Charmed as his life might be (stable and remunerative employment at a daily city newspaper!),  it’s easy to feel sorry for Superman.

Having been around for now the better part of a century, the blue unitard-wearing hero’s name has become almost metonymic with an idealized, impossible conception of “goodness” (see: everything from the ponderous 2010 documentary about charter schools, Waiting for “Superman” to 3 Doors Down’s iconic Y2K-era butt-rock anthem “Kryptonite”). Superman is rarely considered in his own right, rather than as a foil to more earthbound, angsty superheroes such as the Randian vigilante Batman, or to Spider-Man, the idealized boy next door.

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So as ubiquitous as Big Blue might be, who really knows him, or even cares to? While some of the most critically lauded Superman comic books delve into what makes the Übermensch tick, his numerous cinematic iterations have largely avoided this. That is, until James Gunn’s Superman, an instant box office smash upon its release in July, cuts right to the chase and asks: Can someone this good, this earnest, this pure, even be allowed to exist?

It’s to Gunn’s credit that in an era of overbearing cultural moralization, Superman asks this not as a political question, but a more universal, pop-philosophical one. Why Superman is so good — at one point he pauses a superpowered, city-trampling battle to save a single squirrel from being crushed — is relatively unimportant, chalked up to a briefly-explored, yet almost psychedelically idealized Midwestern upbringing. It’s how everyone around him responds to his goodness that makes Gunn’s film so interesting, from paramour Lois Lane’s rapid cycling between admiration and perplexity to archnemesis Lex Luthor’s amphetamine-tinged tech-bro rage.

Luthor has always been an ingenious nemesis for the invulnerable Superman: a merely intelligent human, an evildoing Prometheus out to steal fire from our benevolent cape-wearing god. Here, portrayed by a wonderfully demented Nicholas Hoult, Luthor contains unmistakable echoes of figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, men whose bearing or mien don’t quite sit within the same reality as the rest of us and are consequently bent on bending that reality to their image.

Luthor’s Ahab-like pursuit of Superman recalls a certain viral tweet: “RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris but im different. and better. maybe even better than the gods.” In their final confrontation, Luthor sneers at Superman that “my envy is a calling,” saying his mission to bring the Kryptonian down a peg is really one to preserve humanity’s status as Earth’s apex predator. Superman, true to form, says there’s nothing to envy. And besides, maybe gadgets aren’t everything: “I screw up all the time, but that’s being human, and that’s my greatest strength. Someday I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it’s yours too.”

In other words, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. The obvious Christ metaphor aside, Gunn’s Superman might remind literary-minded moviegoers of Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov, a boyish pilgrim with a steadfast moral compass who is nevertheless tempted, challenged, and sometimes hated by a society that seems to fear and indulge him in equal measure. Superman wraps these deeply unfashionable themes and aspirations in the pomp, spectacle, and humor that are Gunn’s superhero trademark (see: the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, easily among the best of Marvel Comics’ cinematic offerings). It’s resonated with audiences to the tune of more than $300 million in box office receipts, by far the superhero genre’s best showing of 2025.

While Superman tackles head-on whether humanity can accept such a moral and spiritual challenge, this summer’s other superhero blockbuster simply assumes away its existence. Fantastic Four: First Steps, the fourth cinematic depiction of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s signature Marvel Comics creations, departs, literally, from our postmodern, anomie-ridden moral reality to an alternate universe, “Earth-828,” a nod to Kirby’s birthdate. On Earth-828, there is no philosophical garment-rending about humanity’s subservience to superpowered gods, no ironic scorn for their do-goodery, and, seemingly, no other superheroes. The film depicts a world where the Four are something like the Beatles, the Kennedys, the Curies, and the Brady Bunch all in one, a globe-bestriding celebrity family responsible for staving off supernatural threats and, seemingly, establishing world peace.

The film’s brightly lit, jet-age retrofuturism is a refreshing break from the increasingly drab, made-for-TV quality of Marvel’s recent offerings. It contains some of the most genuinely novel action sequences and sci-fi imagery of the bloated Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, from a rollercoaster-like spaceship ride to the classically Kirbian world-eater Galactus striding, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, across New York City. The Four are perfectly cast, and the film hits all the necessary narrative and fan-service beats in a succinct, crowd-pleasing 115 minutes.

And yet… something about the world of this Fantastic Four feels inert, not as far from the in-universe Saturday morning cartoon depicting their adventures as filmmaker Matt Shakman and Marvel’s team of writers might think. In a world where superheroes face no real resistance beyond testing their own supernatural mettle against the powers of their enemies, there can be no real conflict, only mere competition; the outcome of a brief, unconvincing moment of Solomonic temptation for team leaders Reed and Sue Richards is never remotely in doubt.

To juxtapose these iterations of Superman and the Four is to realize that their 20th-century Pax Americana idealism needs to be threatened by the puerile nihilism represented by more popular R-rated superhero fare, such as Joker or the Deadpool series, to have any meaning at all. A world where Superman or the Richardses’ earnest goodness goes unchallenged isn’t just one free of drama, but one free of arete, moral virtue, or catharsis, an idea explored in its own right in some of superheroics’ most genuinely artful iterations and which accounts for the leaden lack of feeling First Steps inspires despite its pure competency as entertainment.

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In that light, Superman might not have it so bad after all, with Luthor’s questing jealousy, not to mention the agape disbelief of a cynical humanity, always there to establish the stakes. The Four’s true archenemy, Richards’s scientific nemesis and mirror image Doctor Doom, is absent in First Steps but will appear in a sequel, giving the world’s largest entertainment machine another crack at the depth that often eludes it.

“It’s too good to be true,” one character remarked of Christopher Reeve’s Superman in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie: “He’s six-foot-four, has black hair, blue eyes, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and tells the truth.” The line is more trenchant than its writers could have known. Not just Superman’s powers, but his character is literally too good to be true, and his untrueness is the source of his seemingly eternal, alien, and yes, as the film insists, subversive appeal, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the superhero class.

Derek Robertson coauthors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.