I will be honest: I had mixed feelings, based exclusively on the trailers, about James Gunn's Superman Restart again. Of course, the casting seemed great, Gunn has a winning track record about super hero rate, and Krypto de Hond stall the show every time he appeared. The trailers hit a nice balance between action, humor and heart. Yet the film also seemed to get too much with super characters, and it was hard to get some idea of the actual plot.
I have now seen the film, and those impressions were largely correct. But I am happy to be able to report that the positives outweigh much heavier than negatives. Superman is a super -awarded ride that unabashedly its early comic book roots, naive optimism and so embrace.
(Spoilers below, but no big reveals.)
Gunn has described his opinion as less a story and more of a journey, in which Superman (David Corswet) is struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origin with his adopted man from the small city. Gunn wanted to completely avoid the origin story and claimed (in my opinion correctly) that it has been depicted several times and there is no need to cover the same land.
So the movie opens In Media ResWith Superman's first defeat in the fight against a Metahuman called the 'Hammer of Boravia'. We see him fall into the snow, bloody and damaged, and whistle for Krypto. The courageous little super dog drags Superman to the fort of loneliness, where he is treated by a posse of robots. Then he goes on his way again for round 2 – only to be beaten again by his rival Metahuman (codename: Ultraman) who, we learn, is controlled by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) for mysterious and undoubtedly nasty purposes.
Why does Ultraman Metropolis attack? Because Superman had thwarted the invasion of the Boravian army in the neighboring country of Jarhanpur a few weeks earlier, so that meaningless bloodshed was avoided, but criticized for interfering with a foreign war when he had no government authority to do this. Of course, Luthor skillfully manipulates the media attention against Superman while trying to convince the Pentagon that Superman is a major threat to national security. The idealistic and naive optimistic Superman is trapped.
