It’s not unusual to make things challenging for the world’s most famous superhero. But Superman, though not without some charms, overdoes it — and other things.

“You’ll believe a man can fly,” the marketing for the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie assured audiences in 1978. They did. In 2025, Superman begins with the title character, already having begun his public heroics, crashing back to earth. He is bruised, bloodied, and wheezing.

It is not unfamiliar for Superman to be laid low. It’s a necessity. Someone so powerful is uninteresting without a real challenge. So just about every property featuring Superman has to do something to weigh him down. The most common method is kryptonite, a weakness so famous that it has passed into popular parlance as a modern synonym for an Achilles’ heel.

So it’s not unusual that this Superman, written and directed by James Gunn (best known for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films), throws such obstacles in the hero’s way. It does overdo this, however. Not just kryptonite but nanites, pocket universes, and other contrivances force Superman (played now by David Coronswet, who missed being my twin by mere hours) to stumble. He frequently needs others, including the super-dog Krypto, to save him. Despite forcing him over these hurdles, Gunn does not compromise the unironic and earnest character of the most famous superhero — for the most part. I find it hard to believe that he would be fazed by mean tweets, but, well . . . he is a Millennial now.

Yet Gunn doesn’t just weigh down Superman with an excess of stressors. He stuffs Superman with a superabundance of other characters and story elements. The classic trio is present: Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) along with Superman/Clark Kent. All are at least serviceable, though Coronswet’s Superman is the strongest (literally and figuratively) of the three. But there’s also a coterie of other heroes and villains of variable interest and dramatic potency. Plus a geopolitical conflict between two nations into which Superman inserts himself. There were early indications that Gunn’s Superman would be too busy. It is. Superman is sometimes lost in his own movie.

This busyness makes it hard for much to stand out. Some of the many characters, such as Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific, do. A few moments, such as the much-teased shot of Superman and Lois rising slowly into the air, do as well. (As an Ohioan, I may be biased here. That scene was filmed in Cleveland’s beautiful Arcade. Another scene was filmed in Cincinnati’s Union Terminal. Recall that, despite his Kryptonian parentage and comic-book Kansas upbringing, Superman was really born in Cleveland.) Gunn makes us work for some other moments that would count as classically uplifting Superman. Most of the on-screen spectacle holds your attention, but lets go quickly afterward. The main thing about Superman that has stuck with me is a significant change the movie makes to the character’s lore. (Spoilers follow.)

In Superman, the hero reaches maturity thinking his parents sent him to Earth with a benevolent mission. But then he learns, at the same time as the rest of our world, that they actually wanted him to come to our planet so that he could rule over it, take many wives, and ensure that his offspring dominate the gene pool. Shaken by this revelation, he eventually overcomes it, accepting that his earthly upbringing has given him a genuine affinity for humanity — as its protector, not as its master.

This is a dramatic break from the common depiction of Superman’s parents as fundamentally good-hearted and decent, who send him to Earth hoping that he can help its people. (The nerds will surely rise up to tell me that some variants show them differently.) It is consistent, however, with the most recent version of Batman (which I liked far less than this Superman). In that movie, Thomas Wayne is not quite as Zod-like as this movie’s Jor-El. Neither, however, is he a redoubtable paragon of virtue: His activities entangle him with the mob.

Maybe this is more realistic. Humans are fallen creatures. But when the definitive interpretations of these characters over the years have shown them as inspirations for their progeny, it is not off-base to suspect a broader anti-patriarchal intent, a kind of “anti-privilege virtue-signaling” to round out the sons of these figures, as a friend put it to me. In Superman, though, this doesn’t really work even on its own terms.

Some have argued, plausibly, relative to the pre-release controversy about the movie over Gunn’s declaring Superman an “immigrant,” that Superman is actually an assimilation narrative. He leaves behind the unsavory mores of his place of origin and adopts the superior values of his new homeland. This is complicated, however, by two defects of the movie that arise from its declining to give us much of Superman’s origin story, even if that is a defensible storytelling decision (the Superman narrative has basically passed into common parlance by now). But it means that we know basically nothing about Krypton and its people other than what his parents’ message conveys. It also means that we have almost no sense of what Superman’s earthly upbringing gave, aside from what appears in a brief Smallville-set sequence, and from some faux-homespun bromides delivered by his human parents. They are presumably meant to be honest, salt-of-the-earth types. But they come off more as offensively caricatured yokels than they have in any Superman adaptation I can recall. (At least he still wasn’t raised by Stalin.)

Amid all the other things weighing Superman (and its Superman) down, this change stands out as the most egregious. The movie’s defects don’t make it completely unenjoyable; it is not without its charms. But call me old-fashioned if you like. I just want to believe a man can fly.