Know: Silence Lights and Hannibal, Lector and Dire Straights and The Groom of the Stool and Marching Forward and Tumbling Down and When It Rains, It Poems

Movie: SANCTUARY (1961), starring Lee Remick, Yves Montand, Bradford Dillman, and Odetta; screenplay by Ruth Ford and James Poe, based on works by William Faulkner; directed by Tony Richardson. In 1928 Mississippi, the black maid of a white woman helps her employer out of a predicament

A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems

John Ostrander: Making a Better Superman