‘Superman’ makes an old hero feel fresh, radical

A man deemed an “alien” has his face crushed into the pavement by a masked thug. He’s then renditioned to a top-secret black site prison where he’s tortured.

No, these aren’t images from today’s news — it’s from James Gunn’s new take on “Superman.” What this iconic superhero faces in the film indeed reflects reality back to us, not necessarily because Gunn could predict the future, but because he read the tea leaves (or the history books) accurately in the right moment.

The superhero, who was created 87 years ago, used to fight for the credo “truth, justice, and the American way.” While his official DC motto was amended a few years ago to change that last part to “a better tomorrow,” Superman is still down with the truth and justice, but in Gunn’s version, it’s about humanity, not nationality.

Even as a superpowered alien “metahuman,” he represents the best of what we should strive for: trying to do good and looking out for the most vulnerable among us.

But when we meet our caped hero (David Corenswet) he’s not doing so super, man.

He’s been pummeled into the Antarctic frost, injured and beaten. This cold open occurs just minutes after his clash with “The Hammer of Boravia,” a heavily armored flying representative of a fictional country on the brink of invading its neighbor, Jarhanpur.

A patched-up Clark Kent is able to don his spectacles for work the next day at the Daily Planet, where he’s secretly been dating his feisty co-worker Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). But his superhero side hustle gets the best of his journalism job — and their relationship — as tensions escalate in Boravia, accelerated by techno-fascist billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who has political and financial interests in the region.

Luthor commandeers a private army of metahumans he hopes to lease to the Department of Defense, as well as lab of IT minions playing video games with his war machines, and toying with a dangerous “pocket universe” that might rip a hole in reality if they plug in the wrong code.

Then there’s his horde of “outrage monkeys,” spewing a stream of negative comments about Superman into the internet. Superman even gets canceled, thanks to a misinformation campaign engineered by Luthor, rocking him with an identity crisis about his mission here on Earth. It’s almost too darkly resonant.

While Gunn’s social commentary (he wrote the screenplay alongside directing the film) may be so obvious as to seem nearly ham-handed, he tempers that, as well as the inherent earnestness of Superman’s character, with lots of humor and a joyously playful approach to the material. He hides the pill of sharp political critique in a fun pop package.

“Superman” is imbued with Gunn’s rascally sensibility. His ebullience and enthusiasm for the material shine through this busy, dizzying film densely packed with side characters from DC comics and striking visuals.

Corenswet, who looks every inch the part, capably keeps up with it all, and he delivers the hero’s deeply felt beliefs, practically spitting in Luthor’s face about what it means to be human, from the perspective of an “alien.”

With this “Superman,” Gunn has done the impossible — he’s made this old hero somehow feel radical.