Review

Culture

Film & TV

Fun & play

Justice

18 July 2025

5 min read

Boom! I love this new Superman!

Eschewing ennui, it’s a great fairy tale for the modern age

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Superman and Krypto the dog.

Warner Bros.

…and that’s what makes this film so enjoyable!

Oh, apologies for any confusion.

No tortuously ‘relevant’ preamble from me today. I’m starting the review right in the middle of the action, because that is exactly what Superman does. No initial slog through a ‘backstory’ that everyone knows – even my wife, who has never read a comic book in her life, is familiar with who and what Superman is. The closest we get to contextualisation is a quick sequence of text: informing us that Superman landed 30 years ago (adopted by the Kent couple, and given the name Clark), began his superhero career three years ago, stopped the fictional nation of Boravia invading the equally fictional Jarhanpur three weeks ago, and three minutes ago lost a battle for the first time.

Boom!

Then straight into the action!

Superman lands in the frozen tundra of the Antarctic and can barely breathe. He lets out a whistle and the next thing we know there is a tremendous snowy disturbance. Krypto the Superdog dashes into view! No explanation – just delight in the fact that there is a mischievous canine with unbelievable power. Krypto drags Superman ‘home’ to the Fortress of Solitude. There the Superman robots heal him with a concentrated dose of radiation from the Yellow Sun which gives him his power. He immediately departs to continue his bout against the nationalist supervillain ‘Hammer of Boravia’, who is secretly being controlled by the evil genius and billionaire Lex Luthor.

The pace of this film isn’t fast…its hypersonic. It flies by at the speed of Superman himself. There isn’t any lag, any let up. Even the quieter moments, such as those meditating on Superman’s dual identities (the alien superhero Kal El/Superman and the human reporter Clark) or his burgeoning relationship with investigative journalist Lois Lane, keep the story moving. Exposition doesn’t take place through inexplicable monologues; it is always pacy conversation, which teaches us something about the characters and their relationships and their motivations.

This is the great triumph of writer/director/producer James Gunn. After his success over at Marvel Studios, he has taken the helm of DC and started to create a universe of characters and stories that doesn’t waste time with painful ‘exploration’ and moralising. This was always the issue that held DC films (arguably featuring the more beloved and well-known characters in comic-book culture) back from matching the success of Marvel. Christopher Nolan is a genius, giving us a superb Batman trilogy, and Zac Snyder produced an underrated dark take on Superman, but neither seemed to delight in the bright, bubble-gum, kaleidoscopic colourfulness of the comic-book medium.

Gunn refuses to make his Superman film gritty or realistic. Characters appear in all their flash and bombast and are welcomed as cheery additions. The ‘Justice Gang’ are simply there – including the always enjoyable Nathan Fillion with an arrogant smirk and an almost offensive bowl cut. Luthor’s genius allows his to create a parallel dimension…why couldn’t he!? If we can suspend our disbelief to accept a protagonist who is an alien superhero, why not a mini-universe?

There is none of the former focus on psychological trauma and existential crisis and the sheer overwhelming ennui of being. In previous films the ethical lesson wasn’t just ‘on the nose’…it flattened your nose with a Mike Tysonesque haymaker! Here, Superman simply IS. He IS good. He IS upstanding. He IS fighting for truth and justice. He refuses to allow political and public-relations considerations to corrupt and dilute his absolute commitment to do (and to BE) what is right. One of the most dramatic scenes isn’t a grand battle, it is a quiet moment where Clark allows Lois to interview him as Superman. The more she questions the realpolitik implications of stopping an invasion, the more Clark becomes incensed. How could someone not allow themselves to save innocent life and serve justice to the oppressed against the oppressor?

The film is such a ‘sigh of relief’ in a bloated comic-book-film market. Yes, the script is hilarious – this is Gunn’s forte. Yes, the music is sublime – both John Murphy and David Fleming’s score (with wonderful nods to the John Williams original) and Mr Gunn’s own needle-drops. The performances are excellent across the board – special mention to David Corenswet, who doesn’t quite look like Superman to me…but boy does he embody the very essence of the character, to the point where you can’t imagine anyone else having played the alien since Christopher Reeve. But its truest strength and victory is its joy in the simplicity (especially moral) of this comic-book genre.

This is what is so refreshing about Gunn’s vision. Superman IS pure. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult not missing a baldy beat) IS so prideful and vain that it has warped him into something twisted and evil and collapsing in upon his own ego. Watching the film, I was put in mind of C. S. Lewis’ writing on the nature of fairy tales:

“For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones…”

Comic-books are the great fairy tales of the modern age…why would we make them brooding deconstructions of the human condition, a la Cormac McCarthy? That isn’t their point or purpose. Lewis again:

“Since it is so likely that they [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

Gunn has given us a film that isn’t just fun and fluffy, but important. In his sugary, childlike wonder and delight in the genre, he has given us a tale of good versus evil that is a true fairy tale: something gleaming and good, something radiant and right, something attractive and aspirational. Superman is a fairy tale where we can be comforted and emboldened by the moral (nay, ontological!) certainties of love and hope.

5 stars

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.