Reimagining Superman: fresh take on the iconic hero

IT'S been almost 50 years since Christopher Reeve starred in Superman, the 1978 movie that spawned what is now an endless spigot of superhero movies.

- ANN HORNADAY

It didn't invent the tropes of messiah-like figures with supernatural powers or the building of elaborate onscreen worlds only to reduce them to apocalyptic rubble but its contours have now been imitated, elaborated, iterated and just plain stolen so often that the original looks wan and generic by comparison.

Superman has been remade since then, with different actors in the role, and often with directors seeking to contemporise the hopelessly square Clark Kent and his upright alter-ego by giving them a brooding, existential sense of solemnity.

The impulse was understandable - hey, it worked for Batman! But the tone was all wrong for a protagonist who, since his inception in World War II-era comic books and then in an iconic 1950s television series, embodied American ideals at their most forthright, wholesome and optimistic.

In Superman, James Gunn's latest installment, David Corenswet comes closest to matching Reeve's inimitable - and still definitive - combination of innocence and casual brute strength. As the human and humane anchor of a movie that is often awash in frenetic action, jump-cutty narrative and pulverising violence, he exudes his own brand of centered, self-confident calm: the Man of Steel as Man of Stillness.