“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s a woke, anti-Trump, anti-Israel metaphor!” Such, at any rate, has been the cry of many critics who have reviewed the new Superman film. I think they need to have their eyes checked.
Played by David Corenswet with a refreshing, low-key earnestness, Superman is back in yet another reboot. The comic book character, created in the 1930s, has a familiar mythos that the movie recounts. An alien from the distant, dying world of Krypton, he was sent as a baby by his Kryptonian parents as the last son of Krypton to Earth—the planet where he could “do the most good” by serving humanity. He crash-landed in Kansas and was raised by his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha, who instilled in him traditional American values.
The film picks up following his life as Clark Kent in Metropolis, where he tries to balance a double life as a journalist alongside girlfriend Lois Lane, while also finding time to feed his superdog, Krypto. When he needs healing, Superman retreats to his secret ice fortress, where he finds solace in his deceased Kryptonian parents’ garbled last message, which counsels him to do good and serve mankind.
As in the comics, Superman’s principal foe is Lex Luthor, the billionaire businessman and genius who sees Superman as an alien threat to humanity. “He’s not a man. He’s an It,” Luthor growls. Luthor—played by Nicholas Hoult in probably the best performance of the film—infiltrates Superman’s fortress and hacks into his computer, recovering his parents’ last message. Then comes the plot twist: the garbled part of the message that Superman had never heard before is restored. It turns out Superman’s parents urge him to conquer humanity, declaring that humans are dull and fit to be subjugated. They tell him to destroy those who oppose him, breed with Earth women to restore the Kryptonian race, and rule the planet.
This, of course, is an edgy and subversive take on Superman’s origin story. His parents are cast not as noble heroes but as eugenic villains—and the revelation throws Superman into an identity crisis. Yet that subversiveness is ultimately sublimated into a strikingly traditional, virtue-centered message about individual moral responsibility and the meaning of family.
When Clark is injured again, this time he returns not to his ice fortress but to his boyhood home in Kansas to convalesce. He confesses to his father that he no longer knows who he is—not someone whose mission is to serve others. Mr. Kent embraces his son and tells him, “Your choices, your actions: that’s what makes you who you are.”
This is not, as some Catholic commentators have suggested, an apologia for voluntaristic liberalism. It is rather an affirmation of the traditional philosophical-anthropological idea that each person, as an imago Dei, bears individual responsibility for his actions. Moreover, in the context of the plot, the statement is strikingly anti-racist (in the genuine sense of that term). Superman’s biological parents sent him as a Kryptonian agent to physically and genetically conquer humanity, in the name of the “superior” Kryptonian race. But Jonathan Kent channels the Judeo-Christian belief that the equal dignity of all rational creatures lies in individual moral agency, telling his son that it is not his parentage or race that determines his destiny. Not only is that message not woke—it is the anti-woke teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition (cf. Josh. 24:15; Deut. 30:19–20; 1 Kings 18:21; Gal. 5:13).
Superman’s identity as one who shares in the human condition is underscored by the final confrontation with Luthor. Luthor is driven by fear of the Kryptonian’s alien threat to humanity, emphasizing Superman’s otherness. (This differs from the Zack Snyder reboot, which emphasized Superman’s godlikeness—but both underscore his difference.) In contrast, Superman affirms his commonality with human beings, including limited knowledge, susceptibility to error, and the need to choose daily to exercise moral freedom. In other words, while the Kryptonian rational animal has powers like superstrength, flight, and heat vision, none of these suffice for moral excellence. What he shares with the human rational animal is something more elemental: our spiritual condition—our fallenness.
Superman’s story is thus a kind of thought experiment: What would a rational, embodied alien species be like if it were also fallen? Kal-El did not arrive on Earth perfect in knowledge and virtue. He needed the traditional American virtues of the Midwestern farm and small town to become someone capable of using his gifts well. In that sense, Superman’s story is a metaphor for every human story.
None of this is to say the film is flawless. It is unevenly paced, and the supporting characters are hit-and-miss at best. Nor is it a great film—it clearly falls short of the standard set by Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Nor even is it to say that one cannot find political metaphors in the film. But I submit that, for the most part, such parallels are the projection of critics eager to find metaphors condemning Trump or Israel—or whatever cause is in the crosshairs.
Take one example: Superman turns himself in, and the government contracts out his detainment to Lex Luthor’s group of metahumans, Planet Watch. When Superman asks, “Aren’t you going to read me my Miranda rights?” the official replies, “There are no Miranda rights for aliens.” He is then imprisoned in a pocket universe—Luthor’s personal black site.
A motivated viewer might see here a metaphor for the U.S. deporting unlawful aliens to prisons in El Salvador. But the disanalogies are glaring. Superman is falsely accused and surrenders voluntarily. This is not the profile of a violent criminal illegal alien like Jose Antonio Ibarra, the Venezuelan national who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022, committed multiple crimes, was not deported, and eventually murdered college student Laken Riley. Moreover, unlike Superman—who is questioned under torture—immigration detainees typically retain the right to silence, to asylum claims, to legal counsel, and to a judicial hearing.
“Your choices, your actions: that’s what makes you who you are.”
A more thoughtful critique of the film is that it misses or downplays the original Superman’s defining virtue: patriotism. That virtue was captured in the iconic motto, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” It’s what makes the Kryptonian who crash-landed in Kansas different from the one imagined in Red Son, where Superman lands in Soviet Russia.
While I am sympathetic to this critique, I do not think it is fatal. The film’s target audience includes Gen Z—the least patriotic generation by polling data, with only 41 percent claiming to be “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. This trend is due largely to miseducation about what Americanism is. Yet the film promotes individual dignity, liberty, and traditional family values—all of which are American. For younger viewers, recovering those values as beautiful may be the first step toward recovering patriotism, which will require a parallel recovery of sound civic education.
In the final scene, Superman’s robots ask whether he wants to hear the recording of his parents again to soothe him. He agrees. Playing in the background is Teddybears’ “Punkrocker,” a callback to an earlier conversation in which Lois and Superman debated the meaning of punk rock. Lois had equated punk with the cynicism she saw in herself. But in Superman, she saw a man who sees beauty in everyone he meets. “Maybe that is true punk rock,” he replied.
As the chorus repeats, “I’m a punkrocker, yes I am,” the walls light up with home videos of Clark’s childhood in Kansas, raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent. Superman did not choose Truth, Justice, and the American Way in a vacuum. He was raised in an intact home, by a loving and devoted mother and father who instilled in him the conviction that every human being is beautiful, of intrinsic worth and dignity.
The montage is a moving testament to the idea that a loving, married mother and father is what every child needs to have his best shot at becoming the hero—rather than the villain—of his own story.