Some Thoughts on the "Superman" (2025) Film and the Jor-El Message

I went to see the new Superman film at the end of last July.

Since people like to praise things as 'absolute cinema' these days, I had kind of thought to disturb the implicit media hierarchy in such kind of praise by instead complimenting a theatrical live action film like this as 'absolute comics' or something. Though, maybe to really reach the 'absolute' territory, it would have taken more animetism at play. But it is one of the films that doesn't shy from being 'comic book-y', what with the hero making some SPIN TO WIN moves in the climatic fight, or the choice to take the setting where superhumans have already been a fact of life, or the extradimensional online troll monkey farm... .

But there is something else I've also been thinking about regarding the film that I wish to talk about. This concerns the controversial Jor-El and Lara's recorded message for the son they sent to Earth to escape Krypton's destruction.

Early in the film, we are told that the message got damaged in the voyage from Krypton so that only the first half of it can be played. Still, Superman has been taking the message as a source of inspiration to do good in Earth, 'cos that's what his parents wanted him to do in the message to his and our understanding of the available message, after all. And it does have precedents in previous Superman media, as in Jor-El's message in the classic 1978 film, for example (which I, incidentally, mostly remembers from being cited in 2006's Superman Returns ;that I actually watched at a cinema).

© & ™ DC. © 2025 WARNER BROS. ENT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

But the twist in the new film is when Lex Luthor recovered the other half of the message, it's revealed that they actually wanted their son to rule over Earth and even rebuild the Kryptonian population by mating with a lot of Earth women. In terms of the plot, this reveal functions as a key source of external and internal conflicts of the film, as public opinion turns against Superman and Superman himself experiencing an identity crisis.

What interests me about this twist is that it affirms a feeling I've had from seeing just the first half of the message, that while the content seems virtuous, it feels like sharing the same kind of logic that can be found in the rhetoric of civilizing mission: it places Earth natives as a backward people that need the 'aid' of an external civilization to become more 'civilized'. The twist simply makes it an overt colonial project.

Director James Gunn has defended this twist by pointing out that it does have precedent in some prior Superman media. But I think it's also interesting how this twist makes me rethink the more unambiguously positive versions of this message such as those in the aforementioned older Superman films. While the Jor-El of that version may have forbidden his son to "interfere with human history" and just lead by example, it's still kind of based on a similar idea that humans of Earth are backwards and could not become more civilized without external help?

I don't know if it's actually the intention of the new film, but arguably, this kind of twist tackles head-on the potential implicit civilizing mission-like logic in the recurrent idea of Superman being inspired by his parents' message and makes it certain that his raison d'être has actually always been independent of that; that it's because he's raised on Earth with both its virtues and flaws that he becomes what he is, after all. A Superman as much inspired by life on Earth as he is inspiring the inhabitants of Earth.

At least that's how I kind of feel and think about that particular plot point. What do you think about the plot twist? Let me hear in the comments.