By now, it’s no secret that we, like most of you, thoroughly enjoyed James Gunn’s Superman. We’re now into the second week of the film’s theatrical run, and it continues to make money hand over fist at the box office. But for all of the movie’s strengths, it’s not without its weaknesses and headscratchers. While James Gunn largely succeeded in weaving a greater understanding of his new DC Universe throughout David Corenswet’s debut as the Man of Steel, the movie definitely raised some questions.
Director James Gunn has already come out and answered some of those questions definitively — no, Lex Luthor didn’t fake the message from Superman’s parents — but there are still plenty of unexplained plot points, and in one case, Gunn’s “clarifying” comments have actually made things more confusing. We’ve compiled some of the most egregious loose ends that Superman left dangling, so without further ado, here are seven things that already make no sense about Superman and the greater DCU.
1. Why Did Ultraman Care What Eve Was Secretly Telling Jimmy Olsen?
The obvious answer to this question is that Ultraman overheard Eve Tessmacher (Sara Sampaio) planning to double-cross Lex Luthor, and informed his master of her betrayal. As a way of moving the plot along, that series of events makes sense, except it relies on Ultraman receiving a temporary I.Q. boost. Before, and after Eve is busted, Ultraman is presented as a mindless brute so devoid of sentience that he needs Lex Luthor to literally feed him fight commands like the criminal mastermind is controlling a Mortal Kombat character.
Why, then, for one scene, is Ultraman both smart enough to interpret Eve’s message to Jimmy as a plot to take down their boss and able to communicate his findings to Luthor? The whole thing feels like Gunn temporarily ignoring the rules of his own universe in order to move the plot from point A to point B in the easiest way possible.
2. The Kent Home Movies Should Have Been Superman’s Comfort Watch From the Beginning
Near the beginning of Superman, the Man of Steel loses his first fight and retreats back to his Fortress of Solitude to recuperate. To soothe him during the painful healing process, his Superman Robots play a message from his Kryptonian birth parents. Later on, it’s discovered that Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van aren’t the benevolent couple Superman thought they were, and by the end of the film, he has switched to watching home videos of his adopted parents while undergoing the healing process. The question is, why weren’t the Kent family home movies Superman’s go-to comfort videos in the first place?
Even before Superman learned the truth about his birth parents, they were still a minuscule component of his upbringing compared to Ma and Pa Kent. The scene at the end almost plays like a companion piece to the ending of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where Star-Lord realizes Yondu was the father he wanted all along. The difference is, in Superman‘s case, Clark didn’t have a sudden epiphany about his adopted parents. The Kents were always loving and supportive guardians.
Once again, it feels like James Gunn let the story dictate the way the world of Superman behaves, rather than allowing that world’s own internal logic to dictate the way.
3. No One is Horrified That Hawkgirl Killed the Leader of a Foreign Nation
Superman begins three weeks after Superman stopped the sovereign nation of Boravia from invading a different sovereign nation, Jarhanpur. This act of interference, despite the fact that it saved countless lives, has surrounded the hero in a whirlwind of controversy. Later on in the film, Hawkgirl casually drops the leader of Boravia to his death, and nobody says a thing. Wait, what?
James Gunn firmly established at the beginning of the film that politics in general work the same way in the DCU that they do in our world, meaning that a privately funded US mercenary invading a foreign country and assassinating its leader — whether they deserve it or not — should, at the very least, cause global unrest. If that were to happen in reality, it would probably spark World War III. Instead, Hawkgirl’s war crime is never addressed, and the movie continues as if it had never happened.
4. Superman Was Awfully Chill About Killing Ultraman
James Gunn wasn’t shy about differentiating his new optimistic take on Superman from Zack Snyder’s darker approach to the character. Throughout the film, Superman demonstrates that saving lives is his prime directive, going so far as to save a squirrel’s life at one point. The only time Kal-El doesn’t go out of his way to preserve the sanctity of life is during his final brawl with Ultraman. While David Corenswet’s Man of Steel doesn’t willfully snap his nemesis’s spine the way Henry Cavill’s version did, he also doesn’t go out of his way to stop Ultraman from flying into a black hole that Superman himself only narrowly avoided earlier in the film.
Fans online have used the classic comic book trope of “no body, means the character is probably still alive” to justify Superman’s actions. Still, the fact remains that whether Ultraman comes out of the other end of that black hole unharmed or perhaps morphed into the DCU’s version of Bizarro, as many have speculated, as far as Clark knows, his clone is dead, and he doesn’t seem very shaken up by it. At least Cavill’s Supes let out a howl of anguish as he broke Zod’s neck.
5. Supergirl Should Have Told Her Cousin How Kryptonians Viewed Humans
One of the most controversial pieces of the new Superman mythos that James Gunn is crafting is the revelation that Kal-El’s parents didn’t send him to Earth to save the human race but to rule over it. To be completely fair, this plays out less like Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van are evil aliens hellbent on galactic domination and more like two members of a doomed race encouraging the last of their people to subjugate a primitive world and turn it into his own personal breeding ground to carry on the Kryptonian legacy.
For the revelation to have the intended effect, it must come as a complete shock to Superman — which it does. Adding Supergirl to the mix, however, creates a problem: why didn’t she tell her cousin that his parents were jerks? James Gunn has recently dismissed this “plot hole” by essentially stating that not all Kryptonians felt the same way about humans, and that Supergirl wouldn’t have discussed it with her aunt and uncle. Something about that explanation rings hollow, though.
For one thing, thanks to earlier comments by Gunn, we know that this Supergirl was on Krypton when it was destroyed. Clearly, someone told her to head to Earth and rendezvous with her cousin — the idea that she just happened to stumble upon the one planet where the only other living Kryptonian ended up is too improbable, even for this universe. Presuming that she was privy to Jor-El and Lara’s plan to send their baby to Earth — because again, why else would she know to go there? — why wouldn’t her Aunt and Uncle tell her their opinion on the human race or their hopes for their child once he reached Earth?
Let’s further presume that Clark Kent was overjoyed to find out he had not only another real, live Kryptonian to talk to but a blood relative to boot. Do you think there’s any chance he wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to ask her what his parents were like? Of course, it’s possible the subject never came up or that Kara knows nothing about her Uncle Jor-El and Aunt Lara Lor-Van, but there are an awful lot of concessions that have to be made for that scenario to be even remotely believable.
6. Peacemaker Being in Superman Blurs the Dividing Line Between the DCEU and the DCU
Of all the cameos in Superman, the one that makes the least sense is Peacemaker. In fact, having the character show up in the DCU in his current incarnation at all is extremely confusing, not just in-universe but from a behind-the-scenes standpoint as well. When James Gunn and Peter Safran announced that the DC Extended Universe would be ending in favor of establishing a new cinematic universe, a certain segment of the DC fandom was understandably upset. While the geek world at large enjoys dunking on the so-called “Snyderverse,” there is a small but loyal group of fans who adored it and wanted to see it continue.
James Gunn quickly shut those fans down by stressing that the DCU would feature a new Superman, a new Batman, and overall represent a new start for DC on TV and at the theater. He then immediately muddied the waters by stating that John Cena would continue to portray Peacemaker in the DCU. So much for a clean start.
It’s not like we don’t understand why Gunn would want to keep Cena around. By the director’s own admission, Peacemaker Season 1 was one of his favorite projects. But to sack Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot and then keep Cena and the rest of the Peacemaker cast around, well, it feels like a slap in the face to some fans. To others, it’s just confusing. Why do Superman and Supergirl look different in the DCU but Peacemaker looks exactly the same? Why do all of the major characters have new backstories, but the majority of Peacemaker Season 1 is still canon?
The trailer for Peacemaker Season 2 explains this discrepancy by introducing a DC multiverse and showing the original Peacemaker hopping dimensions. While it would seem a little early to be connecting the DCEU and the DCU that intimately — The Marvel Cinematic Universe waited until Phase 4 to start tossing non-MCU Marvel actors into the mix — it at least makes sense from a narrative perspective. Gunn, however, recently told Rolling Stone that while Peacemaker Season 2 will be about two dimensions, neither of them will be the DCEU.
That means that for most of Peacemaker Season 1 to be canon, as Gunn has stated, the events of the show just happened to occur exactly the same way in the DCU as they did in the DCEU. This just brings up more questions. Does that mean parts of The Suicide Squad are also canon? If so, given that that movie was a sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad, is some of that movie canon as well? Just where does the DCEU end and the DCU begin?
Obviously, in a fictional multiverse full of flying bird people, super dogs, and pocket dimensions, anything can happen, but we can’t help but feel like the best way to make sure the DCU succeeds would be not to anchor it so heavily to the failed DCEU.
Do you agree with our picks for aspects of Superman that make no sense? Let us know in the comments.
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