<em>Superman</em> Skips the Origin Story. It’s the Movie’s Biggest Kryptonite.

This story contains spoilers for Superman.

Everyone's love for Superman has me seething like Lex Luthor. I resent it, I don't get it, and I don't trust it. Maybe you see the best in a movie that champions kindness, inclusion, and old-fashioned heroics, which is perfectly fine. Trust me, I want to believe in those ideals right now. Desperately. But Superman's supposed virtuousness only makes me angrier. I stop short of saliva-spewing fanboy rage overheard in the mazes of Comic-Con, but I'll say it: This isn't my Superman.

Superman's disavowal of Kal-El's birth heritage and ambiguity of the Kryptonians' true nature betrays its posturing as a pro-immigrant blockbuster, despite writer/director James Gunn's insistence to the contrary. There's a galaxy of distance between Gunn's vision and his execution that leaves his story confused at best, and at worst offensive when you spend more than 30 seconds thinking about it meaningfully. Superman is indeed a great immigrant, but as Gunn's movie paints him, we're just lucky he's one of the good ones.

In Superman, Gunn whizzes by the famous origin story like a speeding bullet, giving only measurements of time (3 decades, 3 years, 3 minutes...) before slinging Superman (a charming David Corenswet) into the snow. From there, it's a breathless dash back to Metropolis to deal with Godzilla-sized threats, geopolitical turmoil, and journalistic ethics and relationship woes before Clark Kent gets up for work the next day. Eventually, Superman (birth name: Kal-El) learns the truth of his parents and the Kryptonians: He was sent to conquer Earth and repopulate the planet to resurrect his extinct species. Naturally, this Man of Steel is shattered like glass by the realization. When all is said and done, Clark is thankful for his real parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, the earthly Kansas farmers who raised him.

Superman is a pro-immigrant story, or so that's what the discourse says right now. Which has always been the case; comic creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were the sons of Jewish immigrants from Russia and modern-day Ukraine. They modeled Superman out of Judeo-Christian lore, an amalgamation of Moses and Christ modernized for a Depression-era readership. "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus was cast in bronze and placed on the Statue of Liberty in 1903; 35 years later, Action Comics #1 was printed and sold for the first time. "Superman is the story of America," Gunn told The Times ahead of the July 11 release. "An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost."

I don't necessarily disagree with Gunn. His Superman is a gentler Man of Steel than the stoic god we met in Zack Snyder's portrayal of the character. You can believe this Superman has the power to laugh and smile—the physical realization of a Sufjan Stevens song. And Superman lives in America, a land of opportunity seized by an egomaniacal technocrat who cozies up to dictators and maintains a secret extrajudicial prison populated by political enemies and ex-girlfriends alike. There's no better time for a Superman to save us. than right now. But glossing over Superman's origins to present a new interpretation—one that posits Kal-El's parents had sinister hopes for Krypton's Last Son—makes the character resentful of his home, rather than a proud ambassador of it.

The unconditional love for this film has me seething like Lex Luthor.

Once again: There is no origin story in Gunn's Superman. For many people this is a check in the right column, as the past 20-plus years of superhero origins have tuckered out a moviegoing public. Gunn publicly declared that he would not retell Superman's origins "because everyone knows them," as he told a fan on Threads months ago. And he has a point. Radioactive spiders and dead parents and dying planets are ubiquitous for a genre that accounts for six of the top twenty highest-grossing movies of all time. But are origin stories really the Kryptonite of superhero flick nowadays? The consequence of Gunn's ambiguity is that the Kryptonians themselves are ambiguous, and we're left assuming only the worst about them. As it turns out, Kal-El's birth parents, Jor-El and Lara Lor-Von (played by Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan, respectively) are indeed the worst, labeling mankind a weak, mindless race in need of a ruler.

Still, Superman rises above the sins of his parents, by assuming the best in all people, even when they mean the worst. I get that. I get that actions are what prove our humanity, not birthrights. I get that Superman seeks to tell a new story, about the lies you build a life around and the Herculean strength it takes commit to it anyway. And yes, that is Superman: The superhero who can do it all and chooses to do good, because it's the right thing anyone should do. I just wish I didn't have to squint while watching the movie to see all of this. We hear a lot about what inspired Superman. We hear a lot about how he grew up. It would have been nice to see any of that and absorb it for ourselves, instead of robots telling us about it.

Superman is what happens when people grow up with limitless love—or at least, he should be. Kal-El was loved by his parents as Clark Kent was loved by his. He was instructed to be decent by both of them. "Live as one of them," said Marlon Brando's Jor-El in the 1978 classic Superman: The Movie. "They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you." (I wouldn't reference the towering '78 classic at all, but the 2025 film's metal covers of John Williams's motif are too loud to ignore.)

My problem isn't with artistic deviations or reinventions of a classic tale. It's that Superman exists with schizophrenic tension, and its conflicted messaging is, dare I say it, offensive. According to Gunn, the movie is pro-immigration. Yet its star immigrant hails from a people that Lex Luthor—correctly!—says are a threat. Might the arrogant billionaire who is bankrolling a genocide have a point? Excuse me while I banish myself into the Phantom Zone.