Up in the sky!
Look!
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
It's Superman!
Superman has always been, or at least was
supposed to be, an enduring icon of freedom.
He is a statuesque outsider from another world who,
regardless of a time or place, believes
in an undiluted heroism.
Oh, Superman.
You're terrific.
Yeah, I know.
This seems like something that wouldn't be
that hard to turn into a movie.
However, there have been numerous attempts
to bring this four-color pop culture
sensation that have failed to capture the public's
imagination.
But there's a large group of people
that believe that this changed when
the CW-verse saved Superman.
The world we live in today is a dark morass
of conflicting ideologies and overstimulation.
This mythical creation serves as a reminder
that we must always rise and embrace the best of us.
That ideal is not necessarily lost
to a bygone era, but rather something
that we must nurture and grow as a global culture.
At least, that's what the people that
create around and with Superman the IP believe.
Created in 1939, Clark Kent, also known
as the last son of Krypton, skyrocketed
to financial and cultural import through the pages of DC Comics
Action Comics Number One.
Over his 80-year history, Superman has meant many things
to many people.
In the 1950s, he was repositioned by DC editor, Mort
Weisinger, as America's dad.
In the '80s, he was rebooted by writer and artist, John Byrne,
as a Reaganesque signifier of family values.
And in the 2010s, thanks to some failed movie adaptations,
well, it got dark.
After a few troubled cinematic outings,
and the long-running Smallville show came to a close,
the prospect of rebooting Superman for a new era
became a priority for Warner Brothers.
They have been attempting to find
a vehicle for the character since the train wreck that
was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
Since then, Kevin Smith, JJ Abrams, Tim Burton,
and Brett Ratner all attempted to reboot the character
to varying levels of failure.
However, in 2011, the burgeoning DC Cinematic Universe
was underway.
Zack Snyder, director of iconic films such as 300
and Dawn of the Dead was tasked with bringing the character
to life and refreshing him for a modern audience.
Warner Brothers had not been satisfied
by the recent attempt mounted by Bryan Singer,
and I guess there, the less we say, the better.
Singer's Superman Returns is still a somber, nostalgic view
of Superman shot through the lens of attempting
to recapture the Richard Donner heights of success
for the 1970s.
Critics, however, were confused by the morally conflicted
depiction of Superman and clamored for more action.
They felt giving him a kid out of wedlock
pushed the character to the breaking point
of familial absurdity.
Snyder's version of Superman would embrace this idea
but pushed the character a little bit sideways.
Snyder's Superman is defined by grit.
This was his way of attempting to root
the character in something that modern audiences could
relate to.
At least, that's what he believed.
Snyder's Man of Steel showcased a conflicted and morally gray
Superman in a completely different way than Singer.
This is a Superman who's attempting
to find his way in the world.
He's attempting to learn right from wrong.
Snyder and company's film climaxes
in a scene where he commits murder
in the name of saving the lives of the innocent, which
is, well, not a very Superman thing to do.
Where his ultimate goal with Superman
was to position the character at the center
of cultural discourse in a way that he had not
been for the last 20 years with both Singer and Snyder.
However, both of these attempts at bringing a darkness
and grittiness to the character failed
to strike a chord with audiences because it's just simply
not who Superman is from 1,000 foot up superficial view
of the character's history.
On a bone-deep level, Superman is
a bright, sunny, jubilant character.
That's not to say he can't have moments of gravitas,
dourness, or even darkness.
But he as a character, was always meant
and always written as a positive force
for good, and altering that too much
just causes the fictional world around him to crumble.
In a modern cinematic landscape that sounds scary,
how do you make an Oscar-winning film about a guy who's smiling?
Well, how do you crack the conundrum
of creating a man compelling enough
that isn't externally conflicted in the same way
as a character might be internally conflicted?
Well, let's mention from the top.
There's a large group of people that
believe that CW figured it out.
This man right here first started
playing the last son of Krypton on the television
show, Supergirl.
After first appearing on CBS for a single season,
Supergirl moved to the CW and was
fully incorporated into the shared superhero
universe spearheaded by mega producer, Greg Berlanti.
When it came time for Kal-El to have his own spinoff,
in patented CW-verse style, writer-producer Todd Helbing
was brought in to oversee the reconstruction
of the beloved grandfather of all superheroes.
Debuting on February 23rd, 2021, the initial episode
of what has been named "Superman & Lois"
recontextualizes the character for modern audiences
maybe perfectly.
Superman that had appeared throughout the CW-verse
as a somewhat fidelitas interpretation of the Big Blue
Boy scout was here and finally coming into his own.
Not as a supporting character, but as the lead right here
in this pilot.
The cold open of "Superman & Lois"
is a perfect representation of everything
that is good about the character.
This simple, five-minute story mostly told
through voiceover and slow-motion imagery
gets to the bottom of what makes Superman a character
that every American instantly recognizes.
Even if you've never seen anything Superman
before this snippet of narrative,
you still get everything you need to know.
It's both a perfect introduction and a wonderful short story.
Rapid shots of a rocket plummeting
to Earth, shots of a baby in a hibernation chamber,
Kansas cornfields, a crash-landing, an infant.
It's all right there, ripped straight from the pages
of All-Star Superman's opening.
But words don't really express what this cold open
does in totality.
Oh, a child.
It's a baby boy.
Oh my god.
Hearing the voices of my parents.
The sound design gives you an instant emotional landscape
to engage with the cinematography is
better than anything the CW-verse has seen before.
The sweeping violins, the crane shots of the Kent farm.
There's more harp earnestness and love in these few moments
than there is in the last few attempts
at making Superman work on a larger screen.
The celebration of the strengths of small-town life
and the pure goodness of Clark Kent, the man from the stars.
There's a moment with a little boy
who says cool costume, to which Clark responds--
Thanks.
My mom made it for me.
That's Superman, not some frowning, angry, alien being.
The fact that this moment is taken almost directly
from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Superman for All Seasons
is evidence that Helbing and his crew
completely get the character.
It's exactly the moment you want in an adaptation
of the Man of Steel in order to immediately communicate
who the person is that's wielding this ungodly might.
Superman's true power isn't being
able to leap a building in a single bound
or run faster than a locomotive.
It's remembering his past.
It's the fact that he's a good person.
That's what makes him the best of us
even though he's not one of us, an alien from a faraway planet.
He's so good and pure of intention
that he's able to hold up a mirror
and reflect who we should be or want to be.
Superman's true power is his kindness,
and any adaptation that forgets that isn't really
doing Superman justice.
This inherent truth is the main thing
that most big screen adaptations of Superman overlook.
In a world fueled by commercial viability in four
quadrant ratings, it's increasingly difficult
to place emphasis on non-conflict-oriented
character-based motivations.
Audiences both domestic and international
want to see action and destruction
whereas a character like Superman
functions in literal opposition to that
at its core or his core.
Sure, there are fight scenes, but he's not
a character rooted in violence, destruction, or darkness.
He exists as a beacon, and this is the true genius
of what the CW did with this character and many
of the other characters they're currently dealing with.
They even gave Superman twins.
That's right, they made him a father with responsibilities.
A core aspect of the character's narrative struggle for so long
was keeping his identity a secret from Lois
and the rest of the supporting characters.
However, now that his two sons are in the picture,
he has to reckon with the decisions and choices he's
made while raising them and balance that
with being Superman, all without it
turning into a horrible, dark black hole.
In many ways, this brings a fresh new dramatic tension
that Warner's been searching for.
They've been attempting to work out
how to update the character for close to two decades.
It appears as though to many, they might have figured it out,
and in some ways, they might have found it
in 1950s idealism of the American father.
After many failed attempts at updating him,
it came down to just looking back
at what made Superman Superman from the very beginning.
CW provided a way to showcase that very thing organically
in allowing Superman to deal with conflict just as much
as he becomes conflict.
That's probably a good lesson for every superhero movie.
Yes, we all want nuanced heroes.
We all want moral grays.
We all want internal struggle, but at the end of the day,
if that internal or external struggle strips away
everything that made that person's internal caricature
what it was to begin with, then you're
not creating internal conflict.
You're rewriting the person altogether.
You're creating someone else.
Man of Steel becomes the title because Superman
is no longer there.
In art, you hear the term trust your gut all the time.
So that's the lesson here.
Trust your gut.
Know yourself, know your character,
and build from there.
Characters evolve.
Evolution is key.
Revolution is where everything falls off the rails.
Well, guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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