The new Superman movie offers the vision of a kinder, more tolerant United States. But should we really pin our hopes on a superhero?
James Gunn’s new Superman movie is a deliberately pro-immigrant, anti-imperialist parable, landing in cinemas across the US at a particularly bleak moment in my nation’s history. It is, as such, admirable and hopeful. Gunn is a clever storyteller and avoids the trap of yet another tedious origin story. He assumes you know the basics: Superman (David Corenswet) was rocketed from planet Krypton, raised by Ma and Pa Kent, and defends the Earth from evil with the sometime help of his girlfriend, ace reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan).
The action starts in media res, shortly after our hero has stopped the made-up nation of Boravia from invading its smaller neighbour. Superman has to fight the Hammer of Boravia – a masked, armoured foe with mysterious superpowers and links to his longstanding nemesis, the supergenius asshole Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). The allegories aren’t subtle. Leader of Boravia Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić) is an uglier, more openly raving analogue for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who claims to be conquering his neighbour for its own good.
Meanwhile, Luthor is attempting to get the US government to arrest the (literal) alien Superman on nativist grounds. Luthor thinks that his superior intelligence, wealth and technological capabilities give him the authority to decide who lives and dies – a kind of composite satire of tech bros like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And of course, Luthor’s constant harping on about Superman’s “alien” identity is clearly a jab at President Donald Trump, whose ICE immigration force is currently scooping people off the streets with little or no due process and sending them off to camps at home and abroad.
Luthor himself manages to ship Superman off to a “pocket universe” he uses as a prison, where his political enemies, ex-girlfriends and anyone he has a grudge against can be tortured or murdered at will. It’s no accident that one of the few people we see actually executed on screen is a courageous Muslim man – a clear rebuke to Islamophobic policies like Trump’s thinly disguised Muslim travel ban.
Corenswet’s Superman is a well-intentioned sweetheart, whose bottomless altruism and dedication to his adopted planet and country serve as a two-hour-long argument against xenophobia and nativism. The world’s greatest hero, the world’s greatest person, doesn’t come from our world. He’s an outsider who loves us more than we love ourselves.
Trump and his odious vice-president claim, falsely, that immigrants will eat your pets; Superman is prepared to die to save his foster dog, Krypto, from the real monomaniacal pet hater – the heartless weirdo Lex Luthor. Meanwhile, the one person in the film who appears to be smarter than Luthor is Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi), a Black (and implicitly neurodivergent) supergenius whose ultra-competence puts the lie to Trump’s anti-DEI claims that every Black professional is necessarily unqualified.
It’s refreshing to see a blockbuster film that is so ready to take a stand against racist garbage. Gunn has been asked if he’s worried about negative reactions from right-wingers in the US and abroad, and his response has been forthright: “Screw them.” The story of Superman, Gunn says, “is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.”
Its vision, though, is limited by its own superhero tropes. The alternative to tech-bro supremacy turns out to be a kind of enlightened super-despotism, predicated on the most powerful person on Earth also being the nicest. Gunn, for all his defiance, clearly wanted to make a film that would fill theatres this summer and do all the things a viewer would expect from a superhero movie – a genre that tends to be geared around the idea that a few amazing individuals are stronger, more powerful and more virtuous than everyone else.
To be fair, Superman explores the contradictions here to some extent. Lex Luthor argues that Superman is subverting democratic processes and the sovereignty of multiple nations, including the US, when he single-handedly stops the Boravian invasion and threatens its leader. His arguments are obviously in bad faith. Luthor isn’t a fan of democracy; he just wants to be the one making the unilateral decisions. But he also has a point. Superman (literally) swoops in to make grand decisions about US foreign policy and global governance. He’s not modelling democracy; he’s modelling white (if alien) saviourism. When Trump says that he’s a genius who can instantly end all wars, it’s ludicrous. But Superman’s approach is basically the same.
Of course, he’s Superman. He’s a better person than everyone, because he’s a fiction. But fascist leaders also work to create fictitious personas via their personality cults. Trump has even shared photoshopped images of himself as Superman. The idea that superheroes can save us all, if we just let them break all the rules, is one that the Maga followers find congenial.
And while using superheroes to counter the demonisation of marginalised people is certainly better than creating an all-white, all-male universe of heroes, it’s also an inherently limited form of respectability politics. We know that immigrants are overall less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. But, obviously, most immigrants are not Superman – and for that matter, most Black people are not Mr Terrific. You shouldn’t have to save the world to get the benefit of due process or be accepted and treated as a neighbour.
Superman does foreground one notable institution of democracy: the media. The Daily Planet, employer of Lois Lane, has been part of the Superman mythos since the 1930s – and the shiny newsroom in the latest movie seems like a throwback to a previous era, before the internet and venture capital gutted local media, and certainly before so many of our daily newspapers went all in on Trumpian nationalism. Today, a well-funded, mainstream publication willing to fearlessly fight the oligarchs seems significantly more fanciful than a man who can fly.
You could argue that both the media and the man here are aspirational; Gunn offers a utopian vision of how people and reporters should behave. But if so, it’s all the more notable that this aspiration doesn’t really include democratic deliberation, or a model of activism, or much in the way of a critique of the American status quo.
In fact, we learn that the alien Kryptonian society was actually awful and undemocratic. Superman isn’t good because he’s an alien; he’s good, it’s strongly implied, because he was raised by white Christian rural Americans – a group generally considered to be the “default” population in the US, and also the group that was most likely to vote for Trump. Gunn wants to combat nativism, but thanks to the Superman canon, and to his own effort to add clever twists, he ends up with a story that suggests that foreigners need to learn about virtue from white heartland dwellers – not an especially enlightened or convincing moral, given the ethics embodied in the current administration.
No one wants to watch Superman run for city council or start a union drive. Such movies don’t do the kinds of box office numbers you expect from a massive legacy property with a $225 million budget. But could Gunn have done better? Maybe he went as far as he could in rebuking strongman fascism and xenophobic Trumpism within the confines of a mainstream action movie. Even with the best will in the world, our collective Hollywood fantasies struggle to dream up a democracy. Which perhaps helps to explain why, in the real world, our own orange, non-supergenius Luthor has in fact conquered the country.
This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
