In the opening pages of All-Star Superman, Kal-El flies into the sun to save a scientific expedition gone awry. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Lois Lane is already writing up the story of his heroic rescue mission for The Daily Planet. When another journalist calls out her questionable tactics, Lane responds bluntly: She always writes Superman headlines before they happen, because, no matter the obstacles, Superman always succeeds.
James Gunn has repeatedly pointed to All-Star Superman as the inspiration for his own take on the Man of Steel, even calling it “the thing that we borrow the most heavily from” at a press event earlier this year. However, as a longtime fan of the character, I’d argue Gunn’s Superman is the farthest any story could be from that source material because it misunderstands the true nature of Superman.
Superman has existed for almost a century, so it can be hard to pin down exactly what defines him. Like all great fictional characters, he means different things to different people, depending on how (and when) they came to know him. However, also like all great characters, Superman maintains a core of existential meaning — a shining, immutable mythology like the purest, strongest alloy.
Superman is strong. That’s something we can all agree on. DC famously kept making him more powerful over the decades, piling up astonishing feats until there was no limit to what he could do.
It can be tempting for storytellers to negate Superman’s strength (typically through his one weakness, kryptonite) as a narrative shortcut. After all, to move the plot forward, you sometimes need to sideline your unstoppable hero. But ultimately, Superman is always going to be the strongest guy in the room.
Of course, there are some exceptions. Seeing Superman get thrashed by Doomsday in the iconic comic book event Death of Superman (1993) was effective because it was new. It was also the kind of thing that superhero stories can only get away with so many times.
All-Star Superman leans directly into his godlike strength. The comic shows us a Superman on the verge of death due to overexposure to Earth’s sun but still capable of accomplishing heroic feats, including the “Twelve Labors of Superman.”
By comparison, James Gunn’s Superman shies away from the character’s incredible strength. This is a Superman who loses his first fight at the start of the movie and regularly struggles to defeat even minor enemies. (Some sci-fi nonsense like a “proton river” shouldn’t be a problem for the Man of Steel.) Gunn gets around this by making Superman fight a clone of himself, but his clever loophole undercuts one of the character’s most fundamental traits.
However, the director’s approach to another core component of Superman’s identity is even more frustrating.
Superman is also an alien, and this is where things can sometimes get tricky. In the Superman mythos, being “alien” doesn’t just mean coming from another planet. It means being fundamentally different from human beings — and most importantly, superior to them.
Superman is trapped between two worlds, represented by his two sets of parental figures: Jor-El and Lara (his dead Kryptonian parents who sent him to Earth), and Martha and Johnathan Kent (three Kansas farmers who adopted him and taught him to be human). He is both the last son of Krypton, a world that doesn’t exist anymore; and the adopted son of Earth, a world that will always, by its nature, be alien to him. This is the core of Superman’s identity, but it plays out differently depending on who’s telling the story.
This duality is central to Gunn’s Superman, but the director makes a surprising choice. He reveals that Kal-El’s parents actually intended for their son to not only protect the Earth, but also subjugate humanity. In the end, Gunn’s hero rejects his alien parents and embraces his adopted human ones in what feels like an outright denial of Kal-El’s status as an alien.
Superman himself vocalizes this narrative choice when he confronts Lex Luthor, saying, “That is where you’ve always been wrong about me, Lex. I am as human as anyone.”
Compare that to All-Star Superman, where a dying Superman has a dream-like conversation with his father Jor-El. As Superman laments that he left one labor unfinished, his father answers, “Your work is done. You have shown them the face of the man of tomorrow. You have given them an ideal to aspire to, embodied their highest aspirations. They will race, and stumble, and fall, and crawl, and curse… and finally… they will join you in the sun, Kal-El.”
This is perhaps the best and most accurate description of the meaning of Superman ever put to words. And it’s significant that Grant Morrison, who wrote All-Star Superman, entrusts this message to Jor-El, not to Jonathan Kent. Morrison understands that Superman’s status as a symbol of strength, goodness, and hope is inextricably tied to his nature as an alien.
Morrison sees his hero as a god capable of inspiring us all, while Gunn chooses to pull Superman down from Mount Olympus and bring him to our level. It makes the character more relatable, but at what cost?
Personally, I’ll always prefer the All-Star Superman approach, epitomized in one line of Grant Morrison’s dialogue. When Superman says he only has moments to save the world, Lois answers: “That’s more than you ever needed.”
