Everything old is new again in the first teaser for James Gunn's "Superman." But if everything here looks familiar, why does it feel so fresh?
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00:00Everything old is new again in the first teaser for James Gunn's Superman.
00:04But if everything here looks familiar, why does it feel so fresh? The teaser is full of familiar
00:10imagery — shots of the American heartland, a man alone in the ice and snow, Maharied Clark Kent,
00:16a confident Lois Lane, Lex Luthor is there, looking all lean and mean.
00:21A fortress of solitude rises from the ice. Even the old John Williams theme is back.
00:26We feel like Dr. Manhattan experiencing all of time at once. There's generations of nostalgia
00:32here, and just when you think you've seen literally all of it before,
00:35blammo! There's Crypto the Superdog. That's new.
00:39"...home. Take me home."
00:43Beyond all the iconography, there's also something here that DC struggled to capture in the last 10
00:48years on film — an optimistic tone. The Man of Steel era was dour, intense, and frightening.
00:54Superman Returns felt too stuck in the past and distant.
00:58The Christopher Reeve movie started hopeful but ended in low-budget disaster almost 40 years ago.
01:03And the last time we saw that Superman, he was a soulless, computer-generated demon
01:08who looked like he'd been rendered on an old Nintendo Wii.
01:11In other words, we've been seeing Superman in movies for years now.
01:14He's never really gone away, but he hasn't felt like Superman in quite a long time.
01:19And this teaser, it feels like the real deal. There's no deleted mustache here.
01:23Superman is strong, but not scary. He looks like the character as you always picture him — hopeful,
01:28humble, strong, and pure. And while we know he has godlike powers, he spends most of the
01:34teaser on the verge of being defeated. He's not some weird alien who's just guaranteed to win.
01:39He's a man. He's human.
01:40It feels like for the last 10 years, DC movies have predicated themselves on the notion that
01:45darkness and violence were the things audiences craved. This time, our superheroes kill people.
01:50They're badass. They're gonna rip the bad guy's head off. And isn't that kind of boring?
01:56What's more interesting, a destroyer or a protector?
01:59We don't know for sure what'll happen in the movie, but this teaser seems to set up a more
02:03inspiring kind of hero. Or should we say heroes? Casting reports and the teaser itself indicate
02:09that there's actually a lot of established superheroes in this movie. Like, enough to
02:13where people were kind of worried. Was this gonna be Batman v. Superman all over again,
02:18stuffed full of characters who didn't need to be here yet?
02:21That remains to be seen, but the important thing for now is that
02:24the teaser doesn't linger on that. We see the other heroes, but they're clearly not the point.
02:29The impression we get is that this is Superman's story,
02:32taking place in a world that will be happening whether he was there or not.
02:35It doesn't beat you over the head with obscure heroes and make you feel like you need to go do
02:40homework to understand basic things about the movie. Finally, you may have noticed that the
02:44trailer ends with no title, just a date and a company logo, DC Studios. This teaser isn't
02:50just hyping up a movie, it's teasing a whole new approach to the DC characters on screen,
02:54under the creative leadership of James Gunn. And after a run of puzzling, embarrassing disasters
03:00like The Flash and Joker 2, that's the thing that audiences really need to be sold on here.
03:06You wouldn't get it.
03:07The fact that there's no title card isn't an oversight. It's a statement of purpose.
03:12You know this story. You know who this is. But hasn't it been a while since you've seen it done
03:17this purely? It conveys confidence in the project and treats the audience with respect.
03:22This same technique was used to great effect in Grant Morrison's All-Stars Superman,
03:26where Clark's origin story is one page long. That's it. They know you know,
03:30and you don't need to hear it again. And that's the same effect this trailer has.
03:34There's no gimmicks, no tricks, just the promise of a story you know, executed well.
03:39And it makes this start to a whole new DC look very promising indeed.