[Warning: This article contains Superman spoilers.] “You will travel far, my little Kal-El,” Marlon Brando’s Jor-El says in 1978’s Superman: The Movie, which opens with the infant Last Son of Krypton being rocketed to Earth from his destroyed home planet. “But we will never leave you. Even in the face of our deaths. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything I feel, all this and more… I bequeath to you, my son. You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine.”
“The son becomes the father, and the father the son,” Jor-El continues, placing a crystal in the baby’s ship. “This is all I can send you, Kal-El.” It will be another 18 years before Clark Kent, raised on Earth by Kansas farmers, uses the crystal to summon his Arctic Fortress of Solitude, where a hologram of Jor-El spends another 12 years shaping the Last Son into a costume-clad Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve).
“It is now time for you to rejoin your new world, and serve as collective humanity. Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed,” Jor-El says. “Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you: my only son.”
It’s a profoundly different speech than the one given by Bradley Cooper’s Jor-El in James Gunn’s Superman. When Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) intrudes on the Fortress of Solitude, then broadcasts a message translated from Kryptonian, Superman (David Corenswet) — and the world — learn that his birth parents sent him to Earth to “lord over the planet as the Last Son of Krypton,” causing a personal and public crisis for the hero.
“I needed somebody who could play Jor-El, who had the stature of what we imagine that character to be,” Gunn told Entertainment Tonight. “Somebody that could walk in the footsteps of Marlon Brando.”
Besides Hoult as nemesis Lex Luthor, Cooper is the biggest name in Superman, even if his role amounts to a glorified cameo. Gunn previously revealed the multi-Oscar nominee who voiced Rocket Raccoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies was “doing me a favor.”
“He’s a friend. We’ve stayed in close contact since the Guardians movies, and I admire him greatly as an actor and as a director,” Gunn said in a prior interview. “I just said, ‘Hey, will you do me a favor? Come down, go to England, we’re going to shoot you in a 3D environment, make a hologram of you, and you can play Jor-El.’ He was like, ‘Okay.’”
Superman stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. The film also features Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, María Gabriela de Faría as the Engineer, Wendell Pierce as The Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White, Neva Howell as Ma Kent, Pruitt Taylor Vince as Pa Kent, with Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord, and Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr. The film is now playing only in theaters.
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