Superman

You go in expecting to enjoy a handsome man wearing his undies over his tights, flying around and doing saving-the-world stuff. You get an Interstellar-level show-and-tell universe. If all that sounds a bit much, it is.

A wonderfully entertaining, heartfelt cinematic reset for the Man of Steel, and a great start for James Gunn's DC universe on the big screen.

This film admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

Superman is a curio that Gunn appears to have made for his own amusement, bursting with geeky weirdness but ultimately glib and flimsy—an eccentric sci-fi B-movie that feels exhaustingly self-indulgent rather than the launch of a long-running franchise.

David Corenswet takes on the blue-and-red mantle admirably, and glimpses of Gunn's signature sense of fun shine through — but a lack of humanity, originality and cohesion means the movie around them just doesn't work.

Here is a film occupying the heartsinking Venn diagram overlap between franchise exhaustion and AI soullessness: a film fatally unconvinced of the reason for its own existence. The Man of Steel – played with square-faced soullessness by David Corenswet – has an uninteresting crisis of confidence in Gunn's cluttered, pointless franchise restartery. What is the point of a film so stymied in its digitally encoded and generically prescribed world that it can't even go through the motions, as that would imply some level of activity and signs of life?