Director James Gunn released his re-envisionment of the classic DC hero in July with Superman (2025), drumming up a left-wing social media parade praising this portrayal of Clark Kent as refreshingly optimistic, hopeful, and anti-Zionist. Right-wing netizens and critics alike have dubbed this picture a product of ‘wokeism,’ lamenting the narrative’s emphasis on Superman’s immigrant status and anti-war sentiments. 

Perhaps Superman is not simply a happy-go-lucky retelling of classic heroism, but rather an uninformed and pernicious white-saviour response to geopolitical tensions. I invite readers to consider why Hollywood might be promoting outsider optimism during this time. Who benefits from disinheriting the consequences of genocide via fictive superhuman resolutions? Is there an emotional distance being wedged between real human activism and justice?

White saviourism on screen

This brings me to one of the film’s most glaring sins: its indulgence in white saviourism. White saviourism is a narrative trope through which a powerful, white outsider swoops in to solve crises in marginalized or non-Western communities, reducing local actors to passive background figures. This tired cliché teaches audiences to view oppressed peoples as helpless and broken. 

In Superman, Boravia and Jarhanpur — stand-ins for ‘wealthy European’ and the stereotypical ‘poor’ nation of the Global South respectively — are utilized as background settings for Superman’s moral advocacy. Acting as a significant conflict in the film, the Boravian government ventures to contest Jarhanpurian land. Territorial tensions eventually lead to genocidal sentiments as Boravia seeks to force Jarhanpur to cede land with the help of the villainous billionaire Lex Luthor and his brainchild, the conglomerate giant LexCorp. 

Landscape shots of Jarhanpurian people holding flags and pitchforks, cheering for an American hero, rekindle the classic image of poor, racialized people looking Westward for salvation from their unfortunate realities. The audience is meant to conflate US soft power with benevolent rescue, obscuring the very real complicity of American foreign policy in fueling conflict. 

Oversimplification of geopolitics 

James Gunn grossly oversimplifies geopolitical power struggles through the character debasement of Lex Luthor. The writing directs blame towards the insecurities of a singular villain instead of engaging with the various contextual reasons why territorial contestation and genocide occur. 

In this film, Lex Luthor becomes a metaphor for exorbitantly wealthy American techno-fetishists, eternally envious of the man in the sky. Luthor’s true comic origins were rooted in poverty and mental illness, conditions which created the sociopathic and deeply troubled character whom the DC Universe loves to hate. It is a low-stakes position to condemn this new champion of late-stage capitalism. 

The plot behind the Jarhanpurian genocide is revealed in the film’s climax. During an emotionally charged confrontation, Luthor admits to Superman that he had armed the Boravian government with the intention of orchestrating Superman’s defiance of international law and conventions out of jealousy. What is Luthor meant to represent in this situation? The hubris of the one percent? Our real conflicts are not orchestrated by singular actors with fragile egos. 

Perhaps Gunn is right. Clearly, an international humanitarian issue, such as ethnic cleansing, could only best be metaphorically resolved through a feud between bald Satan and American Jesus. Thank you, American Jesus. 

Narrative tropes

The whole point of Superman’s life as Clark Kent, a facade constraining his actual capacity, is that he cannot afford to be alone. Superman’s tragedy is that he is constantly trying to be human, though it is evident that he is not. His position as a superhuman-alien-demigod so greatly removes his actions from humanity that this rendition reads closer to Thor’s battles with Jörmungandr than a story about the indomitable human spirit. 

Why are we turning to fairy tales to bring us solace during times of moral decay? Can we no longer imagine ourselves as heroes? With the immediate and overwhelming access to stories covering global violence, warfare, and the suppression of human dignity, we should do well to remember the real activists risking their lives to uphold justice, such as the journalists risking their lives to share the truth about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

Superman and representations of war and genocide

The film’s war sequences are consolidated in unnuanced shots of a poorly weaponized mob standing before a faceless militia. The most compelling scene in this setting was a brief moment of a Jarhanpurian child clutching a flag, visibly shaken with fear. 

The human cost of genocide is reduced to a cutaway before Green Lantern, Mister Terrific, Metamorpho, and Hawkgirl, all members of Metropolis’s defence force, swoop in theatrically to thwart the violence. Slapstick comedy ensues. Green birds are flipped from under tanks by a blonde with a bowl cut wearing spandex. 

Hawkgirl chases down the screaming Boravian president, Vasil Ghurkos. Metamorpho becomes a sandstorm and turns his arms into massive hammers. The tension is relieved almost instantaneously. No trauma, no bloody cleanup. No more pitchforks and crying babies. So simple, so perfect.

The scene meant to showcase the horrors of genocide was turned into a cartoonish spectacle by blasé screenwriters. Sure, we should all know by now that war is bad. Corruption is bad. Killing is bad. But maybe, for a superhero film meant to double as social commentary, the writers should have cared to explain why. 

Superman is fiction — he is a Herculean tale of what humans may only strive to be. Our world does not have extraterrestrial heroes to save us from burning skyscrapers or nuclear warheads. We do not have a supersquad that is capable of stopping genocide in minutes. We have human activists, protestors, political representatives, journalists, and many, many martyrs. They do not regenerate with solar radiation; they fall to bullets and drone strikes every day. 

Our heroes do not fight against eclectic supervillains with nano-robotic mercenaries at their beck and call. They fight fascism and human rights violations. They do not choose to engage with injustice in the spirit of altruism — they are condemned to it because there are no alternatives. Superman will not save us, so let us turn our attention from perfectly two-dimensional moral narratives to the very complex, imperfect, and mortal struggles of human resistance in the real world.