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Supergirl (2026)
I have implicit faith in James Gunn as a filmmaker. He’s earned my trust over the decades, especially in the realm of superhero cinema, and especially after his rip-roaring and reverential relaunch of Superman in 2025. However, when it comes to James Gunn the reigning head of DC movies and television, well, I have more reservations. When he took over the high-profile position and plotted the new direction of DC cinema after the ignoble death of the Snyderverse, Gunn claimed that he would stress quality over quantity, particularly that the studio would not move forward with a project unless he felt the script was great. It’s a nice sentiment considering Marvel movies have for so long retooled and rewritten on the fly. However, it’s also a damning statement that can come back to haunt Gunn if any future DC movie has a script that feels, well, let’s say less than great. It’s one of those cautionary statements, like a politician saying, “I’ve never lied and I’ve never cheated on my wife.” You’re already priming your skepticism.
Enter 2026’s Supergirl, based on a highly regarded eight-issue comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by renowned author Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. I’ve read the 2021-2022 series, being an enormous fan of King ever since his astonishing and award-winning Vision series, and I can see why Gunn would model Supergirl’s big-screen relaunch with this story. It’s essentially a sci-fi version of True Grit, a familiar formula that’s easy to grab an audience with salient themes about vengeance, forgiveness, duty, and responsibility in a world that often feels too indifferent (a frequent repeated refrain is “It’s too big. We’re too small”). It’s a pretty great story and seemingly a great blueprint for a potentially great movie. Having now seen the Supergirl adaptation, I come back to Gunn’s explicit promise. Did he think this screenplay, by actor-turned-playwright Ana Nogueira, was great? Did he think this movie was ready? The whole of me doubts it, given Gunn’s innate understanding of story and character development from his other blockbusters. Yet, I can also recall Gunn’s company-man hyping of 2023’s Flash movie, saying he genuinely felt it was one of the best superhero movies ever. Audiences generally disagreed. I’m starting to think there are two James Gunns, the filmmaker and the boss. I trust the filmmaker. I don’t know yet about the boss, and Supergirl’s muddled and disappointing execution does not help solidify my faith.
Kara Zor-El a.k.a. Supergirl (Millie Alcock) is touring the galaxy for her birthday. She’s specifically visiting planets with red suns because it neutralizes her alien powers so she can actually feel the inebriating effects of alcohol. She wants nothing to do with quests and the downtrodden and that’s where Ruthye (Eve Ridley) comes in. She’s looking for hired muscle to avenge her family. The marauding Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) is the leader of the Brigands, space pirates profiting off the abduction and sale of young women in particular. Things get personal for Kara when Krem steals her own spaceship and mortally wounds her dog, Krypto, with a poisoned arrow. Supergirl has three days before her little pooch succumbs to the poison. She sets out with Ruthye to track down Krem, rip the antidote conveniently hanging around his neck at all times, and maybe facilitate some old-fashioned vengeance.
Where did this movie go wrong? I think we have a few culprits and poor decisions when it comes to the development of character arcs, themes, and in general making an audience care. Most people do not have the generational built-in knowledge about Supergirl and her origin, so the movie needs to be an introduction for us and provide a compelling reason why we should care about this latest hero. Having an arc where a character begins in an isolated, self-loathing, and cynical place only to become more engaged, motivated, and virtuous is a common arc, the stuff of Westerns and the like, the redemptive story of the old gunslinger who learns to fight for something bigger than himself. As evidenced in Supergirl, she’s reclusive and drowning herself in alcohol because of her survivor’s guilt, being one of only two Krytonians, along with her cousin Kal-El, a.k.a. Superman. She doesn’t feel at home, both literally when it comes to a place to call her own as well as within her own skin as a person. She certainly turns up her nose at the idea of being a hero or let alone the prospect of do-gooders. She says, “Clark sees the good in people. I see them for how they really are.” You can see where this is going as far as a character arc. It should be an important and triumphant moment when she, at long last, dons the Supergirl outfit, something she had dismissively rejected earlier. We should care. I still recall how emotional it was for many to watch Wonder Woman triumphantly walk across No Man’s Land in full regalia. The moment in Supergirl is more of a shrug because Kara is mostly a shrug of a character. I don’t think the screenplay presents enough to invest an audience’s emotions into her journey. Part of this is because the entire story feels confused and muddled, so for her to have self-epiphanies made me say, “Uh, really?”
That’s because this character arc goes into a dismaying place, with Supergirl making a choice at the end that seems counter-productive to being a more virtuous example for others. I think she argues she’s sparing an innocent from having to live with something they will regret that could change them, not to allow them to become as hardened and hurt as Kara. But isn’t she also reforming? Doesn’t that say something about starting over with redemption? Also, we’re not given a sufficient back-story that delivers a credible life Supergirl would not wish others to follow. With some later flashbacks, which I think could have served as the opening five minutes, we see Kara’s tragic back-story, losing her planet, then her family, then her adopted home, the only one she’s ever known up until landing on Earth. It’s tragic but it’s not like she’s suffering because of her own mistakes she has to live with. What ills from her past is she trying to prevent others from repeating? The circumstances are not exactly immediately repeatable.
As we begin, Ruthye wants sweet vengeance whereas Kara is indifferent. That’s different from Kara being indifferent to life, reliant upon her super strength to pummel people into submission as her first option. You could begin with her prone to solving every problem with violence and then end on her recognizing the harm of violence and the power of mercy. That’s an identifiable arc. Same with Ruthye going from upstart on an adventure to a more sure-handed and capable fighter, gaining confidence and certainty and learning about the emptiness of vengeance to bring personal closure. The movie doesn’t really do that either. Ruthye is a wet blanket of a character prone to whining, and by the end of the movie, she’s just as hapless in a battle as she was in the beginning. I don’t want to overly harp on the differences with the source material, but in the original comic, the entire story was told from Ruthye’s perspective as our narrator, and she was verbose and assertive, essentially the same persona of Mattie Ross from True Grit, with Supergirl being our curmudgeonly Rooster Cogburn. It made her more relatable and interesting. Now she’s been turned into a sulky teenager who gets rewarded with partying with her new friend.
Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) has been directing for nearly twenty years, going back to 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl. He’s a versatile director but seems to lean toward the quirk, with a heavy dash of Scorsese stylistics like fourth-wall breaks, flashy camera movements, and specific music cues. I don’t know if he was wrong for this material because I don’t think any director would necessarily rise above this script and its problems. The characters’ arcs are muddled. The villain is a dud, which is why they make him a sex trafficker midway through, because he lacks more definition beyond having a bedazzled 1990s jean jacket’s worth of studs embedded in his face. There’s also the frequency of Supergirl losing her powers. I know it’s to provide some danger and stakes since she’s so overpowered to skew the battles, but this happens literally four times. At some point, Krem shoots her with kryptonite arrows, but if she isn’t widely known across the universe, why would he assume these would be effective? Regardless, the action scenes are relatively lackluster and visually sludgy. Much of the movie takes place in dust-heavy desert dwellings, so it makes the movie feel like you want to wipe the camera lens. I can see the Mad Max: Fury Road leanings, especially with rescuing captive wives from janky biker gangs, but if we were going this route, why not make it central from the beginning? The tone of the movie is going for a jokey, breezy, attitude with-a-capital-A Guardians of the Galaxy vibe but it doesn’t work. It feels too forced and phony, the pale imitator of Gunn’s signature prankster anarchy. Too much of the movie feels like disparate elements thrown together over a prolonged and chaotic editing and re-shoot period. The finished film feels far from cohesive, and while that’s not exactly all Gillespie’s fault, he doesn’t save it.
Jason Momoa (Aquaman) is simultaneously perfect for the role of intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo as well as completely extraneous to this movie. He doesn’t belong and takes away from important time we could have been building the characterization and arcs for our leading ladies. And yet, there was a transparently obvious way to make Lobo more integrated into the story, so much that it is baffling to me that the filmmakers didn’t utilize it. Lobo is after one of the other Brigands to bring him in for a bounty, a guy we never really get to know. Why isn’t Krem his sought-after bounty? Having this character trying to capture Krem would immediately improve his involvement in the narrative. Now instead of just being a guy on his own tangentially related solo mission, now he’s a competitor at cross-purposes with Kara. His appearances now have meaning and he becomes a more urgent threat, the guy who will snatch Krem and deny Supergirl and Ruthye completing their goal. That’s a significant added conflict. Ruthye wants Krem dead. Supergirl wants him alive to save her dog. Lobo just wants him to collect a sizable sum of money. That’s how you do it, and yet the screenplay misses this storytelling avenue. As a result, Lobo feels like an interloper, an occasional fighting ally but more so a haphazardly grafted-on character meant to goose a narrative lacking certain energy or humor. Momoa is perfect as this character (seriously, look up drawings of Lobo, first introduced in 1983) as it allows him to growl, guzzle beer, wisecrack, and act like a carefree badass with more than a nod of machismo buffoonery. He’s having fun, but he could have been more meaningful to the movie rather than a special guest appearance diversion.
Gunn and Gillespie have a well-known affinity for needle-drop songs, but there’s one needle-drop choice in Supergirl that is gasp-inducing in its miscalculation. Plenty of modern blockbusters will marry anachronistic music for specific effect, so I’m not against unorthodox music selections. Not everything needs to be literally on-the-nose like 2016’s Suicide Squad, a movie with so many needle-drop music selections that it served as a lazy narrative shorthand. With Supergirl, there’s a slow-mo sequence toward the climax that circles around Ruthye when she finds herself in the fraught center of battle. As explosions and debris tear around her, with Supergirl zipping to and fro averting possible harm, a lilting song begins with an acoustic guitar followed by a woman singing the lyrics to Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” with electronic anthemic flourishes, enough so that makes it feel wrong to those familiar with the early 2000s tune. I generally enjoy tonally different takes on familiar pop songs, but this… does not work. Not only does it not work, it’s astounding how poorly matched this is to the scene. It immediately ripped me out of the movie and made me question the decision-making of so many related to this film. The cover itself is fine from a music standpoint. I have nothing against Kelty Greye and KidMote, the artists responsible. In fact I feel bad for them. They don’t deserve this derision. It’s not their fault. Their song could have been the perfect addition in a different movie. As used in Supergirl, it’s stunningly bad and joins the dishonorable hall of fame along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” awkwardly playing during sex in Watchmen and the truly bizarre rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by child slaves in Pan.
We’re now two movies into Gunn’s renewed DC film universe, with only two more scheduled on the horizon, a smaller genre experiment following Batman villain Clayface, and Gunn’s Superman sequel in 2027, Man of Tomorrow (maybe why they stripped the comic’s original title from this movie?). There’s not a lot to establish a larger universe of heroes and villains and drama. It’s been almost three years since Gunn announced a new Batman movie directed by Andy Muschietti and we haven’t heard anything else. It’s possible that the expansion of this new filmic universe is on a shorter leash, seeing how a small output performs before investing in a larger vision. I don’t think this movie will help matters. Supergirl is a fairly disappointing entry in the superhero canon, lacking charm and panache and excitement and satisfaction. It fails to make the case for Kara as an engaging character, although Alcock’s performance is fine. There’s just a pervading sense of blandness and a grasping quality where you feel the filmmakers’ indecision. It would be easy to say this was far from super, but I’m going to say Supergirl certainly could have flown much higher.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Disclosure Day (2026)
The prospect of Steven Spielberg returning to the world of aliens and summer blockbusters seems like a match made in heaven, the answer to the prayers of millions of eager moviegoers. Disclosure Day, based on a story Spielberg has been developing for decades, is all about forces trying to alert the world that aliens indeed do exist. The primary figures are Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a government whistle-blower on the run, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a local TV meteorologist who is suddenly speaking in foreign tongues, reading people’s minds, and even appearing as different people in the perception of others. Both are on a collision course to find one another and discover a repressed shared past as children. It just so happens there are a lot of armed paramilitary goons who want to stop them.
Disclosure Day is an old-fashioned Spielberg popcorn thriller, for better and for worse. Let’s focus on the good first. It’s an easy movie to get on board with, as the plot moves almost immediately from the start and it becomes one extended series of chases and escapes up until the very end, which makes for an exciting movie that has a definite sense of forward momentum. Does it always make sense? Do you care about the characters? Well, we’ll get more into that later, because right now we’re celebrating what works with Disclosure Day. It’s been eight years since Spielberg made a big-screen blockbuster action-thriller (Ready Player One), albeit it’s been twenty years since he made a great one (2005’s War of the Worlds). He’s been more prone to introspective or technically adventurous filmmaking choices of late, so to have Spielberg readopt the blockbuster mantle, and with aliens no less, feels like a thematic homecoming for the man who defined modern cinema over the last fifty years. He’s always been a little squishy and corny in his approach, and that can certainly be welcomed during trying times such as we find ourselves in (hopefully things have settled and improved when you’re reading this in the future). It’s a familiar yet old-fashioned model for a modern blockbuster that Spielberg helped perfect, so to have him return to this mode and have fun can be rewarding, especially for longtime fans giddy that the master is coming back to the world of extra terrestrials. Spielberg can still position his camera and visual arrangements like nobody else, and just immersing yourself in a masterful cinematic storyteller’s whims can be transporting and uplifting even if you’re not exactly on the same wavelength. In short, it’s gratifying to just experience Spielberg operate in his blockbuster space considering the man is almost 80. Who knows if we’ll ever get another one of these kinds of movies again, so there’s something thematically fitting for the master to return to his roots for added social commentary and sentiment.
I had more problems with the old-fashioned qualities of the movie that didn’t feel like they connected for me and connected to a realistic depiction of our modern-day. The problem with a movie set in the present-day that concerns the revelation of alien encounters is that it’s hard to get a plurality of Americans to believe anything no matter if it’s scientific and correct. Just recall the COVID outbreak at the turn of this decade where people couldn’t even agree on things like masking preventing the public spread of viral infection and vaccines being a life-saver. We had people literally eating horse paste and drinking silver nitrate because charlatans told them to do so. The crux of Disclosure Day rests firmly on the world believing the public disclosure of aliens, presented none other than through network evening news. It’s a bit outdated to think that enough Americans, let alone the world, would hold faith in mainstream network news in our increasingly splintered and information silo-ed era. There are people this week who claimed one political party was controlling the weather to the embarrassment of the other political party, and you’re going to tell me these people are going to believe in the existence of aliens because it happens to be presented by TV news? That’s a bit naive, but I think Spielberg could have sidestepped this by having the movie set in the 1980s or 1990s. It would have been more believable, and holding onto collective faith in humanity coming together in times of crises would be more aspirational rather than, you know, remembering that some people rejected minor inconveniences that could save lives like they were tyrannical affronts to liberties. I don’t know about you, but my ultimate faith in humanity has only lowered when it comes to collective action and shared sacrifice in the name of the greater good.
Brushing aside my own cynical modern perspective, the conspiracy itself, and the machinations of the participants, is kept so frustratingly vague with arbitrary solutions. The movie is populated by two clandestine forces, one looking to divulge the existence of aliens and expose the coverup, and other looking to maintain that coverup. You can easily label them Good Guys and Bad Guys for all the complexity provided. That’s fine. The teams can be generic stock roles as long as our main characters are interesting and well-developed. Unfortunately, our main characters feel easily forgotten, often dropping in and out of the movie for unknown reasons and miraculously reappearing in the exact right moments. There’s a climactic showdown where Team Bad Guys is literally going to shut off the power to the TV news station because that will completely stop the flow of information (it’s not like people would just record with their phones and upload to social media). Then all of a sudden, a character that hasn’t been seen for twenty minutes, is just there, and they have a magic alien device that they know will… restore the power. As a climax, it just feels so goofy, outdated, and sloppy in its clumsy plotting. The bad guys have the power to inhabit other people’s minds and control their bodies, so why aren’t they doing this all the time? Once you start introducing alien technology without any clear definition or limits, it basically becomes a magic wand that can provide whatever the user, or the screenwriter, desires in that moment. It’s an obvious narrative cheat. There are occasions where this power can be diverting and fun, like an invisible escape that doesn’t make much sense but was at least entertaining to experience. However, because so much of the story elements are under-developed, it makes the ultimate showdown unfulfilling.
Another hindrance is that many of the characters feel more as tools of the story to get it from Point A to Point B rather than fleshed-out people. Not every character in a genre thriller needs to feel three-dimensionally accurate, but they need to feel interesting, at least enough to make us care or be curious. Daniel Kellner is the biggest dud for me. I genuinely like O’Connor as an actor and found him mightily compelling in last year’s Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s given so little to work with here. Being the point man on exposing a conspiracy should be plenty, and given the harrowing circumstances of constantly having to look over your shoulder it should provide plenty of mental conflict and second-guessing, showcasing different aspects of who this person can be. Instead, he’s less a character than a figure in motion, the person everyone else is chasing after. He’s more plot device than person.
Margaret is the more interesting character as she’s undergoing a mysterious change that she is struggling to recognize, but halfway through that confusion gives way to godhood, as she becomes essentially a superhero with powers of convenience. No matter what trouble she gets into, the script goes into a cheat code to get her out with a new alien power of contrivance. At some point, she stops even questioning or reflecting on these changes and just goes with it, which feels like the characterization simply giving up. It’s a shame because there’s great drama in the existential and personal crisis she was experiencing. I liked her revulsion at being worshiped as a religious icon once she could appear as people’s dead loved ones. Honestly, a whole different movie could have explored the psychological ramifications of that power and the needs of others to see and talk to departed loved ones one last time, to seek affirmations and closure, all against her own sense of agency with a power she feels has hijacked her identity. In the end, these two characters are mainly here to help convey the message, a human game of intergalactic telephone.
The biggest problem for me, besides the lackluster characterization, is that the most interesting part of this movie is its unsaid implications. I am less enthralled by two competing factions fighting over the alien conspiracy and more interested in how the world responds to the momentous revelation that we are not alone. I kind of wish that Disclosure Day’s Act Three had been its Act One, and rather ending on whether or not the world would discover the truth about little green men, the movie confirmed it and then said, “For the next 90 minutes, we’re really going to dig into how this affects people and changes society.” That’s the movie I want to see, the what comes next. The film briefly explores the spiritual ramifications as one character, a former nun, tries to square her faith with the reality of other intelligent life in the wider universe. Is that revelation comforting and confirmation or conflicting and confusing? I really wish the screenplay had gone further in that exploration, something akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which richly examined the upheaval to societies and personal identity. I suppose I was looking for more of what happens after Disclosure Day rather than leading up to the big disclosure, and I doubt I’m alone.
I will also be spoiling the exact ending because I believe it deserves unpacking, so if you would like to remain spoiler-free, please skip to the next paragraph, dear reader. Alright, with that out of the way, the climax hinges upon the news about aliens being disseminated to the public. It’s a little strange that so much of the climax is merely watching the footage with our characters on the sidelines. In fact, the emotional point of emphasis is placed on a new character, a news anchor played by Courtney Grace, who narrates the footage and its implications in real time. Her performance might be the best in the movie (Blunt is good, folks, but let’s pump the brakes on those “career-best” declarations) as she shows restrained and nuanced emotion trying to process the amazing and perspective-shifting revelation. It’s just strange that so much is placed on a brand-new character so late into the movie. Regardless, what stupefied me was that after all this the good guys literally roll out an elderly alien being in a wheelchair. What? You had a literal living, breathing, well more like rasping-alien (don’t want to cast aspersions, but maybe this alien adopted smoking in his time planet-side) and you just keep him at bay? Your whole goal is to raise awareness about the existence of aliens and you literally have an alien to prove the existence of aliens. Why did everything have to hinge on these two adults realizing they were given special powers as kids? Why did they have to wait 30-plus years for these powers to manifest? Why didn’t aliens just give adults these powers rather than children to wait on their maturation? Could the old alien not learn one of Earth’s languages or at least how to type? We have magic devices that can generally do anything but the creators of these magic devices cannot conceive of something to resolve a predictable language barrier? If the script were stronger or the characters engaging, my brain wouldn’t be consumed with these questions.
Reluctantly, Disclosure Day fits squarely in the fulcrum between good and not so good, teetering between one direction and the other. It’s got high production values, good actors, and Spielberg cooking in the sci-fi/action/thriller realm. It’s enjoyably more tactile with its action set pieces, of which some are exciting and visually inventive. Others are just characters getting overlooked in plain sight, and this is before they introduce magic invisibility. However, the promise of the movie is never truly fulfilled from a story awash in underdeveloped characters and themes, arbitrary and overly convenient plotting, and a resolution that feels less than satisfying and more confusing in execution and implication. I genuinely wish that Disclosure Day was more about the aftermath of the news rather than the reaching of the disclosure itself. Even a middling Spielberg thriller can still have more entertainment than the best of many filmmakers, so I’m sure many filmgoers can find something to enjoy, but they’re just as likely to find something that sticks in their proverbial craw, that they chew over for days, and question why it couldn’t be better.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)
When Avatar: The Way of Water was released in 2022, it had been 13 years since a new Avatar movie, so the return to Pandora was a reminder about how immersive and captivating this world could be, and another reminder that writer/director James Cameron can deliver blockbusters of scale like few others. Now it’s been three years in between Avatar movies and the novelty is definitely missing. Fire and Ash feels in many ways like Avatar 2.5, a direct holdover of characters and plots languishing from the second film. Some of this continuity is a given considering it’s an ongoing series, but each movie should feel like it’s own complete story. Too many of the characters feel stuck in the same place we left them by the end of the second movie, which means it’s another sequel where Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri spends most of those three hours bereft and crying before getting into fighting mode in that last climactic hour. There’s a general sense of same-ness to this story, extending conflicts and character arcs from the second but forgetting to give them more to do. The Na’Vi teens feel disconnected from the larger storyline, off assembling aquatic allies. Primarily, Fire and Ash is the story of Spider (Jack Champion), the son of dead Quaritch (Stephen Lang), raised by stepdad Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), and pursued by the Na’vi clone of his biological father (also Lang). He undergoes a physical transformation that makes him the object of desire for the greedy humans exploiting the natural resources of Pandora. I just didn’t care about Sully child #5 (a.k.a. Spider) when he felt like a tag-along to the group anyhow. To base the majority of the emotional arc of the movie around him is a bold and unfortunately unsuccessful gambit. There’s also a flamboyant and unstable Na’vi antagonist played with magnetic allure by Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones, Taboo). The character isn’t particularly interesting but the brash commitment of Chaplin and her high energy, especially in a movie where so many other characters are morose and dull, makes you draw a little closer every time she’s onscreen. Bringing the same villain back for a third movie in a row, while failing to explore the more existentially compelling questions of identity of a clone, is just boring. The visual spectacle of the world, the special effects, the different elements all mixing together into a stunning photo-realistic tapestry is still world-class and state-of-the-art. The plots of the Avatar movies have never been as groundbreaking as their special effects but they were serviceable, reliable, and sincere, and they followed plot formulas that worked. This time Fire and Ash feels too much like the cobbled together leftovers of the second movie, and with the longest running time of the series yet, the whole experience feels bloated and overburdened with tying up storylines and threads that felt mostly completed with Way of Water. This movie probably could have been condensed down into 45 minutes of additional footage for the second movie. Sorry, James, but this one was more listless than transporting.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Project Hail Mary (2026)
Being stranded for two hours in tight quarters with Ryan Gosling sounds like a dream come true for many. Something tells me I made this same joke except using Matt Damon’s name for the 2015 release of The Martian, another winning mixture of nuts-and-bolts scientific problem-solving and sci-fi exploration from best-selling author Andy Weir. Project Hail Mary is one of those big screen adventures that nourishes your imagination and heart. In short, it’s a rare full-package blockbuster, something to excite the senses as well as appeal to your intelligence to leave you fully satisfied. If you enjoyed the book like myself, then breathe easy, because the film has done this story a great justice. Best of all, it’s the rousing, heart-warming buddy movie you never knew you needed, and it all starts at the end of the world.
In the near future, science discovers an alien microbe that is literally eating the sun. The estimates are that our sun will dim over decades, causing widespread cooling and threatening the lives of billions. The world needs a hero. It got middle school science teacher and disgraced molecular biologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) instead, who awakens on a spaceship in a different stretch of the galaxy far, far away from Earth and its dimming sun. He has little memory of what transpired before and must piece together not just his understanding of who he is but also his world-saving mission that he now, unfortunately, is the only one who can accomplish. He’s very literally tasked with saving the world, so no pressure.
I’m going to avoid major spoilers but there is one plot development I feel needs to be discussed as it gets to the core appeal of the movie, so if you want to go into Project Hail Mary completely unspoiled, and I would advise it if you could, then end this review and come back once you’ve enjoyed the movie. For everyone else, let’s proceed ahead. Thankfully, the amnesia setup isn’t dragged out long. The film is structured to alternate between present-day problem-solving in space and flashbacks to Earth when Ryland was contacted by the top levels of the U.S. government to determine the extent of the unusual problem with water-molecule microbes somehow living and consuming the sun. The microbes are termed “astrophage” and release tremendous amounts of energy, enough so that they become the unexpected fuel for this long-shot space mission that Ryland finds himself the only survivor. He was never supposed to be mankind’s only hope (the other astronauts, the professionals, died from the induced comas for travel).
However, Ryland isn’t alone for long in the movie, and that’s where Project Hail Mary reaches a new level of entertainment and imagination. Our sun isn’t the only one affected by the astrophage, and Ryland is greeted by an alien spacecraft that has also traveled the long journey to figure out why this one sun is unaffected by the astrophage. The sense of discovery is greatly entertaining and I appreciated that there is something remarkably alien about our alien. Our intrepid alien will be nick-named “Rocky” because he best resembles a spider made out of rocks. That’s different. It’s not the old Star Trek school of slapping a forehead ridge onto somebody’s head and calling it a day. A significant and very gratifying sequence of the movie is just watching these two different lifeforms interacting and learning from one another. The language barrier has been explored before, most effectively in 2016’s grounded and somber Arrival. If Arrival was more the contemplative indie about conquering the linguistic challenges of first contact, then Project Hail Mary is the feel-good Spielbergian popcorn spectacle about saving the day and having fun. That doesn’t mean it’s a dumbed-down version; it just has different priorities, and chief among them is the winning buddy comedy of Gosling and a cuddly alien, two humble representatives of distant worlds in shared desperation for saviors. The relationship that blossoms between Ryland and our plucky, curious little space spider is naturally funny but also refreshingly serious too. Rocky is treated like an actual character, not some glorified pet or something to sell toys and Happy meals. He has a distinct perspective, learning curve, peculiarities, and determination that makes him feel more fully-developed than many human characters in terrestrial cinema. If you don’t walk away from the movie wanting your own personal huggable rock spider, then you watched a different movie than I did and, frankly, I pity you.
In my review for The Martian, I wrote, “There is an inherent enjoyment watching intelligent people tackle and persevere over daunting challenges, and this sets up The Martian for lots of payoffs and satisfaction. We see both sides of the problem and it provides even more opportunities for challenges and payoffs.” It’s tremendously enjoyable to watch Ryland and Rocky resolve serious scientific problems, whether it be studying the astrophage, the alien sun and its immunity to astrophage, or even just how to interact with one another when there are different systems for breathing and eating. It’s heady without being weighed down by too much scientific jargon, making the analytical discussions accessible and thus engaging. The conflict of Project Hail Mary isn’t quite as realistic as The Martian, given to more convenient cheats with “alien technology,” though the resulting resolutions still felt well-earned and satisfying thanks to the setups and payoffs that screenwriter Drew Goddard (Bad Times at the El Royale, The Martian) has layered throughout. The source material’s author, Andy Weir, has found himself a very profitable and marketable niche, dropping science whiz everymans into impossible scenarios and having them think their way out of them. At least this time the entire world is working in tandem, and spending likely trillions of dollars, to save the entire solar system instead of just retrieving one misplaced American astronaut. Weir will likely be throwing darts at what new setting someone could be stranded in next.
Now, as a film adaptation, Project Hail Mary goes the distance. This is the first live-action movie directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller since 2014’s 22 Jump Street (granted, they were notoriously fired from finishing 2018’s Han Solo prequel). For those worried that the movie might be more anarchic or yuk-heavy like the duo’s animated oeuvre, such as The Lego Movie and the Spider-Verse films, they have adapted their style to best suit the material. There’s plenty of humor in this movie because of the ridiculously high stakes and general odd couple nature of our buddy dynamic, but the movie never feels like it loses its focus on the bigger world-saving picture. For Ryland, he knows this mission is a one-way trip, as the capsule doesn’t have enough fuel to make the return trip to Earth. He knows this is a sacrifice, but the entirety of all living things on the planet are holding out hope that his sacrifice is successful. Lord and Miller are able to balance the comedy and dramatic elements, as well as finding appropriate spaces for the viewer, as well as Ryland, to take in the natural majesty of space in another star system. The cinematography by Greg Frasier (Dune Parts One and Two) is grand and visually sumptuous, mixing in aspect ratios and focus depth to distinguish between timelines and emotional states. The musical score by Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) is remarkably pleasing to the ears, finding room to be rousing and immersive and awe-inspiring, perfectly aiding the gorgeous visuals. At 150 minutes long, there’s the concern about pacing, especially with a movie that has so much to explain on the go as well devoting nearly half its runtime to flashback morsels doled throughout. I never felt lag. I also never felt crushed with the exposition, as the key details are expertly elevated, then as we progress from one challenge to the next, the screenplay keeps us keyed in on what matters in that moment.
And lastly, where this movie really hinges upon is on the relationship and performances of its two leads. I’m not talking about Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) as the head of the Project Hail Mary mission, assembling cooperation among the world’s countries and experts for this longest of long-shots. Gosling (Barbie, The Fall Guy) is an immensely charming actor, self-effacing and relatably overwhelmed by the faith entrusted to him. Gosling makes us instantly connect with the protagonist, feeling the same nagging pull of his curiosity and excitement when studying something as uniquely fascinating as alien microbes, as well as the mounting trepidation of being out of your depth and having to adapt quickly or else. The film is taken to another level of entertainment thanks to Rocky, who is the clear MVP of the movie. He’s brought to vibrant life through puppeteer James Ortiz, who also provides the computer translation voice, and through the magic of empathy, we’re shedding tears for a creature without a discernible face. The dynamic between the two characters is so enjoyable, so funny, and ultimately so poignant, that it warms your heart while making you feel full by its perfect closing image.
Project Hail Mary is a crowd-pleaser to its very DNA, big yet accessible, brainy but still capable of popcorn thrills and visual fireworks, heartfelt but mordantly funny and even goofy at points, and always engaging and rewarding. It’s also a hopeful movie, something the present world could use more of. In the face of epoch-ending cataclysm, human beings are capable of working together to solve impossible problems, and heroes can emerge from the least likely places. It’s inspirational without falling into sappier, inauthentic maudlin drama, and it’s a celebration not just of teamwork but interstellar teamwork, working across enormous barriers for a common good. It’s invigorating to watch human decency and noble sacrifices prevail but also just an enviable demonstration of competency. What a wonderful world where experts are given deference and praise for their expertise and professionalism (if only this didn’t feel so tragically the stuff of “fiction” in present-day America). Project Hail Mary is a superbly made adventure movie that has a little of everything we’re looking for in mass-appeal blockbusters, and there’s a considerable skill to hold all these parts together into a movie that feels complete and enriching. Fans of heady sci-fi, buddy comedies, disaster movies, and space operas should find plenty to enjoy, but really Project Hail Mary is the kind of movie that all you need is eyes and ears to understand the appeal.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bugonia (2025)
A remake of a 2003 South Korean movie, Bugonia is an engaging conflict that needed further restructuring and smoothing out to maximize its entertainment potential. Jessie Plemons stars as a disturbed man beholden to conspiracy theories, namely that the Earth is populated with aliens among us that are plotting humanity’s doom. He kidnaps his corporate boss, a cold and cutthroat CEO (Emma Stone), who he is convinced is really an Andromedan and can connect him with the other aliens. The problem here is that the story can only go two routes. Either Plemons’ character is just a dangerous nutball and has convinced himself of his speculation and this will lead to tragic results, or his character will secretly be right despite the outlandish nature and specificity of his conspiracy claims. Once you accept that, it should become more clear which path offers a more memorable and interesting story. The appeal of this movie is the tense hostage negotiation where this woman has to wonder how to play different angles to seek her freedom from a deranged kidnapper. Both actors are at their best when they’re sparring with one another, but I think it was a mistake to establish so much of Plemons and his life before and during the kidnapping. I think the perspective would have been improved following Stone from the beginning and learning as she does, rather than balancing the two sides in preparation. The bleak tone is par for a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) movie but the attempts at humor, including some over-the-top gore as slapstick, feel more forced and teetering. I never found myself guffawing at any of the absurdity because it’s played more for menace. The offbeat reality that populates a Lanthimos universe is too constrained to the central characters, making the world feel less heightened and weird and therefore the characters are the outliers. I enjoyed portions of this movie, and Stone’s performance has so many layers in every scene, but Bugonia feels like an engaging premise that needed more development and focus to really get buggy.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Lilo & Stitch (2025)/ How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Two new live-action remakes are recreating Millennial staples, Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, as transparent facsimiles, and they’re both reasonably fine. If you’ve never watched either animated movie, you’d maybe even call the live-action versions pretty good for your first experiences with these stories. Both movies understand what works essentially from their predecessors and don’t reinvent the wheel. They keep things pretty safe and strict, which translates into pleasant but predictable entertainment for anyone familiar with the originals.
I don’t even know how to fully review these entries, which is why I’m combining them together. They’re both so thoroughly fine yet one is the highest-grossing movie of 2025 so far, the popularity of which I cannot explain. My conceptual issue with the nature of live-action remakes is the implicit belief that animated films improve when they are brought into a real-world setting. I strongly disagree. Animated movies can be vibrant, stylistic, and exaggerated in such daring and artistically enigmatic ways. Translating that into real-life often strips away that style or liveliness; take for instance how un-expressive and dour the “live-action” Lion King was, a collection of possessed (cursed?) taxidermy. Animation does not require verisimilitude to be entertaining or engaging. I’m also worried over the speed of which these live-action remakes are coming, now refreshing fairly recent movies. Has there been enough distance between now and 2010 to have compelling artistic differences with the original How to Train Your Dragon? Apparently not. When the live-action Moana comes out in 2026, will it be dramatically different or better than the animated version? I strongly doubt it. We need more distance from the original animated movies so the remakes aren’t just slavish yet inferior versions of the originals. There needs to be more than simply a tracing over. I don’t see this ending any time soon considering the commercial rewards, and so the live-action Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon continue to be good stories, just unnecessary.
Nate’s Grades: B
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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Apparently there must have been an ancient curse that brings forth a new attempt at a Fantastic Four franchise every ten years, even further if you want to include the 1994 Roger Corman movie that was purposely made and never released just to hold onto the film rights (I’ve seen it, and once you forgive the chintzy special effects and shoestring budget, it’s actually a pretty reverent adaptation). The 2000s Fantastic Four films were too unserious, then the 2015 Fantastic Four gritty reboot (forever saddled with the painful title Fant4stic) was too serious and scattershot. Couldn’t there be a healthy middle? There has been an excellent Fantastic Four film already except it was called The Incredibles. That 2004 Pixar movie followed a family of superheroes that mostly aligned with the powers of the foursome that originally made their debut for Marvel comics in 1961. It makes sense then for Marvel to borrow liberally from the style and approach of The Incredibles because, after all, it worked. There’s even a minor villain that is essentially a mole man living below the surface. Set on an alternate Earth, this new F4 relaunch eschews the thirty-something previous films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). You don’t need any prior understanding to follow the action, which is kept to under 105 minutes. The 1960s retro futurist visual aesthetic is a constant delight and adds enjoyment in every moment and every scene. The story is a modern parable: a planet-eating Goliath known as Galactus will consume all of Earth unless Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), a.k.a. Mr. and Ms. Fantastic, give over their unborn son. The added context is that they have struggled with fertility issues, and now that at last they have a healthy baby on the cusp of being theirs, a cosmic giant wants to call dibs. It makes the struggle and stakes much more personal. It makes the foursome genuinely feel like a family trying to resolve this unthinkable ultimatum. I cared, and I even got teary-eyed at parts relating to the baby and his well-being, reflecting on my own parenting journey.
From a dramatic standpoint, this movie has it. From an action standpoint, it leaves a little to be desired. It incorporates the different powers well enough, but there are really only two large action set pieces with some wonky sci-fi mumbo jumbo. There’s a whimsical throwback that makes the movie feel like an extension of a Saturday morning cartoon show except for the whole give-me-your-baby-or-everybody-dies moral quandary. While I also appreciated its running time being lean, you can feel the absence of connective tissue. Take for instance The Thing (The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach) having a possible romance with a teacher played by Natasha Lyonne (Poker Face). The first scene he introduces himself… and then he appears much later at her synagogue seeking her out specifically during mankind’s possible final hours. We’re missing out on the material that would make this personal connection make sense. The same with the world turning on the F4 once they learn they’ve put everyone in danger. It’s resolved pretty quickly by Sue giving one heartfelt speech. The movie already feels like it has plenty of downtime but I wanted a little more room to breathe. I was mostly underwhelmed by Pascal, who seems to be dialing down his natural charm, though his character has some inherently dark obsessions that intrigued me. He recognizes there is something wrong with him and the way his mind operates, and yet he hopes that his child will be a better version of himself, a relatable parental wish. There are glimmers of him being a more in-depth character but it’s only glimmers. The family downtime scenes were my favorite, and the camaraderie between all four actors is, well, fantastic (plus an adorable robot). Kirby (Napoleon) is the standout and the heart of the movie as a figure trying to square the impossible and desperate to hold onto the baby she’s dreamed of for so long.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an early step in a better direction. It’s certainly better than the prior attempts to launch Marvel’s first family of heroes, though this might not be saying much. It does more right than wrong, so perhaps the fourth time might actually be the charm.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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War of the Worlds (2025)
It’s almost refreshing when you discover a movie that is so bad it becomes a feat of amazement. Pitching a War of the Worlds remake primarily starring Ice Cube staring at his work computer sounds akin to pitching a Pride and Prejudice remake starring Jojo Siwa and it’s entirely about her gardening. You could do something like that but why would you? It’s almost like some setup for a joke. This movie was originally made in 2020 and has sat on the shelf for five years, enough so to make one wonder why anyone felt like now was the time to release it, especially in this final condition. I’m dumbfounded simply thinking about this movie. It’s so misguided in about every creative decision, from its stylistic approach to its thematic emphasis and especially making what may be the most boring alien invasion movie into an afterthought about government surveillance laws. Sheesh.
Author H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, and it’s since been turned into many popular radio serials, movies, and TV series, including the 2005 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg hit. Whenever a filmmaker or production company shakes the dust off a story that we already have many versions of, the question arises what this new version will bring to the table. How will this one stand out? How will it connect in a way that the other movies had not? In short, why do we need another version? Naturally, Hollywood doesn’t think about the creative necessity of movies, only their profitability. The core difference with the new 2025 movie is that it’s a “screenlife” movie where everything we see is meant to approximate a computer screen. It’s a variation on the found footage genre. This technique was used to great effect in 2018’s Searching where John Cho tried to uncover his missing daughter’s digital footprint. That was an inventive updating of the detective thriller. Here, I cannot imagine a more boring way to illustrate an alien invasion. We’re watching one man behind a computer screen react to the news and cycle through camera feeds for exposition, having Face Time conversations with loved ones and Zoom meetings with government officials, and he apparently seems to be the only guy capable of doing his job during this war of the worlds. It reminds me of 2010’s Skyline, a smaller alien invasion movie that tried to mask its limited budget by following a group of characters trapped in an apartment that would worriedly look out the windows. It’s a bad approach, making the events feel too limited and like we’re missing out on more interesting events. Suffice to say, when the world is going to war and aliens are destroying cities, you don’t want the focus of our movie to be Ice Cube staring at you and furiously typing key commands.
Another significant blunder was making this less an alien invasion movie and more about government overreach when it comes to data mining. There will be spoilers in this paragraph, dear reader, but honestly I would actively advise you to read them anyway to just better appreciate how ridiculous this all is. The powerful aliens aren’t here for our natural resources, for turning people into food, or even a hostile takeover of the planet as their new home world. Oh, it’s far worse than that. What these dirty dirty aliens are really hungry for is… our personal data. Yes, you read that correctly. The aliens literally consume electronic data. What dull lives these creatures lead. This is less an alien invasion and more a stark literalization of data mining. These aliens are advanced enough to travel through space but need to be in such close physical proximity to harvest our data? They can’t just hack the Pentagon wifi? It turns the aliens into big dumb technological mosquitoes who just need to be directed elsewhere. I’m astounded that War of the Worlds presents an alien invasion and says that nosy government is the real problem. The movie tries to argue that these advanced aliens wouldn’t even be here if Big Government wasn’t wantonly collecting our data for their nebulous spying purposes. It’s an attack on the post-9/11 surveillance state born of the Patriot Act, but it’s also 15-20 years too late for this to be politically relevant.
The movie also picks the wrong character to serve as its moral awakening. It’s nonsensical that Ice Cube could be a trusted DHS official and be unaware of these systems and their reach. He seems to be the guy that the FBI is waiting on for door-breaching warrants that he tidily uploads as PDF files. He’s the guy NASA wants to clue in on their latest reports. He’s the guy the Secretary of Defense calls directly. He’s not the head of Homeland Security; he’s just a guy in the office, and seemingly the only guy in the building (was it a holiday weekend?). Ice Cube plays a man with some extreme boundary issues. He’s literally using government surveillance to spy on his pregnant daughter, hacking into her fridge, and I think even installing cameras into her apartment. He’s using government resources to criticize his daughter’s grocery choices. He’s overstepping his bounds and taking full advantage of that same government surveillance state that he decries at the end of the movie. At three different points someone will say incredulously about the government spying on people’s “Amazon carts,” and it’s just remarkable that something like that would politically galvanize this man when he’s already spying on his kids with that same surveillance apparatus. He’s knowingly breaking into their messages and social media and personal data. This can’t be a “what have we become?” epiphany when he’s always been there.
I like Ice Cube as an actor. He showed surprising depth in Boyz n the Hood, was hilariously applied in the 21 Jump Street movies as a stern sourpuss authority figure. There’s a natural intimidation factor, which was recently played for clever laughs with his appearance on The Studio. This is a performer that can be a great addition when aligned with his strengths. However, range is not a word one would readily use when describing the acting capabilities of Mr. Cube. Hinging this entire movie on Ice Cube’s emotional journey is too much of an ask. Having this man listlessly read gobs of exposition is not good for anyone. He doesn’t have that kind of arresting voice that could hypnotize us, like a Morgan Freeman or Jeremy Irons. It’s even worse when you feel the lackluster effort on his part. Strangely, despite his children being in direct danger, and the whole alien invasion backdrop, the moment that draws the most dramatic response from Ice Cube is when the aliens delete his deceased wife’s Facebook account (I would have accepted you consuming the planet, but when you delete Facebook pictures, now you’ve gone too far). The movie was filmed in the early days of the COVID pandemic and feels it, restricting everyone to their own little screens with nary the physical interaction. When you’re watching Ice Cube race through empty rooms of Homeland Security to insert a thumb-drive in the nick of time to save the world (along with shouting to the unconvincing alien special effects, “Movie bitch, get out the way”) it all just reminds you how painfully myopic and agonizingly restrictive this alien invasion approach ultimately proves to be.
Special mention needs to be made for the over-the-top Amazon product placement in this movie. The company is referenced several times, even used as a motivator for a homeless man (what computer?), but it’s much worse when one of the characters is a proud Amazon delivery driver and he’s going to use their cutting-edge drone delivery tech to make sure Ice Cube gets that all-important thumb-drive in record time. Amazon helps in saving the world thanks to their logistics in package delivery. Thank you corporate overlords, and please enjoy this movie on your life-saving Amazon Prime account, dutiful citizen.
War of the Worlds 2025 is a fascinating and maddening case study in bad adaptation choices. It feels more like an anti-government surveillance state thriller that got awkwardly grafted onto an alien invasion. The way the movie just abandons its larger scale drama for lessons in modern-day privacy laws is creatively criminal. This is an astonishingly bad movie that gets just about everything wrong at every turn. I’m almost tempted to recommend people watch it just to try and reconcile it for themselves. There have been dozens of adaptations of this classic science-fiction tale, and I feel confident in declaring this one the absolute worst even if I haven’t seen every one of them. There can’t be a worse one than this.
Nate’s Grade: F
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Superman (2025)
Has the world ever needed Superman more? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a symbol of good right now who represents the best of us, fighting for justice and protecting the innocent against the diabolical in power that seek to profit and prey upon the vulnerable. Vulture film critic Allison Wilmore has a fantastic headline for her review: “Superman [the movie] isn’t trying to be political. We just have real-life super villains now.” James Gunn, the quirky filmmaker who made us fall in love with a raccoon and a tree in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, ascended to be head of DC movies in 2022, and he eyed reigniting Superman as the top priority, selecting himself as writer and director. It’s a lot of pressure to rebuild the DC movie brand by yourself, as there are only two other movies with scheduled release dates currently. This movie could make or break the fledgling DC Universe (DCU) rebuild soon after the smoking demise of the DC Extended Universe (2013-2023), informally dubbed the Snyderverse. Fortunately, Gunn’s take on the boy in blue is a reminder why this character has lasted so long and why the world still needs a symbol of hope.
Superman (David Corenswet) a.k.a. Clark Kent, has been a defender of Metropolis for three years now. He’s romantically involved with ace reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Bosnahan), who knows his secret identity but still chides Clark on somehow getting all those “exclusive interviews” with Superman. He’s also been a thorn in billionaire industrialist Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) side and become an obsession of his. The world is still debating Superman’s unexpected intervention, thwarting a powerful military from invading its neighbor’s sovereign border (very reminiscent of Russian aggression). The U.S. government needs actionable proof that Superman is a threat, and Lex is determined to eliminate the alien for good.
Amazingly, this movie feels like the second in a series rather than a reboot kickoff. From the opening text, Gunn drops us into this world already in progress. We’re skipping over the origin story, the character introductions, and all the table-setting that comprises many first films in franchises. It’s usually that second film that really takes advantage of the setup and patience of the first movie, expanding the world and deepening the character relationships and conflicts. Gunn has mercifully skipped over all that and gotten us right to the good stuff. The opening minutes of the movie drop us into a super-powered battle with the declaration that this is the first time our Superman has lost, and that beginning follows the most powerful alien on Earth having to patch up his injuries. I think that’s a very intriguing first impression, but I’ll detail more of that in a later paragraph. The world that Gunn establishes already feels well underway but the story is still accessible and the supporting characters have meaning within this world. This is a world that has been used to super heroes, a.k.a. metahumans, for some time, so when Superman finally dons his red underwear it’s not a complete shocker. This is not necessarily a reality where one super-charged character has reconfigured mankind’s entire sense of identity. The world is accustomed and adapted to extraordinary figures and monsters. This is where the Justice Gang comes in (Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and Mr. Terrific). They’re the corporate supes, the ones called in to sign autographs, smile for pictures, and save the day for good P.R. Perhaps that’s too flippant, but the trio of established heroes doesn’t feel the same call to activism like Superman. It’s hard to fully articulate, so bear with me dear reader, but Gunn’s Superman already feels fully established, with the figure known, his relationship with Lois already in play, and Lex having already put nefarious time, research, and lots of money into combating this super obstacle with his own lethal experiments. With Gunn, there’s no time to waste. It’s already fully formed from his imagination, and the parts have their reasoning and meaning, making the whole much more satisfying.
Another way to differentiate this Superman is less from his strength than his vulnerabilities. This is a character long regarded as overly powerful, too indestructible and therefore lacking realtability. Well with Gunn’s version, here is a Superman that gets beat up. A lot. Ben Affleck’s Batman pointedly asked Henry Cavill’s Supes, “Do you bleed?” Gunn has answered in the affirmative. Much like Matt Reeves’ 2022 Batman, we get a work-in-progress superhero that is still feeling out how to best be a superhero. It’s a version that takes lots of lumps and Gunn finds interesting ways to test Superman’s limits, both emotionally and physically. The introduction of nanites into orifices certainly provides nods to Gunn’s body horror roots. While this is a Superman that gets knocked around quite a bit, his biggest vulnerability is his doubt. He’s simply trying to do good and save lives regardless of the political ramifications, but the world and its people, and especially their fears and paranoia of an Other, are more complicated. Superman explains he intervened in an international border war for the simple reason of saving lives. When Lois pushes him in a practice on-the-record interview, during one of the better scenes, about his decision-making, thinking through the consequences, consulting with world leaders and the like, he gets flustered and says there wasn’t time. All he wanted to do was save lives that would have been lost, so why is the rest of the world having a hard time with that? Over the course of those two hours and change, we watch this Superman battle through his self-doubts in a very real and compelling way that I don’t feel like any other Superman movie has better demonstrated. This is a world already rife with heroes, but is it better with a Superman? Is his existence a net positive?
Gunn truly understands the character in a way that Zack Snyder never did. With Man of Steel and the subsequent film appearances, we were given a Superman that didn’t really want to be Superman. He was an overburdened superior being tasked with serving as mankind’s savior, and came across as annoyed. That version of Pa Kent famously told his super son that it might have been best if Clark had just let a bus full of kids die to keep his secret. Thanks for the life lesson, dad, and oh, by the way, your sacrifice was ultimately meaningless when your entire worldview was proven wrong by the end of Man of Steel. Regardless, here is a Superman that is unabashedly sincere and even a little corny. That’s who this character is, a do-gooder wanting to inspire others and wanting to save all life, even the villains, even the wildlife (my theater took special note when Superman saved a squirrel from being crushed). Snyder’s Superman was part of an entire Metropolis 9/11 of horrible collateral damage disaster porn. Gunn’s Superman works hard to make sure the giant kaiju monster, when teetering over, doesn’t fall on any building to protect the people inside. This is also a Superman that feels compelled to be a hero, to do better with his super gifts, and to keep trying even when he fails, that there can be dignity in losing a fight but continuing on because you know that fight is worth it. The depiction of Superman/Clark makes him feel much more a character worth closer examination. He’s not a detached god feeling above these petty mortals always needing saving. The real super power is his empathy and desire to help others, and that may sound corny, but Superman is too, and that’s completely fine in a world that would be better if we had more Supermans and fewer wannabe super villains.
The big question for me was whether Gunn could adapt his cheeky, irony-rich goofball sensibilities from the Guardians movies and make a Superman movie that was earnest and restrained. He has, and let this be a lesson that Gunn does not disappoint when it comes to superhero projects. There are still unmistakable elements of Gunn’s humor and style, like the ironic distance from action serving as an extended joke while characters discuss an unrelated topic, the bouncy and specific needle-drops that cue extended fight or action sequences, and of course the quippy sense of humor. I don’t agree with some of the early reviews I’ve come across that accuse Gunn of undercutting his drama with too many jokes. That is exactly why I was afraid that Gunn would be too insecure with straight drama and earnestness that he would have to rely upon an awkwardly squeezed-in ironic joke to, in his mind, balance the tone. There are jokes, some of them wild and unexpected, but this is most certainly not a movie in the same tonal space as anything Gunn has done before either as a director or a screenwriter. I did not feel that the comedy ever undercut the stakes or the sincerity of the scenes and the movie as a whole. Gunn has shown he can re-calibrate his style and comedic voice while at the same time still making things his own without copious slow-motion. The action is refreshingly staged to be immersive, with few cuts and wide camera swings in order to present everything on the screen in an easily oriented field of vision.
Corenswet (Pearl, Twisters) has some big tights to fill, as I would argue while there have been iffy-to-bad Superman movies there hasn’t been a bad Superman. Obviously the one that all others are defined by is Christopher Reeve who was the greatest special effect the original movie had (I know the flying sequences were groundbreaking for their time, but they play out so cheesy and dated, complete with sudden Margot Kidder poetic resuscitation). Watching him switch from suave hero to clumsy Earthling in a split-second was the best. Corenswet certainly looks the part, clean-cut All-American looks, even though he’s British. He really channels the character’s big heart with his struggle to be accepted, by the public, by the media, by Lois, by even his enemies. He’s got the presence to fill out that suit but the emphasis is not on the contours of his abs but on the unfailing dedication and goodness of a character trying to do right. He won me over early, and it doesn’t hurt hat he has terrific chemistry with Brosnahan, who has been readying herself for this part for years with The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel. She’s great too. Hoult (Nosferatu) channels his smarm perfectly as a very punchable Lex who might make you think about a certain DOGE-master and his team of flunkies wreaking havoc on the rest of the country through unchecked hubris. I loved his pettiness and thinly-veiled vanity, like during an approaching apocalyptic cataclysm and he says to screw the people of Metropolis. “They chose him, let them suffer.” It sounds a lot like, “Your state voted against me, so you won’t get immediate emergency assistance.” You will cheer hard for Lex’s defeat, even more so when his plan involves literal extra-judicial forever confinement.
However, the real brreak-out star of the movie will most certainly be Krypto, the adorably jumpy super dog. Every time this pooch makes an appearance it is welcomed and he’s utilized as more than just easy comic relief. I expect a sharp uptick in the number of good boys named “Krypto” afterwards.
James Gunn has alleviated all of my fears about him tackling the Man of Steel, and he’s created a Superman that soars above the superhero field. It’s so vibrant and funny and accessible to anyone regardless of their prior feelings or understanding of Superman. It’s also a clear-cut example of what a Superman movie can and should be, sincere and bright and, yes, a little bit corny too. We need this character, and we especially need film artists that know how to craft engaging stories with this character who’s existed for almost 90 years. There’s an inherent lasting power to Superman, and it’s his sheer goodness as an outsider, a feared alien, who has all the powers in the world but just wants to help others. Many have long viewed Superman as boring, a Boy Scout in a world that has grown too morally murky to maintain such a morally unwavering figure of truth, justice, and the American way (what does that last part even mean any more in the bleak environment of 2025?). Gunn has shown us how necessary the character can be, a balm to our troubled times, and the reality that do-gooder figures can be inspirational and aspirational no matter the circumstances. He’s made a Superman movie with an intriguing, lived-in world, one that I now believe can easily support a fuller universe of stories and side characters. He’s also made what I consider the best Superman movie to exist yet (apologies to the nostalgia of the fans of the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve originals). I have some minor quibbles, like how Lois fades into the background for the second half, but they are only quibbles. This movie was exactly what I needed. I’m sure there are millions of others yearning for the same. Superman is proof that the DC film universe might actually have the perfect person in charge of charting their cross-franchise courses. Kneel before Gunn.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)
Creating an original sci-fi/fantasy universe is hard work. It involves bringing to life an entire new universe of characters, worlds, back-stories, rules, conflicts, cultures, and classes. There’s a reason major studios look to scoop already established creative universes rather than build their own from scratch. This is what director Zack Snyder had in mind when he pitched a darker, grittier, more mature Star Wars to Disney, who passed. Over the ensuing decade, Snyder and his collaborators, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, continued working on their concept, transforming it into an original movie series, resulting in Netflix’s big-budget holiday release, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, a clunky title I will not be retyping in full again. Snyder’s original results of the “darker, grittier Star Wars” are rather underwhelming and don’t make me excited for the concluding second movie being released in April. Why go to the trouble of building your own universe if you don’t want to fill in the details about what makes it important or at least even unique? I can see why Snyder would have preferred Rebel Moon as a Star Wars pitch, because they could attach all the established world-building from George Lucas and his creative collaborators as a quick cheat code.
In another galaxy, the imperial Motherworld is the power in the universe. The king and his family have been assassinated, and in the power struggle that follows, several planets have taken up arms to fight for independence. On a distant moon, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is doing her best to live a nondescript life as a farmer, helping to provide for her community and stay out of trouble. Well trouble comes knockin’ anyway with Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and his fleet looking for resources and powerless villagers to abuse. Kora’s history of violence comes back to her as she fights back against the Motherworld soldiers with cool precision. Her only hope is to gather a team of the most formidable warriors to protect her village from reprisals. Kora and company band together while her mysterious past will come back to haunt her reluctant return to prominence.
For the first thirty to forty minutes of Rebel Moon, I was nodding along and enjoying it well enough, at least enough to start to wonder if the tsunami of negative reviews had been unfairly harsh, and then the rest of the movie went downhill. One of the major problems of this Part One of a story is that it feels like a movie entirely made up of Act Two plotting. Once our hero sets off on her mission, the movie becomes a broken carousel of meeting the next member of the team, seeing them do something impressive as a fighter, getting some info dump about their mediocre tragic backstory, and then we’re off to the next planet to repeat the process. After the fifth time, when a character says, “Anyone else you know?” I thought that the rest of the movie, and the ensuring Part Two, would be nothing but recruiting members until every character in the galaxy had joined these ragtag revolutionaries, like it was all one elaborate practical joke by Snyder. Some part of me may still be watching Rebel Moon, my eyes glazing over while we add the eight hundred and sixty-sixth person who is strong but also shoots guns real good. Then the movie manufactures an ending that isn’t really an ending, merely a pause point, but without any larger revelations or escalations to further our anticipation for Part Two in four months’ time. What good are these handful of warriors going to be defending a village in a sci-fi universe where the bad guys could just nuke the planet from orbit? Find out in April 2024, folks!
The entire 124-minute enterprise feels not just like an incomplete movie but an incomplete idea. This is because the influences are obvious and copious for Snyder. Rebel Moon starts feeling entirely like Star Wars, but then it very much becomes a space opera version of The Magnificent Seven, itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. With our humble farmer, our high plains drifter trying to turn their back on an old life of violence, and the recruitment of our noble fighters to ward off the evil bandits coming to harass this small outpost, it’s clearly The Magnificent Seven, except Snyder doesn’t provide us the necessary material to invest in this scrappy team. The characters are all different variations of the same stoic badass archetype, like you took one character mold and simply sliced it into ten little shear pieces. The characters don’t even have the most basic difference you could offer in an action movie, variation in skill and weapons. One lady has laser swords (a.k.a. lens flair makers) but pretty much everyone else is just the same heavy gun fighter. One guy doesn’t even bother to put on a shirt. Some of them are slightly bigger or more slender than others but the whole get-the-gang-together plot only really works if we have interesting characters. If we don’t like the prospective team members, it’s like we’re stuck in an endless job interview with only lousy candidates.
The fact that Rebel Moon is derivative is not in itself damaging. Science fiction is often the sum of its many earlier influences, including Star Wars. Rebel Moon cannot transcend its many film influences because it fails to reform them into something coherent of its own. There is no internal logic or connection within this new universe. The original world building amounts to a slain royal family, an evil fascist regime, and maybe a magic princess connected to a prophecy of balance, and that’s it. All the flashbacks and expository data dumps fail to create a clearer, larger picture of how this sci-fi universe operates. The inner workings are kept so broad and abstract. We have an imperial evil and assorted good-hearted little guys. The movie begins by introducing a robot clan of knights that are dying out, and even a young Motherworld soldier who seems likely to defect, both opportunities to go into greater character detail and open up this world and its complications. So what does Snyder do? He leaves both behind shortly. Even though we visit a half dozen planets, these alien worlds don’t feel connected, as if Snyder just told concept artists to follow whatever whim they had. They don’t even feel that interesting as places. One of them is desert. One of them has a saloon. One of them is a mining planet. It’s like the worlds have been procedurally generated from a computer for all we learn about them. They’re just glorified painted backdrops that don’t compliment the already shaky world building. They’re too interchangeable for all the impact on the plot and characters and any declining sense of wonder.
Given the open parameters of imagination with inventing your own sci-fi/fantasy universe, I am deeply confused by some of the choices that Snyder makes that visually weigh down this movie in anachronistic acts of self-sabotage. Firstly, the villains are clearly meant to be a one-to-one obvious analog for the Empire in Star Wars, itself an analog for the fascists of World War II, but Lucas decided having them as stand-ins was good enough without literally having them dress in the same style of uniforms as the literal fascists from World War II. You have an interconnected galaxy of future alien cultures and the bad guys dress like they stepped out of The Man in the High Castle. It’s too familiar while being too specific, and the fact that it’s also completely transparent with its iconic source references is yet another failure of imagination and subtext. I just accepted that the Space Nazis were going to look like literal Nazis, but what broke my brain was the costuming of Skrein’s big baddie in the second half of the movie. At some point he changes into a white dress shirt with a long thin black tie and all I could think about was that our space opera villain looks like one of those door-to-door Mormon missionaries (“Hello, have you heard the Good Word of [whatever Snyder is calling The Force in this universe]?”). Every scene with this outfit ripped me out of the movie; it was like someone had photo-shopped a character from a different movie. It certainly didn’t make the devious character of Atticus Noble more threatening or even interesting. I view this entire creative decision as a microcosm for Rebel Moon: a confused fusion of the literal, the derivative, and the dissonant.
Snyder is still a premiere visual stylist so even at its worst Rebel Moon can still be an arresting watch. He’s one of the best at realizing the awe of selecting the right combination of images, a man who creates living comic book splash pages. I realized midway through Rebel Moon why the action just wasn’t as exciting for me. There’s a decided lack of weight. It’s not just that scenes don’t feel well choreographed or developed to make use of geography, mini-goals, and organic complications, the hallmarks of great action, it’s that too little feels concrete. It feels too phony. I’m not condemning the special effects, which are mostly fine. The action amounts to Character A shoots at Bad Guy and Character B shoots at Other Bad Guy, maybe behind some cover. There’s only one sequence that brings in specifics to its action, with the challenge of defeating a rotating turret gun pinning the team down from escape. That sequence established a specific obstacle and stakes. It worked, and it presented one of the only challenges that wasn’t immediately overcome by our heroes.
The Snyder action signature of slow-mo ramps has long ago entered into self-parody territory (I’m convinced a full hour of his four-hour Justice League cut was slow motion), so its use has to be even more self-aware here, especially in quizzical contexts. There are moments where it accentuates the visceral appeal of the vivid imagery, like a man leaping atop the back of a flying griffin, akin to an 80s metal album cover come to life. Then there are other times that just leave you questioning why Snyder decided to slow things down… for this? One such example is where a spaceship enters the atmosphere in the first twenty minutes, and a character drops their seeds in alarm, and those seeds falling are detailed in loving slow motion. Why show a character’s face to impart an emotion when you can instead see things falling onto the ground so dramatically?
The actors are given little to do other than strike poses and attitudes, and for that they all do a fine job of making themselves available for stills and posters and trailers. Boutella (The Mummy) is good at being a stoic badass. I just wish there was something memorable for her to do or make use of her athleticism. The best actor in the movie is Skrein (Deadpool) who really relishes being a smarmy villain. He’s not an interesting bad guy but Skrein at least makes him worth watching even when he’s in the most ridiculous outfit and awful Hitler youth haircut. There’s also Jena Malone (Sucker Punch) as a widowed spider-woman creature. So there’s that. Cleopatra Coleman (Dopesick), who plays one half of a revolutionary set of siblings along with Ray Fisher, sounds remarkably like Jennifer Garner. Close your eyes when she’s speaking, dear reader, and test for yourself. I was most interested in Anthony Hopkins as the voice of our malfunctioning android (literally named “Jimmy the Robot”) operating on mysterious programming that hints at something larger in place relating to perhaps the princess being alive. Fun fact: Rebel Moon features both actors who played the role of Daario on Game of Thrones (Skrien and Michiel Husiman).
Even with all the money at Netflix’s mighty disposal, Rebel Moon can’t make up for its paltry imagination and thus feels like an empty enterprise. I’m reminded of 2011’s Sucker Punch, the last time Snyder was left completely to his own devices. I wrote back then, “Expect nothing more than top-of-the-line eye candy. Expect nothing to make sense. Expect nothing to really matter. In fact, go in expecting nothing but a two-hour ogling session, because that’s the aim of the film. Look at all those shiny things and pretty ladies, gentlemen.” That assessment seems fitting for Rebel Moon as well, a movie that can’t be bothered to provide compelling characters, drama, or world-building to invest in over two to four hours, once you consider the approaching Part Two. I wish this movie had a more distinct vision and sense of humor, something akin to Luc Besson’s lively Fifth Element, but fun is not allowed in the Zack Snyder universe, so everything must be grim, because grim means mature, and mature means automatically better, right? Rebel Moon is a space opera where you’ll prefer the void.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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