Michael Knowles REVIEWS The New ＂Superman＂ Movie (2025)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
183.8388
Summary
Superman: Dawn of the Superheroes is out in theaters and I'm here to review it. Spoiler: It's not good. But it's not all that bad either, and I'll give you a quick run down of what I thought of it.
Transcript
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There will not be spoilers in the first part of this review.
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There might be some later on, but I'll let you know.
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I generally don't care for these superhero movies.
00:00:18.920
They're not really for me, so I am reviewing it on that handicap.
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And I went into this movie being told this was going to be super woke, super anti-Trump, super pro, immigration, really woke.
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There was a little bit of that, but just a little bit.
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Before I even saw the movie, my wife said, she goes,
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You know, man, at this point, I wonder if the studios are just releasing all this really woke stuff to just gin up controversy and make people...
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But it was so lazy that it was even a vaguely anti-George Bush angle.
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It was just like a vaguely anti-deportation, anti-torture, whatever.
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That's like, I don't even count that as a spoiler.
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There was a character who was a right-wing pundit who was obviously supposed to be Tucker.
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There was an interesting observation, which is that all journalists are operators.
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This you just kind of get from the general Clark-Lois story throughout the whole franchise,
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which is that Lois is supposed to be a journalist, but she's sleeping with her mark, you know, with her source.
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My biggest takeaway, total non-spoiler takeaway, though,
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the special effects don't work as well anymore.
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It used to be that these movies were pretty well-written.
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And then, with CGI and special effects coming up in the 90s and 2000s,
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And there could be less dialogue because the filmmakers could spend more time just blowing stuff up.
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You'd go and watch New York City be blown to smithereens,
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But with AI, I can make that now in about five minutes.
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So, I think that the writing is going to have to get better now.
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Because the studios don't really have any advantage over some dude in his basement
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Some of the writing was a little better than some superhero movies.
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It was better than some of the Marvel movies where, really, there's no point whatsoever.
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There were some interesting points, which we'll get into in more of the spoiler section.
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But the main takeaway is, and they couldn't have known it, really.
00:03:06.840
Or maybe they should have seen it coming, but they couldn't have seen the rapidity of it.
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The special effects just don't hit like they used to.
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Sorry, you're going to have to write dialogue again, studios.
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If you want to go see the movie, I'm not saying avoid it at all costs.
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But I don't think this will ruin the movie, these kind of spoilers.
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The government arrests him without reading his Miranda rights because he's an alien.
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This is a clear knock on Trump and the anti-mass migration movement and the pro-deportation movement.
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Unfortunately, it's not even really true because we do afford the illegal aliens a ton of rights that slow down the whole process.
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And it's how they've exploited the system and why there are 16 million illegals in the country.
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But anyway, that's one bit where you say, okay, no more truth justice in the American way.
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Here's a slight spoiler, though, that was interesting.
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So if you don't want any slight, this is a slight spoiler.
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Lois and Clark are having a debate over punk rock.
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And Clark responds and says, maybe that's the real punk rock.
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That was a good line because of the moment we're living in.
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We're coming out of the cynicism and irony of the 2000s and 20-teens.
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What's hot now, what's punk rock now is sincerity, authenticity, earnestness, enthusiasm.
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It's a little bit of a millennial Zoomer divide.
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We are coming out of an age of cynicism and irony and vocal fry and disbelief.
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And I think what we're coming into is a greater appreciation of beauty,
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a recognition that man is made in the image of God,
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And you can actually look for the good and you can pursue the good.
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And really, good is to be pursued and evil to be avoided.
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That's more important than just a kind of crass, materialist, envious, selfish cynicism.
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So if you don't like it, if you're like me and you would have never seen this movie,
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if you weren't made to, if it wasn't your job to go see this movie, then keep watching.
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The hook of the movie is that Superman is basically the Antichrist.
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What I mean by that is, the hook of the movie is that his parents,
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I'm not even that familiar with the Superman story.
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I had to have some friends around here explain to me the broad Superman story.
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But his birth parents, who sent him to the Earth before planet whatever was exploded,
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And the message was, you're here to serve humanity.
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But the hook of this movie is, there's more to the message.
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And the rest of the message is, and you got to dupe these idiots.
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And this causes a crisis of identity for Superman.
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I kind of liked it because it raises questions about, am I just inevitably going to be a replica
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And the answer it gives is that, yes, indeed, the sins of the father can be revisited upon the son.
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What the father does, what the father says, or the mother, for that matter, what your parents say and do,
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He doesn't have to be what his father planned him out to be.
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And there's a great scene where he goes back to the people who raised him,
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the nice old Midwestern farmers who raised him.
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You know, they are really fulfilling that parent role.
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And so this has, you know, so much of Superman has biblical Christian references.
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And that clearly calls to mind, you know, who is my mother?
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There's then a direct conversation between the father who raised Superman, not his birth father,
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And this part was good, but it was still a little bit lib.
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Because he says, hey, Clark, Clark says, I'm not who I thought I was.
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And the father says, the adoptive father says, parents aren't for telling their kids who they are.
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You have done things that determine who you are.
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You know, obviously, yes, we do have free choice.
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But I think the adoptive father is underselling the role of parents in a way that is classically liberal.
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And so that's where I think it kind of fails philosophically.
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Yeah, you don't have to be like your apparently evil alien dad.
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And actually, the role of parents is to tell kids who they are.
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If the role of parents were not to tell kids who they are, what's the role of parents?
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You're not, your role is not to educate your children.
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If your role is not to help bring up your kids, what's the point of parents?
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You just, you're bringing them money or feeding them or something?
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And then, and it really hits this classically liberal line when the adoptive father says,
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Because your choices do matter, but your choices come from something.
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Because freedom is willing, predicated on knowledge.
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What would have been a better, more accurate portrayal is, is the, the adoptive father saying,
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hey, Superman, nature is a part of you, but nurture is also a part of you.
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And nature and nurture are combining with your, with your freedom to make up who you really are.
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Could have said, no, no, no, you're, the role of parents is to tell kids who they are.
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And you've run with that and you've done better than I did.
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That would have been, so it wasn't, you can't really blame the studios for not being all that philosophically adept or anthropologically adept.
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But that was a part where I thought, I, it's, this is, could be interesting, but just, they don't take it all the way.
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Then, super heavy spoiler, super duper heavy spoiler.
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Okay, so you're now taking this theme of, you know, like, I was born to be this evil tyrant over the earth,
00:12:02.140
You know, and then, so he meets the clone, who's the, the thing he could have been.
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Now, in, in the classical way we understand human nature, this is just, you know, this, this is just a could have been.
00:12:13.540
In the way that now materialists desperately try to avoid God and, you know, free will and everything.
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They, this would, this would be like the multiverse, you know, so here's the Superman in the multiverse who's an evil, terrible clone.
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But either way, whatever, if you, if you can do the lame version or the classical good version.
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Either way, okay, here's how it could have gone wrong.
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He became the good guy, and that, that's great.
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And then you get one last little woke thing at the end, big spoiler, where he says, I'm not an alien.
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This is, you know, the guy, the guy with face tattoos who MS-13 shuttled across the border yesterday.
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Some guy in Timbuktu, he's, he's the real American.
00:13:01.480
And you, 12th generation from the founding stock, you know, you're not a real American because America is just an idea.
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It's both, a human being is both spirit and flesh.
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And unfortunately, we, in our schizophrenic modern age, in our stupid modern age, we somehow deny both of those things.
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On the one hand, we say we don't really have souls or we don't, spirit is meaningless.
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But then on the flip side, we say, but actually the body doesn't matter at all.
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And this movie partakes of that error to some degree.
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You're not quite human, but you're not totally divorced from humanity.
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And by recognizing that reality, you are living up to your full potential, more so than even your birth father hoped for you to be.
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And more than your adoptive father ever could be because you have these special powers and you get to be this special thing.
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Unfortunately, the movie ends on this kind of identity crisis, this identity confusion.
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The whole point is the problem in the movie is there's identity confusion.
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And he overcomes the identity confusion by realizing that he's not just a prisoner of what his birth father wanted him to be.
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You know, his biological father wanted him to be.
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But then it ends on the same kind of identity confusion that we all have.
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Not only biologically, you know, the trans debate of the last 10 years, but also politically.
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The American identity debate of the last 50 years.
00:15:01.260
It's bad in different ways, though, from how we expected it to be.
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It's more classically liberal, I guess, which is almost worse as far as I'm concerned.
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I'm hopeful these movies are going to have to get better because the studios can't just lazily fill up two-thirds of the movie with it.
00:15:29.760
It was dazzling the first 300 times they did it.
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Technological change is just naturally, especially movies themselves, obviously, are a technological innovation.
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And when the technology changes, the art forms are going to have to react to that.
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So the hopeful note on Superman is it's going to have to get better or it's just going to go away.
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It's like it's trying to get back to truth, justice, and the American way.