In September 2025, Clark’s Film Society held a showing of the 2025 Superman movie. Friday was not the usual date of their movie screenings, so the theater was much less packed than usual. This actually worked out very well for me, as it gave me the space to fully focus on the movie at hand. I had watched the movie before, but this was the first time I was actively taking notes for it. Doing so helped me see through the movie’s thin veneer; this movie is the definition of something with the appearance of progressiveness, but it is one of the most deeply conservative films I have ever seen underneath. This is a movie that purported to be pro-immigrant, but then has one of the most prevalent anti-immigrant stereotypes; that immigrants were sent here to take over and rape women be provent true. This movie says that when someone accuses an immigrant of being from a different culture (or species, as is the case in this movie), the correct response is to deny all connection to your culture and insist you’re just as “normal” as all the other (white) citizens. This is a movie that puts on a show of caring about the Palestinians being victims of genocide (not that James Gunn will admit it, because he is a coward). In practice, the film gives Palestinians no culture, no voice, not even names.The Jarhanporians, the Palestinian stand ins, are portrayed as Hollywood typically portrays people from the Middle East when they are not portrayed as terrorists, a mass of brown people who are just hanging out in the desert without a building in sight. The comparison of the Japhrinusin to Palestinians does not come out of nowhere. Word of mouth for the movie itself was heavily based on the fact that this movie was a pro-Palestine movie, and the iconography goes out of its way to encourage this view.  However, as stated earlier, this does not mean the movie treats Palestinians stand ins as people, it treats them as a backdrop to show how great the white heroes are, rendering them nothing more than small props in Superman’s story. This is a movie that, even with its mild, veiled ‘defense’ of Palestine in the most white savior of ways, does not condemn the U.S military. In this movie, the U.S. military had nothing to do with the genocide, and it was all the dastardly Lex Luthers’ fault. It’s a good thing they added that; otherwise, I might have thought about the U.S complicity in the real-life genocide of Palestine happening right now. 

All of this would be terrible if it were unintentional, if the creators of this movie had good intentions and just ended up not getting things right, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. This movie was directed and written by James Gunn, but he wasn’t the only person working on it. A producer of the film, someone who is slated to play a major role as a consultant for the DC Universe and someone who is literally writing the upcoming Supergirl movie, is Tom King. For those not aware, King is a comic book writer with a fairly prolific career, but before that, he had another job; that job was being an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA. In this role, he himself has stated that he played a fairly major part in the invasion of Iraq. He is proud of his time in the CIA, saying to GamesRadar, “it was the greatest honor of my life. I very much enjoyed the job.” ( From CIA To comic books: The secret origin of Tom King | GamesRadar+) So, unfortunately, I have a deep amount of trouble believing all of this was accidental, given King’s involvement with the project. 

This leaves us with a Superman who, instead of being an immigrant, is an assimilationist. A Superman that, instead of being a hero, is a white savior. A Superman that butchers the very core of the character, one made by two Jewish immigrants, and turns his mangled corpse into a puppet of neo-liberal “hope”. This isn’t my Superman, but, unfortunately, for the time being, it’s the world’s.