Superman’s Humanity

David Corenswet as Superman in James Gunn’s Superman (2025)

Not a single person in the world asked me to respond to Sonny Bunch's review of James Gunn's Superman, which appeared in The Bulwark recently, and it's likely that a similar number of people actually care what I have to say, but I'm going to say it anyway.

This isn't a refutation of the whole review, or a criticism of Bunch, who I've never read before and know nothing about. But there's one point near the end of the review that I think misses the mark, and in my own film-teachery way, I enjoy this kind of discussion. So here it is. This involves a major spoiler for the film, so you've been warned.

Partway through the film, it's revealed that Superman's father and mother sent him to Earth, not to serve humanity, as is traditionally the case, but to dominate it, and replace its people with his own bloodline. That's right, in this movie, Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van are running an alien great replacement scheme.

Due to their message being corrupted when his ship crashed as a child, Superman has only ever heard the first part, in which his parents express their love and faith in him, and tell him to save the planet, and he takes this instruction as his lodestar. But Lex Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, where Superman has the message set up to be displayed prominently (he finds it soothing) and with the help of another character, Luthor manages to unlock the full recording. He then uses this to turn the public against Superman. Cue the "Luthor was right" segment of Online Discourse™.

To be clear, the film treats this message as authentic. Luthor apparently hasn't doctored it in any way, and this is confirmed by many in-universe experts.

One of the things I found strange about the movie at first is that Superman himself makes no apparent effort to validate this finding, but apparently just hears it on the news and accepts it, which speeds up the pacing of the film, but left me scratching my head. But on reflection I think it plays into a couple of the film's themes. More on that in a minute.

By the end of the film, Superman has replaced the message from his Krypronian parents with footage of his life growing up with Ma and Pa Kent. Bunch argues in his review that this confuses the film's metaphors on immigragion, which director James Gunn has highlighted as a key theme of the film. Bunch says the following:

"The case being made by the film’s final shots, in which we see images of Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van replaced by images of Pa and Ma Kent in the Fortress of Solitude, the case being made by Superman himself when he argues that he is human because he was raised by humans—is one about assimilation, about the importance of abandoning the defunct, broken ideals of your homeland and embracing the ideals of the land that took you in."

This is where I disagree. When discussing the themes of a film, we often talk about what a character learns during the course of the story. We talk about the lies they believe, and how the story reveals the lie, and whether or not the character chooses to stop believing it. In the case of this film, the lie Superman believes, as evidenced by a number of his lines and actions, is that his role on earth—his very identity—is determined exclusively by someone else. He is Superman because he believes that's who he was sent here to be. His entire sense of purpose is derived from his parents' message. I think this explains why he doesn't independently verify the message. He takes the experts at their word, and his entire sense of self is shaken by it. By changing the intentions of his Kryptonian parents, not only is Gunn playing with the usual Superman-as-Messiah trope, in which Kal-El is a stand-in for divine intervention or the salvation we need but cannot bring ourselves, he's forcing his protagonist to source his concept of identity in his own attributes, not those handed to him by someone else, whether birth parents or adopted ones.

It's Pa Kent himself who drives this concept home. In his only significant lines of the film, he tells a distraught Clark that a parent's job isn't to determine what their children become, but to give everything to them as they discover who they are for themselves. It's not who we are raised by, or the societal values we adopt, but our individual choices that make us good or bad. This ultimately doesn't come from an external source. To apply this to the immigration metaphor, immigrants aren't good because of where they come from, and they're not good because of choosing to assimilate with American culture/economics/politics/whatever. They're good because they have chosen to be good. For many of them, that's why they came here, and since they're here, we should treat them like people, not whatever the media/crazed politicians/disingenuous tech billionaires portray them as. In a very real sense, it's not how they define themselves, but how we receive them that matters. If we treat them like humans, they have a role to play in saving us all.

Superman may choose to identify himself as human, but he doesn't abandon his Kryponian heritage. He still inhabits the fortress. He still splits his time between Superman and Clark Kent. But he does embrace humanity as part of who he is, not just where he is. And there are a lot of kinds of humans in this movie. How does Supes define his humanity? As strength born of weakness.

There's a great moment in the final episode of the animated Justice League Unlimited, in which Superman talks to Darkseid (before letting loose on him) about feeling like he lives in a world made of cardboard, always having to hold himself back or risk doing too much damage to the people and things around him. He knows his strength is too much for the world, and he never gets to use his full power. But Gunn's Superman is different. His final speech to Luthor is about finding strength in human weakness. He's rejected the lie that he's defined by someone else's vision for him. He instead turns to his own attributes to define himself: not just his Kryptonian strengths, but his humanity. And he doesn't argue that this comes from being raised by humans, but from something more personal: his woundable heart, his emotions, his other inherent vulnerabilities. He acknowledges that these are his greatest source of strength.

Strength, that is, not power. Superman doesn't long to dominate others with his alien abilities. He longs to live in a world that doesn't ask such things of him. He spends the film saving bystanders and pets, even an unfortunate squirrel. He gets sad when other heroes kill the monster rampaging through Metropolis, because he wanted to find a way to preserve it (or humanely euthanize it if necessary). He even chooses not to engage in the fight against an inter-dimensional imp because he's looking for his missing dog. He trusts the other heroes to have the imp covered.

As is often the case with Superman, Gunn's version only engages in force when there's no other option, and it's usually the least amount of force possible. The only time he really lets loose is when faced with a distorted clone of himself, one Luthor tells him is faster and stronger, even if he is stupider (thematically, this fight is Superman's struggle to overcome the version of him his parents want him to be, but on a meta level it's pretty clearly Gunn having a good time beating up Zack Snyder's incarnation of the Man of Steel, which is pretty funny). In the end, it's both his power and his restraint that makes Superman "the hero we always thought he was." We're not to believe the scheming rich guy's distortions about him, we're to look at him and judge him by his actions.

Gunn gives us a Superman who struggles less with the physical fighting, which is sometimes much briefer than you'd expect, and more with the same things we all struggle with: how to feel about stuff, how to perceive himself, which influences to follow, how to express his emotions, how to navigate relationships at work and at home. He worries about his parents. He worries about his girlfriend. He worries about his dog. What he doesn't worry about is whether or not he should protect human life above all other concerns. Regarding immigrants, international conflicts, and everything else the movie touches on, Gunn is telling us, neither should we.