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Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk cover
Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk cover
The K.B. Radio Network

Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk

Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk

1h00 |12/07/2025
Play
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Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk cover
Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk cover
The K.B. Radio Network

Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk

Superman (2025) SPOILER Talk

1h00 |12/07/2025
Play

Description

The SPOILER review of DC's Superman. Written and directed by James Gunn, it is the first film in the DC Universe (DCU) produced by DC Studios and the second reboot of the Superman film series. David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent / Superman, alongside Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, and Isabela Merced. In the film, Superman must prove to the world that he is their protector after billionaire Lex Luthor conducts a plan to turn public opinion against him.


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Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Hello everyone and welcome to the concession stand here on the KB radio network. I am your host Kevin Reed and this is the spoiler. I repeat spoiler. Review of Superman, the brand new film from writer-director James Gunn, starring David Cornswet as the man of steel himself, and this is the first film in the DC universe. I absolutely adore this film. I've seen it twice. I had to watch it again in order to kind of grasp, you know, everything that I saw in the first. viewing and i gave my initial review if you want to hear that review the non-spoiler review uh you can find it on my channel but i couldn't get into a lot of things on that review because it would be spoilery you know i don't want to spoil it for anybody uh who haven't seen it so i decided to split them up in two and do a non-spoiler and a spoiler this is more of a talk then it is a rebuke. because I reviewed it already. I gave it a B+. It is an excellent film to kick off this new cinematic universe over at DC. And so I wanted to touch in on some points here concerning the film that I enjoyed and some things that I didn't. Especially since I've viewed it a couple of times now, I have a greater sense of the story and There's a couple of things that I even missed on the first viewing, shockingly enough. Nothing big or major, but just little nuggets that kind of explained some things clearer for me. You know, it wasn't earth-shattling or caused me not to like the movie on the first viewing, but it just added to my enjoyment of the film. this film kicks off we don't get a origin story in this movie this is superman already superman you know clark has he's been through smallville we we didn't have to see krypton blow up we didn't have to see uh paul and uh mark kent raise him up and all this other good stuff and you know him discovering his powers we've been through that we saw it in the christopher reeves version we saw it in the man of steel we've seen it in comics we've seen it on television hey we saw a whole television show dedicated to the upbringing of clark kent so we didn't need to dive back into the origin story if you don't know the origin story of superman by this point god bless you and now the one thing i will say i say all that as somebody who is in his mid-40s have watched multiple versions of superman i will go as far to say every version um on television comics and movies but in regards to little kids or children who are going to see this movie with their parents or friends or whoever and this is their first superman this is the first time they were experiencing superman on the big screen in some cases at all in any media and they probably don't know the origin they probably don't know the full story of superman i think in regards to those people they're not just kids because there are grown-ups who probably don't know to be honest with you but in regards to those people they're probably be a little thrown off by it and that's one knock that i didn't give my initial review. you know just in regards to those individuals who are experiencing the character of superman for the first time and just want to see a superhero film uh whether they're young or old there'll be a little little concerning there they're like okay so how did he become superman uh did he get hit by a meteor or something like that you know they don't know that he's an alien and all this here now all of this is explained throughout the film you know if you sit there and pay attention but i'm just saying as far as somebody for the first time sitting down in the theater and don't know the story of Superman and hope to be introduced to this character from the beginning, you're not going to get that in this type of film. And for me, I appreciated it. For me personally, I love that decision. You know, it's something like Batman. If they make a Batman movie, which is coming, not anytime soon, it'll probably be a... a couple of years from now as far as in this cinematic universe uh james gunn has said that there won't be an origin story we're not gonna see uh martha and uh thomas wayne get shot in the alley in that film thank god because we've seen it in every single iteration of that character you know but i understand for younger viewers who don't know who's not in the comics uh Probably didn't watch the animated series and so on and so forth don't know but hopefully with good Storytelling in the film you can find out and that's one thing about this movie that it does do well It does tell that story that Kal-el which is his given name his biological name comes from Krypton. He's sent here by his parents to avoid the destruction of Krypton and whatnot. He lands in Smallville, Kansas, raised up by the Kants, and voila, there we go. So it is told to us and shown to us in a degree throughout the film. We just have to commit to it. But as a comic book lover, as a fan of these comic book films and properties, I was all in on it. I'm glad we picked it. up at the point at the time that we did pick up in this film this film starts with the explanation that metahumans have been on earth for three centuries at this point you know 300 years on earth so we've had superhuman beings in this version of earth already you know so it didn't make sense to have an origin story when we We have a world established that has metahumans for the past 300 years. And the first image we see is Superman crash landing on the snow. You know, that we saw in the trailer and everything. He's beaten up, he's broken up, and the text on screen explains that this is Superman's first defeat. This is the first time he's lost. And did he lose? I mean... broken ribs and punctured lungs and all this other stuff i mean he the hammer of uh bararia it tore his behind up who we later find out once again it's spoilers we later find out that is ultraman in that suit and he beat him half to death literally and once again i think this was a genius way to start this film because if we find our hero at his lowest this is where we start at his lowest it we get to go on this journey with him you know as he accomplishes go as he vanished the enemy and come out on top we can go on that journey through this story and that excited me for some strange reason i was intrigued by that when that was the opening scene because when you see it in the trailer Of course, and this is in all movies, in all movie trailers, when you see the trailer, you're not seeing the movie in context. It's not like it's a shorter version of the film as far as chronological order. You know, everything is all out of whack. And so I didn't think that that was going to be the opening shot. And to be honest with you, when you really go back and watch the trailers, all of them, I think it's what, three trailers that they released? A couple of clips, but the three trailers that they released were basically the same thing. They were the same scene from the movie, and all of those trailers were the beginning part of the film. You know, I think the last trailer showed a little bit of the third act, but it didn't show everything. But the majority of those trailers were the first act of the movie. and so once again this was the opening scene and i'm like okay so we can only go up from here but no pun intended we're only going up up from here so crypto another factor in this film i mentioned in my initial review i was a little nervous about going into this movie i thought we were going to be oversaturated with this dog and i love dogs you know my daughter has a dog which basically means i'm an owner of a dog by default because it's in my house but i love dogs you know i do and this is coming from somebody when i was younger i was allergic to dogs. I couldn't be around dogs and it's weird how that just went away It went away because this isn't our first dog. We've had a couple of dogs before our current Little crypto that runs around and destroys the house, but as neither here nor there I thought we was gonna be over saying I thought this was gonna be a crypto movie the way they were promoting him You know every promotional material was crypto oh man i don't want to see that not that i don't care for the dog i i want to see a superman movie not a crypto movie but the film gave you just the right amount of crypto and you actually fall in love with the dog at least i did i fell in love with crypto no matter how unruly he was he was still a beautiful dog love that dog It added to every scene that he was a part of. We get to the Fortress of Solitude. We meet the Superman robots, which is from the, I think, All-Star Superman comics. Or was it that? I think it was the animated movie. I think it was one, but they did incorporate it in the comics after. But I think they were introduced in the animated movie first. Either way, don't care. I love them in this film. I love that addition to heal Superman with the rays from the sun magnifying it so he can get soaked in the sun's power to heal him. Superman, he gets off the table. He goes back, immediately goes back into the fight against the Hammer of Berraria. I'm pretty sure I'm saying the name wrong, but anyways, goes back into the fight and loses again. He loses again. and i thought that was cool i'm like man this is cool to see superman struggle because you always look at superman as the the you know the automatic problem solver you know as long as you don't have kryptonite he can destroy anything i mean there's nothing that can stop him uh kryptonite or magic it's nothing that can stop him but they found the way to work it into the comic lore that he can be beat he can be hurt and still be the superman that we know and love so we get introduced to lex luthor played by nicholas hope and i'm just gonna say it right now after watching it a second time nicholas hope is the best lex luthor ever i loved his portrayal of that villain he embodied everything that I remember from the comics. I think that's the most important thing for me. Going back to 1978's Superman, where we got the late, great Gene Hackman playing that character. I love Gene Hackman. I love his Lex Luthor, but that wasn't the Lex Luthor in the comics. Now, a lot of people's first exposure to that character was through the movies. Namely me, you know, before I was old enough to get into comics and actually read, you know, and explore what that character was truly all about throughout the comic lore. He is not this comedic criminal that, you know, petty thug or whatever that was displayed in those films. But that Lex Luthor fit the tone of that movie, fit the story that. they were telling richard donald was telling in that film and so i'm not mad at it you know so this is no disrespect to him he fit that that film uh kevin spacey and superman return fit that film which was pretty much a continuation of the gene hackman's uh lex luthor but i think kevin spacey was the closest thing up to this point the closest thing to the lex luthor that I remember from the comics. and I'm just talking film because Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville has been my favorite Lex Luthor ever, you know, and he's still up there with me, but it's something about Nicholas Holt's performance in this film that made him one of the best comic book villains in all of comic book films. Uh, i'm including marvel in past uh uh dc films he managed to blend and i'm talking a perfect blend here blend a level of menace of entitlement of uh even compassion you know there's there's a genius, all of this wrapped up in one and make. that character so layered which he could have been this mustache trailing villain which you know you script down the layers uh that's basically what lex luther is but he gave that character so much you know and i don't know if it's how the character was written or how it was acted by Nicholas Hope or a combination of both. But it. absolutely worked in this movie love this lex luther the perfect lex luther for this superman for this cinematic universe that we're going forward with and so we get that introduction we get introduced to miss tess macker who plays a bigger role later on and everything up to this point it was it was it was coming together i'm not going to sit here and say that the first 30 minutes of this movie was perfect because it wasn't because up to this point i'm kind of confused i'm like is this a non-linear story are we going to be going in flashbacks and this that and the third i'm like where are we going with this i'm liking what i'm seeing i'm just not understanding where the story is going at this point and i was hoping to get that because i know the movie's only two hours long and we're 30 minutes in so i wanted to kind of get a sense of what's going on up to this point but that was immediately thrown away even though i still didn't know and had questions i was enjoying the next two scenes so much i forgot you know and that was the two scenes that we got basically our only exposure to clark kent you know uh die. Clark Kent in the Daily Planet and the scene with Clark and Lois in the apartment for the interview scene. The scene in the Daily Planet, which on my first viewing, I was kind of, I think in my review, I mentioned that I didn't too much care for David Cornswet's Clark Kent performance. I know why I said that, but after I watched it the second time, I appreciated it a little more. I saw little nuances that he was doing that I didn't pick up on in the first viewing, and I appreciated it more. I still stand by the fact his voice didn't really change, and like I said before, I'm not expecting him to do the whole... Christian Bale Batman switch up with his voice I'm just me you know he just the way his voice comes out and I guess it's just David Cornswet's voice he he has this confident strong voice and it's the same voice he uses for Superman you know that same tone and you know like well you know it is not it's not hard to pick up on the fact that it's the same person that's that's my whole thing now i get the hypno glasses that we do find out and this is in the comics this is comic accurate that he wears hypno glasses to uh you know throw off his appearance to everybody that looks at him and so they won't look at him and say you know what you resemble superman but the glasses throw you off so it was just the voice thing. And I think in my mind, and I, I constantly tell myself that I don't want to compare David Cornswet to Henry Cavill. Don't want to compare them to Christopher Reeves or. or Tom Welling or whoever, Brandon Rolfe. I don't want to do that. This is his version. And I found myself realizing that when I made that statement in my review, I was comparing him. I was comparing him to Christopher Reeve. Christopher Reeve did the best transition of those characters. I say those. It's the same character. Clark Kent in Superman. Just the way he slumped his shoulders when he was Clark. the way he lumbered around and clumsy and just he didn't change his voice to the degree of squeaky but it was just a little subtle thing that he did and you know when he was superman he would broaden his shoulders and stick his chest out and chin up and his voice was more confident and strong and it was just those little things that made christopher reeve one of the best supermen if not the best superman according to my mom uh the best superman to ever put on the suit and i was unfairly putting that on david corn sweat now i do appreciate what the little things that he was doing in that scene now when we get to the scene with him and lois uh this uh i think they're calling it the interview scene uh That's different because he was him. He was just him. He wasn't Clark. He was Kal-El. He was Superman. He was just him. This was my favorite scene in the movie. Yes, the punchy punchy smash smash with the kaiju and Ultraman and the engineer and all that. All that was fun and good. But this was my favorite scene in the film. Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane was probably the best casting throughout this entire film. film the entire cast was banger this was great casting by uh james gunn throughout this entire film he the dude's a genius you can say what you want about james gunn he's a genius he he knows what he wants he has a vision and he executes it uh everybody a part of this film was perfectly but nothing can be as perfect as racial rachel brosnahan as lois she She's the best Lois Lane, hands down, hands down. And I know there's a lot of Margo Kidder fans out there who was screaming blasts from me at me right now. But come on, I'm sorry. And I love Margo Kidder. But come on, Rachel Brosnahan was born to play Lois Lane. Just watch one episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Mabel. I said it back then, and this is before any consideration for a Superman movie at the time. I said, man, she would make a perfect Lois Lane. You know, I always felt that watching that show. And when this came around and they announced that they cast her, I was like, well, that's a duh. That's a no-brainer. And she knocked it out the park. But what made it so great, what made her performance so great, was the chemistry between her and David Cornswet, and it showed so much in this scene. If I had one knock about Lois Lane in this movie, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Rachel Brosnahan, is the fact that she kind of disappears in the third act. She doesn't have much to do in the third act, because we get this powerful scene in the first act. we get another great scene well a couple of great scenes in the second act uh her interacting with the justice gang and her with mr terrific as they go to that pocket dimension that she is great and she kind of get lost in the shuffle in the third act but that's my only knock and that's not her fault but she was excellent man excellent and this scene was so good how they switched it up it went from lovey-dovey to playful banter to actual heated discussion to the point that they basically almost broke up if not completely broke up i know they was on the they were on the fence there when clark left the apartment and it just escalated to that point and this was like uh i don't know how long was this scene it felt like It took up half the movie, but I'm not mad at it taking up half the movie. It was so good. You couldn't cut nothing from that scene. That was just... that was just cinema there you know you letting actors just act letting them do their thing just letting them eat and it it almost stole the movie i i would have i would have sat there for two hours and watched lois and clark just go back and forth at the dinner table and have been happy i would have felt i got my money's worth uh that's how good that scene was but in the midst of that scene we learn a lot of story we find out that superman is kind of a lone wolf you know he marched to the beat of his own drum he doesn't take orders from the president he doesn't take orders from the justice gang he doesn't take orders from the uh some conglomerate or anything like that he he marches to the beat of his own drum he goes where he's needed where he feels help is needed to save lives no matter what and he intervenes in this invasion that we later find out that uh lex luther is orchestrating uh just to have the world turn on superman and so he goes to stop this war and inadvertently gets involved in this geopolitical uh battle i guess you could say and it sparks up a whole nother thing which brings me to a point uh that i wanted to talk about before but i couldn't and it's the i don't know it's the real world implications here you know it it's it this movie mirrors exactly what's happening in the world right now you know you could watch You can go to the theater, watch Superman, go home, turn on CNN, and it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. It's just with different names for the countries and different names for Lex Luthor. Replace Lex Luthor with Elon Musk and you'll get the movie. It's pretty much the same thing. And so it's definitely timely and poignant, if you will. and so lex luther and his uh minions the engineer and uh ultraman they invade the fortress of solitude and once again sitting there in the theater first time when i watched it the first time i'm like how did he just walk up to the fortress you know and they explained it away but you know when i watched it the first time i was like boy they're gonna have to explain this but uh we find out that ultra man is uh the clone of superman you know so they used his dna and that's how they got in but anyway they invade the fortress of solitude we see the engineer just just go to town on the superman robots which was cool cool little fight gets in a fight with crypto we get to see some crypto action there And then we get our big little turning point at this juncture of the movie. When Superman, the first scene in the movie when Superman was brought back to the fortress and the Superman robots turned on the message from Krypton of his parents, his biological parents, who was played by Bradley Cooper as Joel. um and the mother i don't know i've seen that actress in something but i can't recall what i seen her in uh but that's neither here nor there um they play his parents and they're uh tell uh they sent the message and the message got damaged when he came to earth or crashed on earth or whatever so you only get the first half of the message in the first half of the matches message is uh uplifting today it's inspiring you know we sent you to earth to to help and to uh be a beacon of light or whatever the case may be and when the engineer hacks into the computer there at the fortress of solitude she is able to decrypt the second half of the message where we find out that joel and his mother sent them to earth to conquer earth and so this is Oh. all the gas that Lex needed to start this fire you know this this pretty much uh confirms his feelings about Superman you know that he's an alien he's here to uh rule over us or whatever the case may be so this this was confirmation in his eyes and so he releases the message all the while while he's invading um the Fortress of Solitude he has a little distraction going on he unleashes this kaiju on metropolis and this is when we get the fight we see in the trailer and he's fighting the kaiju and uh this is where at this moment when i fell in love with david corn sweats version of superman something that we didn't get to see in other versions of this character on the big screen While he was fighting this giant monster, he would stop and save people. He would save a dog from being crushed by the foot of this monster. He saved a woman from being crushed and saved these people that was in the building. Every time he saved them, he would smile at them. He'll ask them if they was okay. He'll give them little... affirmations i guess you know just breathe you know just just take deep breaths and whatever it's stuff like that and give a smile and that's the superman that i loved from the comics this is the superman that i always envisioned you know in live action and i finally got to see it love henry cowell love him But that was such a dark and moody guy to say he was Superman. But for that film, he fit that vision of Zack Snyder. Now, for comic fans and lovers of the animated show, this is the Superman for you. This is exactly what I wanted to see. And from at that point in the film, I knew that. Nothing else could bother me throughout this movie and nothing did. Yeah, I had some little nitpicks from that moment on, but nothing to deter me from feeling that this was a great Superman movie. And so he defeats the Kaiju with the help of the Justice Gang. This is when we get introduced to Guy Gardner's Green Lantern, played by Nathan Fillion, Mr. Terrific. played by Eddie Nami. I can't pronounce his name. I had it. I practiced it before I started the show, and I still can't get it out. But I do enjoy him as an actor. He stole the movie, to be honest. Every scene that he was in, he stole the movie. I love Mr. Terrific in this movie. And we got Hawkgirl played by Isabella Morset. This was... an interesting decision by James Gunn to include these characters in this story. The easiest thing to do, the low-hanging fruit, of course, you're going to bring in Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. They'll bring in Wonder Woman, bring in Batman, you know, the most notable of superheroes in the DC lore. But he decided to pick these X-Ups obscure characters and that's what james gunn do if you really go through the history of his films who knew anything about the guardians of the galaxy before the movies came out i didn't you know i read comics you know i did not know anything about guardians when he did the suicide squad i knew a couple of those characters i didn't know all of peacemaker i knew nothing about and that ended up being the best character in the film i mean end got his own tv show and has a cameo in this movie and i i love peacemaker and so he has a way of finding the most obscure characters and turning them into something and so this was a interesting choice to pick these particular characters to pop up in this film um i said in my initial review that i was worried about that you know leading up to the film with the trailers and everything that okay we're going to be oversaturated with all of these dc characters and this is supposed to be a superhero or a superman film I don't want to see all of these characters man if you're going to do that just make a Justice League movie but instead we got the right amount of these characters you know because he's building a universe here and so you can't just have a movie with just Superman and nothing else happens you know you have to incorporate these characters in some way and expand the universe out that way and I thought that was genius and using these particular characters was smart. And they did not oversaturate the movie. They were used properly. They came in to do their jobs and they did it perfectly. The only one who got shortchanged in this film is Hulk Girl, is Isabella Morissette. You know, Guy Garner had a great part. Mr. Terrific had a terrific part. Not so much with Hulk Girl. She was just there. And that's my... That's the only part about that whole Justice gang that I just can't get over. Even after the second viewing, it was worse. That's the only part about this movie that got worse on the second viewing. And that was Hawkgirl. Because I can't help but wonder, was her part cut or what? I mean, what happened here? Because we got nothing. And if you followed Hawkgirl in the comics, you would know that that is a very interesting character and i'm not saying we had to do a whole backstory and origin story and tell her arc in this movie but you could have hinted to something about her character we didn't get that in this film but it is what it is you know hopefully moving forward we'll get more you know and so around this time they defeated the kaiju and voila next thing you know lex luther released the footage of the message from his parents and now everybody turns on him now this was another part and him i mean superman this was another part of the movie where i was like uh i get what you're doing i'm a i'm a roll with what you're doing but i wish it was done a little better and what i mean by that is the people instantly turned on superman i mean instant i understand i understand they saw the message i understand that uh that initially the plans were from his parents for him to come to earth and take over but nothing from superman throughout the i think three years he's been Superman, at least. That's the way they set it up in this film. Nothing indicates that he's anything like that. He's a hero. He literally just risked his life to save everybody. And they instantly turned. I'm not saying the people shouldn't have turned. Yeah, but it should have been kind of a rollout to it. As opposed to immediately shouting and cursing him out and throwing cans at his head and all this other stuff. It was like too fast for me. It didn't that just didn't work But I get the context of the story I just wish it was kind of played out a little better, but that's just me, you know, so now we get Superman he decides to turn himself in to the Justice Department Because he's a Boy Scout, you know, he's not gonna go on a run and so he turns himself in and uh rick flagg who uh i love rick flagg and creature commandos i love frank grillo who plays uh rick flagg senior i didn't see the purpose of him being in this movie he was in for two scenes and this was one of them and he he said maybe two words but it was nothing he was just there and i know he he's gonna have a bigger role in the peacemaker season two series uh but i don't know it was just weird that he was just there to be there he he was there he was more useless than hawk girl and that's saying something but anyways he gets turned into lex luther and lex luther puts him in that pocket dimension and this is where we meet uh metamorpho and he uh you know crabs uh kryptonite to weaken superman and This is where we get to see Lex Luthor be as diabolical that I've ever seen in any iteration of this character. Where he literally blows a man's head off in front of Superman. A guy that helps him. A guy that is a fan of Superman. And playing Russian roulette with him and just kills him. And like, okay, well, we'll find somebody else. We're going to get somebody else to find out because he's interrogating him to find out who raised him, who found him as a baby, you know. And, of course, Superman won't tell. And so he killed the guy. And I'm like, man, Lex, Lex is a beast in this movie, man. And Nicholas Hope, I tell you, bro, I cannot scream any louder my praise for this man. as this character just to think that initially he went there when he uh when he was auditioning for this movie he was auditioning to be superman nicholas hope and i wasn't mad at that idea because i like nicholas hope uh from playing in the x-men films and uh numerous other projects that he he was in i really do enjoy him even though i see him more as a batman but I would have took him as Superman. But no. Once again, James Gunn, genius move, saw something else. He saw something else there. And when they cast him as Lex Luthor, I was a little skeptical. Can he pull it off? And then I thought about, well, Jesse Eisenberg. God bless him. As long as he isn't that, I'll be all right with it. Well, he blew that out. completely out of the water but upon witnessing that brutal killing metamorpho he finds he he finds a new i don't know heart he gets the heart he decides that now he wants superman to get out and help him save his baby uh little baby joey once again from the comics didn't ever think i'll see that in film, but we got to see it. He creates a version of the sun to power up Superman. They escape. There's an epic little battle there where Superman is holding the baby about trying to fight off those rafters. And you've got a proton river that's about to suck him into a black hole. And all this is going on. All the while, you've got Mr. Terrific and Lois. they found their way into the pocket dimension and crypto is there as well and it sounds messy on the surface but it actually flowed pretty well i thought this was a really good scene a exciting scene we get out of the pocket dimension and lois lane brings uh superman to home brings him to smallville to be with his parents so he can recuperate from all uh the radiation that he got from that kryptonite and another great scene between david corn sweat and uh oh my god what's his name uh puett puett taylor who plays uh jonathan kent uh what a scene man and once again i'm sitting in the theater and my dog i guess my daughter knew she sensed it on me uh Knowing the relationship between me and my father and how deep that conversation was between Clark and Jonathan Kent. And it was, yeah, it was Niagara Falls. I was in there crying. I was crying because I felt it because those conversations or similar conversations took place between me and my dad. And I remember every when when I watched it, I can just picture my dad telling me everything that Jonathan Kent was telling Clark in that moment. And it just I I did good. I did good. It wasn't complete. My makeup didn't run, but I was it was it was it had a couple of tears that dropped out. But It was a powerful scene, really good scene, and it really reinforced the fact that, because Clark, that he was so worried about... why his biological parents sent him to Earth. And that reassured him that, you know, that conversation with Jonathan reassured him that his real parents were Jonathan and Martha Kent. And those Joel L. and why am I blanking on her name? But the mother name. But they, yeah, they are his biological parents. but that's not what reared him up that's not why he is who he is jonathan and martha kent is the reason superman is who he is and i thought it they did a excellent job by depicting that in one small scene we didn't need an origin we didn't need to see jonathan kent raising him up and teaching them right from wrong and you know we didn't have to have a scene where they sit them on a couch and try to uh reinforce you know oh no you you fight for good truth justice in american way it was none of that you know it was just a small subtle scene and it told you everything that you needed to know and it it worked so well and i was just amazed by how Less was more in this instant. But anyways, meanwhile, Lex Luthor, he's mad now. Superman got free, so he, you know, ramps up the power on that pocket dimension portal thing. And it exploded to the point where it caused the rift. So now Metropolis is about to get swallowed up in this rift. And this was cool. I like this scene. to see the destruction of metropolis now this was destruction done right as opposed to man of steel where metropolis just turned into a scorched earth wasteland during the battle this this made sense this felt comic booky this felt animated serious you know the way the the city was just being torn apart by this by this rift and all the while you have superman going around he's catching buildings from falling on uh this woman in a car you know he he gets in a fight with the engineer and ultraman in this stadium which was cool all the while you have an invasion that's about to take place in um in those two between those two fictional countries and this was another scene that almost had me crying and it wasn't a scene it was more or less just one little part and that's when the little kid was holding up the flag and calling out to superman and i don't know why that moved me it just moved me i was like come on but superman's tied up with this battle and you're like oh my god is he gonna be get there on time because those people about to get annihilated by his army. and so he's in this battle and uh of course he's struggling you know because he's going up against two superhuman beings you know two metahumans and one of them is his clone who we get get that reveal in a couple of minutes but they're going at it in the stadium to the point where they figured out that okay i'm gonna use uh the engineer who is made up of all nanobots i'm gonna take the nanobots and uh smother you and fill up your lungs and kill you you know that's in that that's one way to kill superman i mean he's super but i i don't think he's super enough to whereas he can live without brain breathing and so he comes up with the plan he's gonna fly out into the atmosphere with both of them attached to him and just come back down with the force of a meteor and that's how he gets loose from it and able to uh uh throw up those nanobots and this this incapacitates the engineer who we don't see anymore uh in the movie and that kind of bothered me too i was like well how you knock out somebody that's made of nanobots i mean it that that was weird to me but whatever uh i looked past that because we didn't have time to breathe because superman was going up against Ultraman whose suit was all torn up from the impact of them falling back to Earth. He takes off the suit. And it is none other than a clone of Superman. It was David Cornsweat with a wig on. And if you read comics, you pretty much know who Ultraman is. And that's basically what he is. And so it didn't come as a shock. But it still was a shock to me. I don't know why it surprised me in the movie. And I know who Ultraman is. But it still surprised me in the film. And you have Lex Luthor. controlling him uh because lex luther once again showing his genius and this was planted throughout the film when he fought the uh hammer of bararia uh with ultraman in that suit but that lex was controlling him you know because lex had figure out all of superman's fighting style or how he fought so he he came up and devised this plan on how to defeat him you know with this fighting. you know, had these team of tech wizards that can orchestrate this fight. And that's how Superman struggled so much, because Lex Luthor figured out how to beat him. He knows his moves, his every move. He studied him. So they go at it back and forth. Of course, Ultraman is having an upper hand. Lex Luthor makes the comment that you know you can't beat brains braun cannot beat brain and superman smiles and he's like yeah i have the brains too i have brains too or something to that effect and he whistles and who comes to the rescue it is none other than crypto another another uh element i think right before that we find out that yes clark is not going to be able to get to beraria to save those people from that army he called the justice game to go help and that's so similar to what we witnessed in the animated series and i was so shocked and surprised by that again i'm like okay this works this works perfectly and so So he whistles for Crypto. Crypto comes and gets Ultraman off of him. And they both team up because at this point, Lex doesn't have a plan for crypto. So they were able to get the get the upper hand to the point where Superman throws Ultraman into the black hole. And I don't know if this is going to set up Bizarro or or what, but. that's that could be a nice way to set up bizarro later on down the line but if we never revisit it again that's fine too that doesn't have to be revisited so uh the rafters come the other squad this little legion of warriors that lex have and superman and crypto just go to work on them he he were he goes to work on them now he's going after lex uh gives lex a nice speech you know as crypto works him it reminded me of uh when the hawk took loki you know the puny god scene in the avengers it was the same thing crypto worked lex lute i'm like man is he gonna kill him i was getting kind of worried for the legs i ain't gonna lie But he probably wished he was dead after that beating. But that was cool. And they end up throwing Lex Luthor into Belle Reeves. And we get the obligatory Superman-Lois kiss at the end of the battle and whatnot. And Superman, he's back at the Fortress of Solitude, getting healed up from all of this. battling he been doing and who drops by but his cousin carla carla zorrell yes played by millie adcock if you are a fan of uh house of the dragon yes her is she she's playing uh carla zorrell's aka supergirl and supergirl that comes out next year but she makes a cameo in this movie to pick crypto We found out is actually her dog all this time Superman was just dog sitting with Before Supergirl, but that was a nice little scene uh to see her in the one thing i didn't like about it was the explanation it i did not like that superman told the superman robot uh oh you know she goes to a planet that has a red sun so she can get drunk because our metabolism here uh we can't get drunk and blah blah blah that's all fine and good and that's true but why are you telling this to the superman robots shouldn't they know that already i'm like okay why are you if they already know who are you explaining it to us we don't need to know that we'll find that out next year when supergirl comes out i didn't need the explanation you know and i already knew why she was drunk you know but it's still kind of baffling why is she still drunk because she is currently under a yellow sun that would have that would have wore off i'm just saying but anyways that was the end of the film uh but well i will say the last scene was also epic in my humble opinion because when superman in the first scene he returned to the fortress of solitude the superman robots uh turned on the message from his biological parents to soothe him so this time when he's healing up in the fortress of solitude the superman robots turns on his parents video to soothe him and this time it was jonathan and martha kent and what was so genius about this and i didn't pick it up until the second viewing. That's why I said it was just little things that I didn't catch the first time that I caught today when I watched it again. It was the fact that when that first scene, when we see his biological parents, that's the scene when he was healing up and the sun rays are healing him. And those... That message was supposed to soothe him, yet when the rays hit him, he was screaming. He was in pain because his bones were getting back in place. He was healing up rapidly. So he was screaming in pain, listening to their voices. At the end of this movie, while he's healing up and watching the footage of Jonathan and Malte Kent when he was younger and his Jonathan Kent. lifting him up in the air and he's posing like superman as a little kid and stuff like that he's smiling and the movie goes off once again another tear rolled down my eye this time i was by myself so i didn't i didn't have to worry about my daughter looking at me but yes yeah i thought that was genius that was so poetic but overall this was this was it. excellent superman movie i i thought that we would get at least a decent movie i wasn't expecting much from it to be honest with you and i got much more i got a whole lot more and i'm excited for this universe going forward as i stated in my initial review and so like i said just to add on this movie is still a b plus in my humble opinion i think it's One of the best Superman movies, if not the best. I'm not going to fight anybody on that, if that's your opinion. Superman movies to be released. I super enjoyed it, and I will be going to see it for a third time before it's all said and done. Well, I got to do it this week, because next week, of course, is Fantastic Four. But I'm super, super happy, and, you know. round of applause to james gunn for giving us a movie full of heart full of hope and a cinematic universe that we can be excited about but once again i would love to know what were your thoughts of superman did you enjoy superman did you think it's up there with richard donner's uh 1978 superman or do you Think it's more along the lines of Superman 4, A Quest for Peace. I would love to hear your thoughts about this version. Email the show, kbradiopodcast at gmail.com. You can also search for the show on all social media platforms. Just search for the KB Radio Network. Also, don't forget about YouTube. Subscribe to the KB Radio Network channel and like this video if you don't. mind don't forget about the five stars the reviews and sharing this show if you're listening on apple podcast spotify iheart radio wherever you are currently listening to the concession stand here on the kb radio network everybody thank you for joining me for this spoiler talk for james guns warner brothers dc studios new film Superman. Want you all to know that I love you. Continue to love everyone. And until we speak again, you all be blessed.

Description

The SPOILER review of DC's Superman. Written and directed by James Gunn, it is the first film in the DC Universe (DCU) produced by DC Studios and the second reboot of the Superman film series. David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent / Superman, alongside Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, and Isabela Merced. In the film, Superman must prove to the world that he is their protector after billionaire Lex Luthor conducts a plan to turn public opinion against him.


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Transcription

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    Hello everyone and welcome to the concession stand here on the KB radio network. I am your host Kevin Reed and this is the spoiler. I repeat spoiler. Review of Superman, the brand new film from writer-director James Gunn, starring David Cornswet as the man of steel himself, and this is the first film in the DC universe. I absolutely adore this film. I've seen it twice. I had to watch it again in order to kind of grasp, you know, everything that I saw in the first. viewing and i gave my initial review if you want to hear that review the non-spoiler review uh you can find it on my channel but i couldn't get into a lot of things on that review because it would be spoilery you know i don't want to spoil it for anybody uh who haven't seen it so i decided to split them up in two and do a non-spoiler and a spoiler this is more of a talk then it is a rebuke. because I reviewed it already. I gave it a B+. It is an excellent film to kick off this new cinematic universe over at DC. And so I wanted to touch in on some points here concerning the film that I enjoyed and some things that I didn't. Especially since I've viewed it a couple of times now, I have a greater sense of the story and There's a couple of things that I even missed on the first viewing, shockingly enough. Nothing big or major, but just little nuggets that kind of explained some things clearer for me. You know, it wasn't earth-shattling or caused me not to like the movie on the first viewing, but it just added to my enjoyment of the film. this film kicks off we don't get a origin story in this movie this is superman already superman you know clark has he's been through smallville we we didn't have to see krypton blow up we didn't have to see uh paul and uh mark kent raise him up and all this other good stuff and you know him discovering his powers we've been through that we saw it in the christopher reeves version we saw it in the man of steel we've seen it in comics we've seen it on television hey we saw a whole television show dedicated to the upbringing of clark kent so we didn't need to dive back into the origin story if you don't know the origin story of superman by this point god bless you and now the one thing i will say i say all that as somebody who is in his mid-40s have watched multiple versions of superman i will go as far to say every version um on television comics and movies but in regards to little kids or children who are going to see this movie with their parents or friends or whoever and this is their first superman this is the first time they were experiencing superman on the big screen in some cases at all in any media and they probably don't know the origin they probably don't know the full story of superman i think in regards to those people they're not just kids because there are grown-ups who probably don't know to be honest with you but in regards to those people they're probably be a little thrown off by it and that's one knock that i didn't give my initial review. you know just in regards to those individuals who are experiencing the character of superman for the first time and just want to see a superhero film uh whether they're young or old there'll be a little little concerning there they're like okay so how did he become superman uh did he get hit by a meteor or something like that you know they don't know that he's an alien and all this here now all of this is explained throughout the film you know if you sit there and pay attention but i'm just saying as far as somebody for the first time sitting down in the theater and don't know the story of Superman and hope to be introduced to this character from the beginning, you're not going to get that in this type of film. And for me, I appreciated it. For me personally, I love that decision. You know, it's something like Batman. If they make a Batman movie, which is coming, not anytime soon, it'll probably be a... a couple of years from now as far as in this cinematic universe uh james gunn has said that there won't be an origin story we're not gonna see uh martha and uh thomas wayne get shot in the alley in that film thank god because we've seen it in every single iteration of that character you know but i understand for younger viewers who don't know who's not in the comics uh Probably didn't watch the animated series and so on and so forth don't know but hopefully with good Storytelling in the film you can find out and that's one thing about this movie that it does do well It does tell that story that Kal-el which is his given name his biological name comes from Krypton. He's sent here by his parents to avoid the destruction of Krypton and whatnot. He lands in Smallville, Kansas, raised up by the Kants, and voila, there we go. So it is told to us and shown to us in a degree throughout the film. We just have to commit to it. But as a comic book lover, as a fan of these comic book films and properties, I was all in on it. I'm glad we picked it. up at the point at the time that we did pick up in this film this film starts with the explanation that metahumans have been on earth for three centuries at this point you know 300 years on earth so we've had superhuman beings in this version of earth already you know so it didn't make sense to have an origin story when we We have a world established that has metahumans for the past 300 years. And the first image we see is Superman crash landing on the snow. You know, that we saw in the trailer and everything. He's beaten up, he's broken up, and the text on screen explains that this is Superman's first defeat. This is the first time he's lost. And did he lose? I mean... broken ribs and punctured lungs and all this other stuff i mean he the hammer of uh bararia it tore his behind up who we later find out once again it's spoilers we later find out that is ultraman in that suit and he beat him half to death literally and once again i think this was a genius way to start this film because if we find our hero at his lowest this is where we start at his lowest it we get to go on this journey with him you know as he accomplishes go as he vanished the enemy and come out on top we can go on that journey through this story and that excited me for some strange reason i was intrigued by that when that was the opening scene because when you see it in the trailer Of course, and this is in all movies, in all movie trailers, when you see the trailer, you're not seeing the movie in context. It's not like it's a shorter version of the film as far as chronological order. You know, everything is all out of whack. And so I didn't think that that was going to be the opening shot. And to be honest with you, when you really go back and watch the trailers, all of them, I think it's what, three trailers that they released? A couple of clips, but the three trailers that they released were basically the same thing. They were the same scene from the movie, and all of those trailers were the beginning part of the film. You know, I think the last trailer showed a little bit of the third act, but it didn't show everything. But the majority of those trailers were the first act of the movie. and so once again this was the opening scene and i'm like okay so we can only go up from here but no pun intended we're only going up up from here so crypto another factor in this film i mentioned in my initial review i was a little nervous about going into this movie i thought we were going to be oversaturated with this dog and i love dogs you know my daughter has a dog which basically means i'm an owner of a dog by default because it's in my house but i love dogs you know i do and this is coming from somebody when i was younger i was allergic to dogs. I couldn't be around dogs and it's weird how that just went away It went away because this isn't our first dog. We've had a couple of dogs before our current Little crypto that runs around and destroys the house, but as neither here nor there I thought we was gonna be over saying I thought this was gonna be a crypto movie the way they were promoting him You know every promotional material was crypto oh man i don't want to see that not that i don't care for the dog i i want to see a superman movie not a crypto movie but the film gave you just the right amount of crypto and you actually fall in love with the dog at least i did i fell in love with crypto no matter how unruly he was he was still a beautiful dog love that dog It added to every scene that he was a part of. We get to the Fortress of Solitude. We meet the Superman robots, which is from the, I think, All-Star Superman comics. Or was it that? I think it was the animated movie. I think it was one, but they did incorporate it in the comics after. But I think they were introduced in the animated movie first. Either way, don't care. I love them in this film. I love that addition to heal Superman with the rays from the sun magnifying it so he can get soaked in the sun's power to heal him. Superman, he gets off the table. He goes back, immediately goes back into the fight against the Hammer of Berraria. I'm pretty sure I'm saying the name wrong, but anyways, goes back into the fight and loses again. He loses again. and i thought that was cool i'm like man this is cool to see superman struggle because you always look at superman as the the you know the automatic problem solver you know as long as you don't have kryptonite he can destroy anything i mean there's nothing that can stop him uh kryptonite or magic it's nothing that can stop him but they found the way to work it into the comic lore that he can be beat he can be hurt and still be the superman that we know and love so we get introduced to lex luthor played by nicholas hope and i'm just gonna say it right now after watching it a second time nicholas hope is the best lex luthor ever i loved his portrayal of that villain he embodied everything that I remember from the comics. I think that's the most important thing for me. Going back to 1978's Superman, where we got the late, great Gene Hackman playing that character. I love Gene Hackman. I love his Lex Luthor, but that wasn't the Lex Luthor in the comics. Now, a lot of people's first exposure to that character was through the movies. Namely me, you know, before I was old enough to get into comics and actually read, you know, and explore what that character was truly all about throughout the comic lore. He is not this comedic criminal that, you know, petty thug or whatever that was displayed in those films. But that Lex Luthor fit the tone of that movie, fit the story that. they were telling richard donald was telling in that film and so i'm not mad at it you know so this is no disrespect to him he fit that that film uh kevin spacey and superman return fit that film which was pretty much a continuation of the gene hackman's uh lex luthor but i think kevin spacey was the closest thing up to this point the closest thing to the lex luthor that I remember from the comics. and I'm just talking film because Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville has been my favorite Lex Luthor ever, you know, and he's still up there with me, but it's something about Nicholas Holt's performance in this film that made him one of the best comic book villains in all of comic book films. Uh, i'm including marvel in past uh uh dc films he managed to blend and i'm talking a perfect blend here blend a level of menace of entitlement of uh even compassion you know there's there's a genius, all of this wrapped up in one and make. that character so layered which he could have been this mustache trailing villain which you know you script down the layers uh that's basically what lex luther is but he gave that character so much you know and i don't know if it's how the character was written or how it was acted by Nicholas Hope or a combination of both. But it. absolutely worked in this movie love this lex luther the perfect lex luther for this superman for this cinematic universe that we're going forward with and so we get that introduction we get introduced to miss tess macker who plays a bigger role later on and everything up to this point it was it was it was coming together i'm not going to sit here and say that the first 30 minutes of this movie was perfect because it wasn't because up to this point i'm kind of confused i'm like is this a non-linear story are we going to be going in flashbacks and this that and the third i'm like where are we going with this i'm liking what i'm seeing i'm just not understanding where the story is going at this point and i was hoping to get that because i know the movie's only two hours long and we're 30 minutes in so i wanted to kind of get a sense of what's going on up to this point but that was immediately thrown away even though i still didn't know and had questions i was enjoying the next two scenes so much i forgot you know and that was the two scenes that we got basically our only exposure to clark kent you know uh die. Clark Kent in the Daily Planet and the scene with Clark and Lois in the apartment for the interview scene. The scene in the Daily Planet, which on my first viewing, I was kind of, I think in my review, I mentioned that I didn't too much care for David Cornswet's Clark Kent performance. I know why I said that, but after I watched it the second time, I appreciated it a little more. I saw little nuances that he was doing that I didn't pick up on in the first viewing, and I appreciated it more. I still stand by the fact his voice didn't really change, and like I said before, I'm not expecting him to do the whole... Christian Bale Batman switch up with his voice I'm just me you know he just the way his voice comes out and I guess it's just David Cornswet's voice he he has this confident strong voice and it's the same voice he uses for Superman you know that same tone and you know like well you know it is not it's not hard to pick up on the fact that it's the same person that's that's my whole thing now i get the hypno glasses that we do find out and this is in the comics this is comic accurate that he wears hypno glasses to uh you know throw off his appearance to everybody that looks at him and so they won't look at him and say you know what you resemble superman but the glasses throw you off so it was just the voice thing. And I think in my mind, and I, I constantly tell myself that I don't want to compare David Cornswet to Henry Cavill. Don't want to compare them to Christopher Reeves or. or Tom Welling or whoever, Brandon Rolfe. I don't want to do that. This is his version. And I found myself realizing that when I made that statement in my review, I was comparing him. I was comparing him to Christopher Reeve. Christopher Reeve did the best transition of those characters. I say those. It's the same character. Clark Kent in Superman. Just the way he slumped his shoulders when he was Clark. the way he lumbered around and clumsy and just he didn't change his voice to the degree of squeaky but it was just a little subtle thing that he did and you know when he was superman he would broaden his shoulders and stick his chest out and chin up and his voice was more confident and strong and it was just those little things that made christopher reeve one of the best supermen if not the best superman according to my mom uh the best superman to ever put on the suit and i was unfairly putting that on david corn sweat now i do appreciate what the little things that he was doing in that scene now when we get to the scene with him and lois uh this uh i think they're calling it the interview scene uh That's different because he was him. He was just him. He wasn't Clark. He was Kal-El. He was Superman. He was just him. This was my favorite scene in the movie. Yes, the punchy punchy smash smash with the kaiju and Ultraman and the engineer and all that. All that was fun and good. But this was my favorite scene in the film. Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane was probably the best casting throughout this entire film. film the entire cast was banger this was great casting by uh james gunn throughout this entire film he the dude's a genius you can say what you want about james gunn he's a genius he he knows what he wants he has a vision and he executes it uh everybody a part of this film was perfectly but nothing can be as perfect as racial rachel brosnahan as lois she She's the best Lois Lane, hands down, hands down. And I know there's a lot of Margo Kidder fans out there who was screaming blasts from me at me right now. But come on, I'm sorry. And I love Margo Kidder. But come on, Rachel Brosnahan was born to play Lois Lane. Just watch one episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Mabel. I said it back then, and this is before any consideration for a Superman movie at the time. I said, man, she would make a perfect Lois Lane. You know, I always felt that watching that show. And when this came around and they announced that they cast her, I was like, well, that's a duh. That's a no-brainer. And she knocked it out the park. But what made it so great, what made her performance so great, was the chemistry between her and David Cornswet, and it showed so much in this scene. If I had one knock about Lois Lane in this movie, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Rachel Brosnahan, is the fact that she kind of disappears in the third act. She doesn't have much to do in the third act, because we get this powerful scene in the first act. we get another great scene well a couple of great scenes in the second act uh her interacting with the justice gang and her with mr terrific as they go to that pocket dimension that she is great and she kind of get lost in the shuffle in the third act but that's my only knock and that's not her fault but she was excellent man excellent and this scene was so good how they switched it up it went from lovey-dovey to playful banter to actual heated discussion to the point that they basically almost broke up if not completely broke up i know they was on the they were on the fence there when clark left the apartment and it just escalated to that point and this was like uh i don't know how long was this scene it felt like It took up half the movie, but I'm not mad at it taking up half the movie. It was so good. You couldn't cut nothing from that scene. That was just... that was just cinema there you know you letting actors just act letting them do their thing just letting them eat and it it almost stole the movie i i would have i would have sat there for two hours and watched lois and clark just go back and forth at the dinner table and have been happy i would have felt i got my money's worth uh that's how good that scene was but in the midst of that scene we learn a lot of story we find out that superman is kind of a lone wolf you know he marched to the beat of his own drum he doesn't take orders from the president he doesn't take orders from the justice gang he doesn't take orders from the uh some conglomerate or anything like that he he marches to the beat of his own drum he goes where he's needed where he feels help is needed to save lives no matter what and he intervenes in this invasion that we later find out that uh lex luther is orchestrating uh just to have the world turn on superman and so he goes to stop this war and inadvertently gets involved in this geopolitical uh battle i guess you could say and it sparks up a whole nother thing which brings me to a point uh that i wanted to talk about before but i couldn't and it's the i don't know it's the real world implications here you know it it's it this movie mirrors exactly what's happening in the world right now you know you could watch You can go to the theater, watch Superman, go home, turn on CNN, and it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. It's just with different names for the countries and different names for Lex Luthor. Replace Lex Luthor with Elon Musk and you'll get the movie. It's pretty much the same thing. And so it's definitely timely and poignant, if you will. and so lex luther and his uh minions the engineer and uh ultraman they invade the fortress of solitude and once again sitting there in the theater first time when i watched it the first time i'm like how did he just walk up to the fortress you know and they explained it away but you know when i watched it the first time i was like boy they're gonna have to explain this but uh we find out that ultra man is uh the clone of superman you know so they used his dna and that's how they got in but anyway they invade the fortress of solitude we see the engineer just just go to town on the superman robots which was cool cool little fight gets in a fight with crypto we get to see some crypto action there And then we get our big little turning point at this juncture of the movie. When Superman, the first scene in the movie when Superman was brought back to the fortress and the Superman robots turned on the message from Krypton of his parents, his biological parents, who was played by Bradley Cooper as Joel. um and the mother i don't know i've seen that actress in something but i can't recall what i seen her in uh but that's neither here nor there um they play his parents and they're uh tell uh they sent the message and the message got damaged when he came to earth or crashed on earth or whatever so you only get the first half of the message in the first half of the matches message is uh uplifting today it's inspiring you know we sent you to earth to to help and to uh be a beacon of light or whatever the case may be and when the engineer hacks into the computer there at the fortress of solitude she is able to decrypt the second half of the message where we find out that joel and his mother sent them to earth to conquer earth and so this is Oh. all the gas that Lex needed to start this fire you know this this pretty much uh confirms his feelings about Superman you know that he's an alien he's here to uh rule over us or whatever the case may be so this this was confirmation in his eyes and so he releases the message all the while while he's invading um the Fortress of Solitude he has a little distraction going on he unleashes this kaiju on metropolis and this is when we get the fight we see in the trailer and he's fighting the kaiju and uh this is where at this moment when i fell in love with david corn sweats version of superman something that we didn't get to see in other versions of this character on the big screen While he was fighting this giant monster, he would stop and save people. He would save a dog from being crushed by the foot of this monster. He saved a woman from being crushed and saved these people that was in the building. Every time he saved them, he would smile at them. He'll ask them if they was okay. He'll give them little... affirmations i guess you know just breathe you know just just take deep breaths and whatever it's stuff like that and give a smile and that's the superman that i loved from the comics this is the superman that i always envisioned you know in live action and i finally got to see it love henry cowell love him But that was such a dark and moody guy to say he was Superman. But for that film, he fit that vision of Zack Snyder. Now, for comic fans and lovers of the animated show, this is the Superman for you. This is exactly what I wanted to see. And from at that point in the film, I knew that. Nothing else could bother me throughout this movie and nothing did. Yeah, I had some little nitpicks from that moment on, but nothing to deter me from feeling that this was a great Superman movie. And so he defeats the Kaiju with the help of the Justice Gang. This is when we get introduced to Guy Gardner's Green Lantern, played by Nathan Fillion, Mr. Terrific. played by Eddie Nami. I can't pronounce his name. I had it. I practiced it before I started the show, and I still can't get it out. But I do enjoy him as an actor. He stole the movie, to be honest. Every scene that he was in, he stole the movie. I love Mr. Terrific in this movie. And we got Hawkgirl played by Isabella Morset. This was... an interesting decision by James Gunn to include these characters in this story. The easiest thing to do, the low-hanging fruit, of course, you're going to bring in Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. They'll bring in Wonder Woman, bring in Batman, you know, the most notable of superheroes in the DC lore. But he decided to pick these X-Ups obscure characters and that's what james gunn do if you really go through the history of his films who knew anything about the guardians of the galaxy before the movies came out i didn't you know i read comics you know i did not know anything about guardians when he did the suicide squad i knew a couple of those characters i didn't know all of peacemaker i knew nothing about and that ended up being the best character in the film i mean end got his own tv show and has a cameo in this movie and i i love peacemaker and so he has a way of finding the most obscure characters and turning them into something and so this was a interesting choice to pick these particular characters to pop up in this film um i said in my initial review that i was worried about that you know leading up to the film with the trailers and everything that okay we're going to be oversaturated with all of these dc characters and this is supposed to be a superhero or a superman film I don't want to see all of these characters man if you're going to do that just make a Justice League movie but instead we got the right amount of these characters you know because he's building a universe here and so you can't just have a movie with just Superman and nothing else happens you know you have to incorporate these characters in some way and expand the universe out that way and I thought that was genius and using these particular characters was smart. And they did not oversaturate the movie. They were used properly. They came in to do their jobs and they did it perfectly. The only one who got shortchanged in this film is Hulk Girl, is Isabella Morissette. You know, Guy Garner had a great part. Mr. Terrific had a terrific part. Not so much with Hulk Girl. She was just there. And that's my... That's the only part about that whole Justice gang that I just can't get over. Even after the second viewing, it was worse. That's the only part about this movie that got worse on the second viewing. And that was Hawkgirl. Because I can't help but wonder, was her part cut or what? I mean, what happened here? Because we got nothing. And if you followed Hawkgirl in the comics, you would know that that is a very interesting character and i'm not saying we had to do a whole backstory and origin story and tell her arc in this movie but you could have hinted to something about her character we didn't get that in this film but it is what it is you know hopefully moving forward we'll get more you know and so around this time they defeated the kaiju and voila next thing you know lex luther released the footage of the message from his parents and now everybody turns on him now this was another part and him i mean superman this was another part of the movie where i was like uh i get what you're doing i'm a i'm a roll with what you're doing but i wish it was done a little better and what i mean by that is the people instantly turned on superman i mean instant i understand i understand they saw the message i understand that uh that initially the plans were from his parents for him to come to earth and take over but nothing from superman throughout the i think three years he's been Superman, at least. That's the way they set it up in this film. Nothing indicates that he's anything like that. He's a hero. He literally just risked his life to save everybody. And they instantly turned. I'm not saying the people shouldn't have turned. Yeah, but it should have been kind of a rollout to it. As opposed to immediately shouting and cursing him out and throwing cans at his head and all this other stuff. It was like too fast for me. It didn't that just didn't work But I get the context of the story I just wish it was kind of played out a little better, but that's just me, you know, so now we get Superman he decides to turn himself in to the Justice Department Because he's a Boy Scout, you know, he's not gonna go on a run and so he turns himself in and uh rick flagg who uh i love rick flagg and creature commandos i love frank grillo who plays uh rick flagg senior i didn't see the purpose of him being in this movie he was in for two scenes and this was one of them and he he said maybe two words but it was nothing he was just there and i know he he's gonna have a bigger role in the peacemaker season two series uh but i don't know it was just weird that he was just there to be there he he was there he was more useless than hawk girl and that's saying something but anyways he gets turned into lex luther and lex luther puts him in that pocket dimension and this is where we meet uh metamorpho and he uh you know crabs uh kryptonite to weaken superman and This is where we get to see Lex Luthor be as diabolical that I've ever seen in any iteration of this character. Where he literally blows a man's head off in front of Superman. A guy that helps him. A guy that is a fan of Superman. And playing Russian roulette with him and just kills him. And like, okay, well, we'll find somebody else. We're going to get somebody else to find out because he's interrogating him to find out who raised him, who found him as a baby, you know. And, of course, Superman won't tell. And so he killed the guy. And I'm like, man, Lex, Lex is a beast in this movie, man. And Nicholas Hope, I tell you, bro, I cannot scream any louder my praise for this man. as this character just to think that initially he went there when he uh when he was auditioning for this movie he was auditioning to be superman nicholas hope and i wasn't mad at that idea because i like nicholas hope uh from playing in the x-men films and uh numerous other projects that he he was in i really do enjoy him even though i see him more as a batman but I would have took him as Superman. But no. Once again, James Gunn, genius move, saw something else. He saw something else there. And when they cast him as Lex Luthor, I was a little skeptical. Can he pull it off? And then I thought about, well, Jesse Eisenberg. God bless him. As long as he isn't that, I'll be all right with it. Well, he blew that out. completely out of the water but upon witnessing that brutal killing metamorpho he finds he he finds a new i don't know heart he gets the heart he decides that now he wants superman to get out and help him save his baby uh little baby joey once again from the comics didn't ever think i'll see that in film, but we got to see it. He creates a version of the sun to power up Superman. They escape. There's an epic little battle there where Superman is holding the baby about trying to fight off those rafters. And you've got a proton river that's about to suck him into a black hole. And all this is going on. All the while, you've got Mr. Terrific and Lois. they found their way into the pocket dimension and crypto is there as well and it sounds messy on the surface but it actually flowed pretty well i thought this was a really good scene a exciting scene we get out of the pocket dimension and lois lane brings uh superman to home brings him to smallville to be with his parents so he can recuperate from all uh the radiation that he got from that kryptonite and another great scene between david corn sweat and uh oh my god what's his name uh puett puett taylor who plays uh jonathan kent uh what a scene man and once again i'm sitting in the theater and my dog i guess my daughter knew she sensed it on me uh Knowing the relationship between me and my father and how deep that conversation was between Clark and Jonathan Kent. And it was, yeah, it was Niagara Falls. I was in there crying. I was crying because I felt it because those conversations or similar conversations took place between me and my dad. And I remember every when when I watched it, I can just picture my dad telling me everything that Jonathan Kent was telling Clark in that moment. And it just I I did good. I did good. It wasn't complete. My makeup didn't run, but I was it was it was it had a couple of tears that dropped out. But It was a powerful scene, really good scene, and it really reinforced the fact that, because Clark, that he was so worried about... why his biological parents sent him to Earth. And that reassured him that, you know, that conversation with Jonathan reassured him that his real parents were Jonathan and Martha Kent. And those Joel L. and why am I blanking on her name? But the mother name. But they, yeah, they are his biological parents. but that's not what reared him up that's not why he is who he is jonathan and martha kent is the reason superman is who he is and i thought it they did a excellent job by depicting that in one small scene we didn't need an origin we didn't need to see jonathan kent raising him up and teaching them right from wrong and you know we didn't have to have a scene where they sit them on a couch and try to uh reinforce you know oh no you you fight for good truth justice in american way it was none of that you know it was just a small subtle scene and it told you everything that you needed to know and it it worked so well and i was just amazed by how Less was more in this instant. But anyways, meanwhile, Lex Luthor, he's mad now. Superman got free, so he, you know, ramps up the power on that pocket dimension portal thing. And it exploded to the point where it caused the rift. So now Metropolis is about to get swallowed up in this rift. And this was cool. I like this scene. to see the destruction of metropolis now this was destruction done right as opposed to man of steel where metropolis just turned into a scorched earth wasteland during the battle this this made sense this felt comic booky this felt animated serious you know the way the the city was just being torn apart by this by this rift and all the while you have superman going around he's catching buildings from falling on uh this woman in a car you know he he gets in a fight with the engineer and ultraman in this stadium which was cool all the while you have an invasion that's about to take place in um in those two between those two fictional countries and this was another scene that almost had me crying and it wasn't a scene it was more or less just one little part and that's when the little kid was holding up the flag and calling out to superman and i don't know why that moved me it just moved me i was like come on but superman's tied up with this battle and you're like oh my god is he gonna be get there on time because those people about to get annihilated by his army. and so he's in this battle and uh of course he's struggling you know because he's going up against two superhuman beings you know two metahumans and one of them is his clone who we get get that reveal in a couple of minutes but they're going at it in the stadium to the point where they figured out that okay i'm gonna use uh the engineer who is made up of all nanobots i'm gonna take the nanobots and uh smother you and fill up your lungs and kill you you know that's in that that's one way to kill superman i mean he's super but i i don't think he's super enough to whereas he can live without brain breathing and so he comes up with the plan he's gonna fly out into the atmosphere with both of them attached to him and just come back down with the force of a meteor and that's how he gets loose from it and able to uh uh throw up those nanobots and this this incapacitates the engineer who we don't see anymore uh in the movie and that kind of bothered me too i was like well how you knock out somebody that's made of nanobots i mean it that that was weird to me but whatever uh i looked past that because we didn't have time to breathe because superman was going up against Ultraman whose suit was all torn up from the impact of them falling back to Earth. He takes off the suit. And it is none other than a clone of Superman. It was David Cornsweat with a wig on. And if you read comics, you pretty much know who Ultraman is. And that's basically what he is. And so it didn't come as a shock. But it still was a shock to me. I don't know why it surprised me in the movie. And I know who Ultraman is. But it still surprised me in the film. And you have Lex Luthor. controlling him uh because lex luther once again showing his genius and this was planted throughout the film when he fought the uh hammer of bararia uh with ultraman in that suit but that lex was controlling him you know because lex had figure out all of superman's fighting style or how he fought so he he came up and devised this plan on how to defeat him you know with this fighting. you know, had these team of tech wizards that can orchestrate this fight. And that's how Superman struggled so much, because Lex Luthor figured out how to beat him. He knows his moves, his every move. He studied him. So they go at it back and forth. Of course, Ultraman is having an upper hand. Lex Luthor makes the comment that you know you can't beat brains braun cannot beat brain and superman smiles and he's like yeah i have the brains too i have brains too or something to that effect and he whistles and who comes to the rescue it is none other than crypto another another uh element i think right before that we find out that yes clark is not going to be able to get to beraria to save those people from that army he called the justice game to go help and that's so similar to what we witnessed in the animated series and i was so shocked and surprised by that again i'm like okay this works this works perfectly and so So he whistles for Crypto. Crypto comes and gets Ultraman off of him. And they both team up because at this point, Lex doesn't have a plan for crypto. So they were able to get the get the upper hand to the point where Superman throws Ultraman into the black hole. And I don't know if this is going to set up Bizarro or or what, but. that's that could be a nice way to set up bizarro later on down the line but if we never revisit it again that's fine too that doesn't have to be revisited so uh the rafters come the other squad this little legion of warriors that lex have and superman and crypto just go to work on them he he were he goes to work on them now he's going after lex uh gives lex a nice speech you know as crypto works him it reminded me of uh when the hawk took loki you know the puny god scene in the avengers it was the same thing crypto worked lex lute i'm like man is he gonna kill him i was getting kind of worried for the legs i ain't gonna lie But he probably wished he was dead after that beating. But that was cool. And they end up throwing Lex Luthor into Belle Reeves. And we get the obligatory Superman-Lois kiss at the end of the battle and whatnot. And Superman, he's back at the Fortress of Solitude, getting healed up from all of this. battling he been doing and who drops by but his cousin carla carla zorrell yes played by millie adcock if you are a fan of uh house of the dragon yes her is she she's playing uh carla zorrell's aka supergirl and supergirl that comes out next year but she makes a cameo in this movie to pick crypto We found out is actually her dog all this time Superman was just dog sitting with Before Supergirl, but that was a nice little scene uh to see her in the one thing i didn't like about it was the explanation it i did not like that superman told the superman robot uh oh you know she goes to a planet that has a red sun so she can get drunk because our metabolism here uh we can't get drunk and blah blah blah that's all fine and good and that's true but why are you telling this to the superman robots shouldn't they know that already i'm like okay why are you if they already know who are you explaining it to us we don't need to know that we'll find that out next year when supergirl comes out i didn't need the explanation you know and i already knew why she was drunk you know but it's still kind of baffling why is she still drunk because she is currently under a yellow sun that would have that would have wore off i'm just saying but anyways that was the end of the film uh but well i will say the last scene was also epic in my humble opinion because when superman in the first scene he returned to the fortress of solitude the superman robots uh turned on the message from his biological parents to soothe him so this time when he's healing up in the fortress of solitude the superman robots turns on his parents video to soothe him and this time it was jonathan and martha kent and what was so genius about this and i didn't pick it up until the second viewing. That's why I said it was just little things that I didn't catch the first time that I caught today when I watched it again. It was the fact that when that first scene, when we see his biological parents, that's the scene when he was healing up and the sun rays are healing him. And those... That message was supposed to soothe him, yet when the rays hit him, he was screaming. He was in pain because his bones were getting back in place. He was healing up rapidly. So he was screaming in pain, listening to their voices. At the end of this movie, while he's healing up and watching the footage of Jonathan and Malte Kent when he was younger and his Jonathan Kent. lifting him up in the air and he's posing like superman as a little kid and stuff like that he's smiling and the movie goes off once again another tear rolled down my eye this time i was by myself so i didn't i didn't have to worry about my daughter looking at me but yes yeah i thought that was genius that was so poetic but overall this was this was it. excellent superman movie i i thought that we would get at least a decent movie i wasn't expecting much from it to be honest with you and i got much more i got a whole lot more and i'm excited for this universe going forward as i stated in my initial review and so like i said just to add on this movie is still a b plus in my humble opinion i think it's One of the best Superman movies, if not the best. I'm not going to fight anybody on that, if that's your opinion. Superman movies to be released. I super enjoyed it, and I will be going to see it for a third time before it's all said and done. Well, I got to do it this week, because next week, of course, is Fantastic Four. But I'm super, super happy, and, you know. round of applause to james gunn for giving us a movie full of heart full of hope and a cinematic universe that we can be excited about but once again i would love to know what were your thoughts of superman did you enjoy superman did you think it's up there with richard donner's uh 1978 superman or do you Think it's more along the lines of Superman 4, A Quest for Peace. I would love to hear your thoughts about this version. Email the show, kbradiopodcast at gmail.com. You can also search for the show on all social media platforms. Just search for the KB Radio Network. Also, don't forget about YouTube. Subscribe to the KB Radio Network channel and like this video if you don't. mind don't forget about the five stars the reviews and sharing this show if you're listening on apple podcast spotify iheart radio wherever you are currently listening to the concession stand here on the kb radio network everybody thank you for joining me for this spoiler talk for james guns warner brothers dc studios new film Superman. Want you all to know that I love you. Continue to love everyone. And until we speak again, you all be blessed.

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The SPOILER review of DC's Superman. Written and directed by James Gunn, it is the first film in the DC Universe (DCU) produced by DC Studios and the second reboot of the Superman film series. David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent / Superman, alongside Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, and Isabela Merced. In the film, Superman must prove to the world that he is their protector after billionaire Lex Luthor conducts a plan to turn public opinion against him.


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    Hello everyone and welcome to the concession stand here on the KB radio network. I am your host Kevin Reed and this is the spoiler. I repeat spoiler. Review of Superman, the brand new film from writer-director James Gunn, starring David Cornswet as the man of steel himself, and this is the first film in the DC universe. I absolutely adore this film. I've seen it twice. I had to watch it again in order to kind of grasp, you know, everything that I saw in the first. viewing and i gave my initial review if you want to hear that review the non-spoiler review uh you can find it on my channel but i couldn't get into a lot of things on that review because it would be spoilery you know i don't want to spoil it for anybody uh who haven't seen it so i decided to split them up in two and do a non-spoiler and a spoiler this is more of a talk then it is a rebuke. because I reviewed it already. I gave it a B+. It is an excellent film to kick off this new cinematic universe over at DC. And so I wanted to touch in on some points here concerning the film that I enjoyed and some things that I didn't. Especially since I've viewed it a couple of times now, I have a greater sense of the story and There's a couple of things that I even missed on the first viewing, shockingly enough. Nothing big or major, but just little nuggets that kind of explained some things clearer for me. You know, it wasn't earth-shattling or caused me not to like the movie on the first viewing, but it just added to my enjoyment of the film. this film kicks off we don't get a origin story in this movie this is superman already superman you know clark has he's been through smallville we we didn't have to see krypton blow up we didn't have to see uh paul and uh mark kent raise him up and all this other good stuff and you know him discovering his powers we've been through that we saw it in the christopher reeves version we saw it in the man of steel we've seen it in comics we've seen it on television hey we saw a whole television show dedicated to the upbringing of clark kent so we didn't need to dive back into the origin story if you don't know the origin story of superman by this point god bless you and now the one thing i will say i say all that as somebody who is in his mid-40s have watched multiple versions of superman i will go as far to say every version um on television comics and movies but in regards to little kids or children who are going to see this movie with their parents or friends or whoever and this is their first superman this is the first time they were experiencing superman on the big screen in some cases at all in any media and they probably don't know the origin they probably don't know the full story of superman i think in regards to those people they're not just kids because there are grown-ups who probably don't know to be honest with you but in regards to those people they're probably be a little thrown off by it and that's one knock that i didn't give my initial review. you know just in regards to those individuals who are experiencing the character of superman for the first time and just want to see a superhero film uh whether they're young or old there'll be a little little concerning there they're like okay so how did he become superman uh did he get hit by a meteor or something like that you know they don't know that he's an alien and all this here now all of this is explained throughout the film you know if you sit there and pay attention but i'm just saying as far as somebody for the first time sitting down in the theater and don't know the story of Superman and hope to be introduced to this character from the beginning, you're not going to get that in this type of film. And for me, I appreciated it. For me personally, I love that decision. You know, it's something like Batman. If they make a Batman movie, which is coming, not anytime soon, it'll probably be a... a couple of years from now as far as in this cinematic universe uh james gunn has said that there won't be an origin story we're not gonna see uh martha and uh thomas wayne get shot in the alley in that film thank god because we've seen it in every single iteration of that character you know but i understand for younger viewers who don't know who's not in the comics uh Probably didn't watch the animated series and so on and so forth don't know but hopefully with good Storytelling in the film you can find out and that's one thing about this movie that it does do well It does tell that story that Kal-el which is his given name his biological name comes from Krypton. He's sent here by his parents to avoid the destruction of Krypton and whatnot. He lands in Smallville, Kansas, raised up by the Kants, and voila, there we go. So it is told to us and shown to us in a degree throughout the film. We just have to commit to it. But as a comic book lover, as a fan of these comic book films and properties, I was all in on it. I'm glad we picked it. up at the point at the time that we did pick up in this film this film starts with the explanation that metahumans have been on earth for three centuries at this point you know 300 years on earth so we've had superhuman beings in this version of earth already you know so it didn't make sense to have an origin story when we We have a world established that has metahumans for the past 300 years. And the first image we see is Superman crash landing on the snow. You know, that we saw in the trailer and everything. He's beaten up, he's broken up, and the text on screen explains that this is Superman's first defeat. This is the first time he's lost. And did he lose? I mean... broken ribs and punctured lungs and all this other stuff i mean he the hammer of uh bararia it tore his behind up who we later find out once again it's spoilers we later find out that is ultraman in that suit and he beat him half to death literally and once again i think this was a genius way to start this film because if we find our hero at his lowest this is where we start at his lowest it we get to go on this journey with him you know as he accomplishes go as he vanished the enemy and come out on top we can go on that journey through this story and that excited me for some strange reason i was intrigued by that when that was the opening scene because when you see it in the trailer Of course, and this is in all movies, in all movie trailers, when you see the trailer, you're not seeing the movie in context. It's not like it's a shorter version of the film as far as chronological order. You know, everything is all out of whack. And so I didn't think that that was going to be the opening shot. And to be honest with you, when you really go back and watch the trailers, all of them, I think it's what, three trailers that they released? A couple of clips, but the three trailers that they released were basically the same thing. They were the same scene from the movie, and all of those trailers were the beginning part of the film. You know, I think the last trailer showed a little bit of the third act, but it didn't show everything. But the majority of those trailers were the first act of the movie. and so once again this was the opening scene and i'm like okay so we can only go up from here but no pun intended we're only going up up from here so crypto another factor in this film i mentioned in my initial review i was a little nervous about going into this movie i thought we were going to be oversaturated with this dog and i love dogs you know my daughter has a dog which basically means i'm an owner of a dog by default because it's in my house but i love dogs you know i do and this is coming from somebody when i was younger i was allergic to dogs. I couldn't be around dogs and it's weird how that just went away It went away because this isn't our first dog. We've had a couple of dogs before our current Little crypto that runs around and destroys the house, but as neither here nor there I thought we was gonna be over saying I thought this was gonna be a crypto movie the way they were promoting him You know every promotional material was crypto oh man i don't want to see that not that i don't care for the dog i i want to see a superman movie not a crypto movie but the film gave you just the right amount of crypto and you actually fall in love with the dog at least i did i fell in love with crypto no matter how unruly he was he was still a beautiful dog love that dog It added to every scene that he was a part of. We get to the Fortress of Solitude. We meet the Superman robots, which is from the, I think, All-Star Superman comics. Or was it that? I think it was the animated movie. I think it was one, but they did incorporate it in the comics after. But I think they were introduced in the animated movie first. Either way, don't care. I love them in this film. I love that addition to heal Superman with the rays from the sun magnifying it so he can get soaked in the sun's power to heal him. Superman, he gets off the table. He goes back, immediately goes back into the fight against the Hammer of Berraria. I'm pretty sure I'm saying the name wrong, but anyways, goes back into the fight and loses again. He loses again. and i thought that was cool i'm like man this is cool to see superman struggle because you always look at superman as the the you know the automatic problem solver you know as long as you don't have kryptonite he can destroy anything i mean there's nothing that can stop him uh kryptonite or magic it's nothing that can stop him but they found the way to work it into the comic lore that he can be beat he can be hurt and still be the superman that we know and love so we get introduced to lex luthor played by nicholas hope and i'm just gonna say it right now after watching it a second time nicholas hope is the best lex luthor ever i loved his portrayal of that villain he embodied everything that I remember from the comics. I think that's the most important thing for me. Going back to 1978's Superman, where we got the late, great Gene Hackman playing that character. I love Gene Hackman. I love his Lex Luthor, but that wasn't the Lex Luthor in the comics. Now, a lot of people's first exposure to that character was through the movies. Namely me, you know, before I was old enough to get into comics and actually read, you know, and explore what that character was truly all about throughout the comic lore. He is not this comedic criminal that, you know, petty thug or whatever that was displayed in those films. But that Lex Luthor fit the tone of that movie, fit the story that. they were telling richard donald was telling in that film and so i'm not mad at it you know so this is no disrespect to him he fit that that film uh kevin spacey and superman return fit that film which was pretty much a continuation of the gene hackman's uh lex luthor but i think kevin spacey was the closest thing up to this point the closest thing to the lex luthor that I remember from the comics. and I'm just talking film because Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville has been my favorite Lex Luthor ever, you know, and he's still up there with me, but it's something about Nicholas Holt's performance in this film that made him one of the best comic book villains in all of comic book films. Uh, i'm including marvel in past uh uh dc films he managed to blend and i'm talking a perfect blend here blend a level of menace of entitlement of uh even compassion you know there's there's a genius, all of this wrapped up in one and make. that character so layered which he could have been this mustache trailing villain which you know you script down the layers uh that's basically what lex luther is but he gave that character so much you know and i don't know if it's how the character was written or how it was acted by Nicholas Hope or a combination of both. But it. absolutely worked in this movie love this lex luther the perfect lex luther for this superman for this cinematic universe that we're going forward with and so we get that introduction we get introduced to miss tess macker who plays a bigger role later on and everything up to this point it was it was it was coming together i'm not going to sit here and say that the first 30 minutes of this movie was perfect because it wasn't because up to this point i'm kind of confused i'm like is this a non-linear story are we going to be going in flashbacks and this that and the third i'm like where are we going with this i'm liking what i'm seeing i'm just not understanding where the story is going at this point and i was hoping to get that because i know the movie's only two hours long and we're 30 minutes in so i wanted to kind of get a sense of what's going on up to this point but that was immediately thrown away even though i still didn't know and had questions i was enjoying the next two scenes so much i forgot you know and that was the two scenes that we got basically our only exposure to clark kent you know uh die. Clark Kent in the Daily Planet and the scene with Clark and Lois in the apartment for the interview scene. The scene in the Daily Planet, which on my first viewing, I was kind of, I think in my review, I mentioned that I didn't too much care for David Cornswet's Clark Kent performance. I know why I said that, but after I watched it the second time, I appreciated it a little more. I saw little nuances that he was doing that I didn't pick up on in the first viewing, and I appreciated it more. I still stand by the fact his voice didn't really change, and like I said before, I'm not expecting him to do the whole... Christian Bale Batman switch up with his voice I'm just me you know he just the way his voice comes out and I guess it's just David Cornswet's voice he he has this confident strong voice and it's the same voice he uses for Superman you know that same tone and you know like well you know it is not it's not hard to pick up on the fact that it's the same person that's that's my whole thing now i get the hypno glasses that we do find out and this is in the comics this is comic accurate that he wears hypno glasses to uh you know throw off his appearance to everybody that looks at him and so they won't look at him and say you know what you resemble superman but the glasses throw you off so it was just the voice thing. And I think in my mind, and I, I constantly tell myself that I don't want to compare David Cornswet to Henry Cavill. Don't want to compare them to Christopher Reeves or. or Tom Welling or whoever, Brandon Rolfe. I don't want to do that. This is his version. And I found myself realizing that when I made that statement in my review, I was comparing him. I was comparing him to Christopher Reeve. Christopher Reeve did the best transition of those characters. I say those. It's the same character. Clark Kent in Superman. Just the way he slumped his shoulders when he was Clark. the way he lumbered around and clumsy and just he didn't change his voice to the degree of squeaky but it was just a little subtle thing that he did and you know when he was superman he would broaden his shoulders and stick his chest out and chin up and his voice was more confident and strong and it was just those little things that made christopher reeve one of the best supermen if not the best superman according to my mom uh the best superman to ever put on the suit and i was unfairly putting that on david corn sweat now i do appreciate what the little things that he was doing in that scene now when we get to the scene with him and lois uh this uh i think they're calling it the interview scene uh That's different because he was him. He was just him. He wasn't Clark. He was Kal-El. He was Superman. He was just him. This was my favorite scene in the movie. Yes, the punchy punchy smash smash with the kaiju and Ultraman and the engineer and all that. All that was fun and good. But this was my favorite scene in the film. Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane was probably the best casting throughout this entire film. film the entire cast was banger this was great casting by uh james gunn throughout this entire film he the dude's a genius you can say what you want about james gunn he's a genius he he knows what he wants he has a vision and he executes it uh everybody a part of this film was perfectly but nothing can be as perfect as racial rachel brosnahan as lois she She's the best Lois Lane, hands down, hands down. And I know there's a lot of Margo Kidder fans out there who was screaming blasts from me at me right now. But come on, I'm sorry. And I love Margo Kidder. But come on, Rachel Brosnahan was born to play Lois Lane. Just watch one episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Mabel. I said it back then, and this is before any consideration for a Superman movie at the time. I said, man, she would make a perfect Lois Lane. You know, I always felt that watching that show. And when this came around and they announced that they cast her, I was like, well, that's a duh. That's a no-brainer. And she knocked it out the park. But what made it so great, what made her performance so great, was the chemistry between her and David Cornswet, and it showed so much in this scene. If I had one knock about Lois Lane in this movie, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Rachel Brosnahan, is the fact that she kind of disappears in the third act. She doesn't have much to do in the third act, because we get this powerful scene in the first act. we get another great scene well a couple of great scenes in the second act uh her interacting with the justice gang and her with mr terrific as they go to that pocket dimension that she is great and she kind of get lost in the shuffle in the third act but that's my only knock and that's not her fault but she was excellent man excellent and this scene was so good how they switched it up it went from lovey-dovey to playful banter to actual heated discussion to the point that they basically almost broke up if not completely broke up i know they was on the they were on the fence there when clark left the apartment and it just escalated to that point and this was like uh i don't know how long was this scene it felt like It took up half the movie, but I'm not mad at it taking up half the movie. It was so good. You couldn't cut nothing from that scene. That was just... that was just cinema there you know you letting actors just act letting them do their thing just letting them eat and it it almost stole the movie i i would have i would have sat there for two hours and watched lois and clark just go back and forth at the dinner table and have been happy i would have felt i got my money's worth uh that's how good that scene was but in the midst of that scene we learn a lot of story we find out that superman is kind of a lone wolf you know he marched to the beat of his own drum he doesn't take orders from the president he doesn't take orders from the justice gang he doesn't take orders from the uh some conglomerate or anything like that he he marches to the beat of his own drum he goes where he's needed where he feels help is needed to save lives no matter what and he intervenes in this invasion that we later find out that uh lex luther is orchestrating uh just to have the world turn on superman and so he goes to stop this war and inadvertently gets involved in this geopolitical uh battle i guess you could say and it sparks up a whole nother thing which brings me to a point uh that i wanted to talk about before but i couldn't and it's the i don't know it's the real world implications here you know it it's it this movie mirrors exactly what's happening in the world right now you know you could watch You can go to the theater, watch Superman, go home, turn on CNN, and it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. It's just with different names for the countries and different names for Lex Luthor. Replace Lex Luthor with Elon Musk and you'll get the movie. It's pretty much the same thing. And so it's definitely timely and poignant, if you will. and so lex luther and his uh minions the engineer and uh ultraman they invade the fortress of solitude and once again sitting there in the theater first time when i watched it the first time i'm like how did he just walk up to the fortress you know and they explained it away but you know when i watched it the first time i was like boy they're gonna have to explain this but uh we find out that ultra man is uh the clone of superman you know so they used his dna and that's how they got in but anyway they invade the fortress of solitude we see the engineer just just go to town on the superman robots which was cool cool little fight gets in a fight with crypto we get to see some crypto action there And then we get our big little turning point at this juncture of the movie. When Superman, the first scene in the movie when Superman was brought back to the fortress and the Superman robots turned on the message from Krypton of his parents, his biological parents, who was played by Bradley Cooper as Joel. um and the mother i don't know i've seen that actress in something but i can't recall what i seen her in uh but that's neither here nor there um they play his parents and they're uh tell uh they sent the message and the message got damaged when he came to earth or crashed on earth or whatever so you only get the first half of the message in the first half of the matches message is uh uplifting today it's inspiring you know we sent you to earth to to help and to uh be a beacon of light or whatever the case may be and when the engineer hacks into the computer there at the fortress of solitude she is able to decrypt the second half of the message where we find out that joel and his mother sent them to earth to conquer earth and so this is Oh. all the gas that Lex needed to start this fire you know this this pretty much uh confirms his feelings about Superman you know that he's an alien he's here to uh rule over us or whatever the case may be so this this was confirmation in his eyes and so he releases the message all the while while he's invading um the Fortress of Solitude he has a little distraction going on he unleashes this kaiju on metropolis and this is when we get the fight we see in the trailer and he's fighting the kaiju and uh this is where at this moment when i fell in love with david corn sweats version of superman something that we didn't get to see in other versions of this character on the big screen While he was fighting this giant monster, he would stop and save people. He would save a dog from being crushed by the foot of this monster. He saved a woman from being crushed and saved these people that was in the building. Every time he saved them, he would smile at them. He'll ask them if they was okay. He'll give them little... affirmations i guess you know just breathe you know just just take deep breaths and whatever it's stuff like that and give a smile and that's the superman that i loved from the comics this is the superman that i always envisioned you know in live action and i finally got to see it love henry cowell love him But that was such a dark and moody guy to say he was Superman. But for that film, he fit that vision of Zack Snyder. Now, for comic fans and lovers of the animated show, this is the Superman for you. This is exactly what I wanted to see. And from at that point in the film, I knew that. Nothing else could bother me throughout this movie and nothing did. Yeah, I had some little nitpicks from that moment on, but nothing to deter me from feeling that this was a great Superman movie. And so he defeats the Kaiju with the help of the Justice Gang. This is when we get introduced to Guy Gardner's Green Lantern, played by Nathan Fillion, Mr. Terrific. played by Eddie Nami. I can't pronounce his name. I had it. I practiced it before I started the show, and I still can't get it out. But I do enjoy him as an actor. He stole the movie, to be honest. Every scene that he was in, he stole the movie. I love Mr. Terrific in this movie. And we got Hawkgirl played by Isabella Morset. This was... an interesting decision by James Gunn to include these characters in this story. The easiest thing to do, the low-hanging fruit, of course, you're going to bring in Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. They'll bring in Wonder Woman, bring in Batman, you know, the most notable of superheroes in the DC lore. But he decided to pick these X-Ups obscure characters and that's what james gunn do if you really go through the history of his films who knew anything about the guardians of the galaxy before the movies came out i didn't you know i read comics you know i did not know anything about guardians when he did the suicide squad i knew a couple of those characters i didn't know all of peacemaker i knew nothing about and that ended up being the best character in the film i mean end got his own tv show and has a cameo in this movie and i i love peacemaker and so he has a way of finding the most obscure characters and turning them into something and so this was a interesting choice to pick these particular characters to pop up in this film um i said in my initial review that i was worried about that you know leading up to the film with the trailers and everything that okay we're going to be oversaturated with all of these dc characters and this is supposed to be a superhero or a superman film I don't want to see all of these characters man if you're going to do that just make a Justice League movie but instead we got the right amount of these characters you know because he's building a universe here and so you can't just have a movie with just Superman and nothing else happens you know you have to incorporate these characters in some way and expand the universe out that way and I thought that was genius and using these particular characters was smart. And they did not oversaturate the movie. They were used properly. They came in to do their jobs and they did it perfectly. The only one who got shortchanged in this film is Hulk Girl, is Isabella Morissette. You know, Guy Garner had a great part. Mr. Terrific had a terrific part. Not so much with Hulk Girl. She was just there. And that's my... That's the only part about that whole Justice gang that I just can't get over. Even after the second viewing, it was worse. That's the only part about this movie that got worse on the second viewing. And that was Hawkgirl. Because I can't help but wonder, was her part cut or what? I mean, what happened here? Because we got nothing. And if you followed Hawkgirl in the comics, you would know that that is a very interesting character and i'm not saying we had to do a whole backstory and origin story and tell her arc in this movie but you could have hinted to something about her character we didn't get that in this film but it is what it is you know hopefully moving forward we'll get more you know and so around this time they defeated the kaiju and voila next thing you know lex luther released the footage of the message from his parents and now everybody turns on him now this was another part and him i mean superman this was another part of the movie where i was like uh i get what you're doing i'm a i'm a roll with what you're doing but i wish it was done a little better and what i mean by that is the people instantly turned on superman i mean instant i understand i understand they saw the message i understand that uh that initially the plans were from his parents for him to come to earth and take over but nothing from superman throughout the i think three years he's been Superman, at least. That's the way they set it up in this film. Nothing indicates that he's anything like that. He's a hero. He literally just risked his life to save everybody. And they instantly turned. I'm not saying the people shouldn't have turned. Yeah, but it should have been kind of a rollout to it. As opposed to immediately shouting and cursing him out and throwing cans at his head and all this other stuff. It was like too fast for me. It didn't that just didn't work But I get the context of the story I just wish it was kind of played out a little better, but that's just me, you know, so now we get Superman he decides to turn himself in to the Justice Department Because he's a Boy Scout, you know, he's not gonna go on a run and so he turns himself in and uh rick flagg who uh i love rick flagg and creature commandos i love frank grillo who plays uh rick flagg senior i didn't see the purpose of him being in this movie he was in for two scenes and this was one of them and he he said maybe two words but it was nothing he was just there and i know he he's gonna have a bigger role in the peacemaker season two series uh but i don't know it was just weird that he was just there to be there he he was there he was more useless than hawk girl and that's saying something but anyways he gets turned into lex luther and lex luther puts him in that pocket dimension and this is where we meet uh metamorpho and he uh you know crabs uh kryptonite to weaken superman and This is where we get to see Lex Luthor be as diabolical that I've ever seen in any iteration of this character. Where he literally blows a man's head off in front of Superman. A guy that helps him. A guy that is a fan of Superman. And playing Russian roulette with him and just kills him. And like, okay, well, we'll find somebody else. We're going to get somebody else to find out because he's interrogating him to find out who raised him, who found him as a baby, you know. And, of course, Superman won't tell. And so he killed the guy. And I'm like, man, Lex, Lex is a beast in this movie, man. And Nicholas Hope, I tell you, bro, I cannot scream any louder my praise for this man. as this character just to think that initially he went there when he uh when he was auditioning for this movie he was auditioning to be superman nicholas hope and i wasn't mad at that idea because i like nicholas hope uh from playing in the x-men films and uh numerous other projects that he he was in i really do enjoy him even though i see him more as a batman but I would have took him as Superman. But no. Once again, James Gunn, genius move, saw something else. He saw something else there. And when they cast him as Lex Luthor, I was a little skeptical. Can he pull it off? And then I thought about, well, Jesse Eisenberg. God bless him. As long as he isn't that, I'll be all right with it. Well, he blew that out. completely out of the water but upon witnessing that brutal killing metamorpho he finds he he finds a new i don't know heart he gets the heart he decides that now he wants superman to get out and help him save his baby uh little baby joey once again from the comics didn't ever think i'll see that in film, but we got to see it. He creates a version of the sun to power up Superman. They escape. There's an epic little battle there where Superman is holding the baby about trying to fight off those rafters. And you've got a proton river that's about to suck him into a black hole. And all this is going on. All the while, you've got Mr. Terrific and Lois. they found their way into the pocket dimension and crypto is there as well and it sounds messy on the surface but it actually flowed pretty well i thought this was a really good scene a exciting scene we get out of the pocket dimension and lois lane brings uh superman to home brings him to smallville to be with his parents so he can recuperate from all uh the radiation that he got from that kryptonite and another great scene between david corn sweat and uh oh my god what's his name uh puett puett taylor who plays uh jonathan kent uh what a scene man and once again i'm sitting in the theater and my dog i guess my daughter knew she sensed it on me uh Knowing the relationship between me and my father and how deep that conversation was between Clark and Jonathan Kent. And it was, yeah, it was Niagara Falls. I was in there crying. I was crying because I felt it because those conversations or similar conversations took place between me and my dad. And I remember every when when I watched it, I can just picture my dad telling me everything that Jonathan Kent was telling Clark in that moment. And it just I I did good. I did good. It wasn't complete. My makeup didn't run, but I was it was it was it had a couple of tears that dropped out. But It was a powerful scene, really good scene, and it really reinforced the fact that, because Clark, that he was so worried about... why his biological parents sent him to Earth. And that reassured him that, you know, that conversation with Jonathan reassured him that his real parents were Jonathan and Martha Kent. And those Joel L. and why am I blanking on her name? But the mother name. But they, yeah, they are his biological parents. but that's not what reared him up that's not why he is who he is jonathan and martha kent is the reason superman is who he is and i thought it they did a excellent job by depicting that in one small scene we didn't need an origin we didn't need to see jonathan kent raising him up and teaching them right from wrong and you know we didn't have to have a scene where they sit them on a couch and try to uh reinforce you know oh no you you fight for good truth justice in american way it was none of that you know it was just a small subtle scene and it told you everything that you needed to know and it it worked so well and i was just amazed by how Less was more in this instant. But anyways, meanwhile, Lex Luthor, he's mad now. Superman got free, so he, you know, ramps up the power on that pocket dimension portal thing. And it exploded to the point where it caused the rift. So now Metropolis is about to get swallowed up in this rift. And this was cool. I like this scene. to see the destruction of metropolis now this was destruction done right as opposed to man of steel where metropolis just turned into a scorched earth wasteland during the battle this this made sense this felt comic booky this felt animated serious you know the way the the city was just being torn apart by this by this rift and all the while you have superman going around he's catching buildings from falling on uh this woman in a car you know he he gets in a fight with the engineer and ultraman in this stadium which was cool all the while you have an invasion that's about to take place in um in those two between those two fictional countries and this was another scene that almost had me crying and it wasn't a scene it was more or less just one little part and that's when the little kid was holding up the flag and calling out to superman and i don't know why that moved me it just moved me i was like come on but superman's tied up with this battle and you're like oh my god is he gonna be get there on time because those people about to get annihilated by his army. and so he's in this battle and uh of course he's struggling you know because he's going up against two superhuman beings you know two metahumans and one of them is his clone who we get get that reveal in a couple of minutes but they're going at it in the stadium to the point where they figured out that okay i'm gonna use uh the engineer who is made up of all nanobots i'm gonna take the nanobots and uh smother you and fill up your lungs and kill you you know that's in that that's one way to kill superman i mean he's super but i i don't think he's super enough to whereas he can live without brain breathing and so he comes up with the plan he's gonna fly out into the atmosphere with both of them attached to him and just come back down with the force of a meteor and that's how he gets loose from it and able to uh uh throw up those nanobots and this this incapacitates the engineer who we don't see anymore uh in the movie and that kind of bothered me too i was like well how you knock out somebody that's made of nanobots i mean it that that was weird to me but whatever uh i looked past that because we didn't have time to breathe because superman was going up against Ultraman whose suit was all torn up from the impact of them falling back to Earth. He takes off the suit. And it is none other than a clone of Superman. It was David Cornsweat with a wig on. And if you read comics, you pretty much know who Ultraman is. And that's basically what he is. And so it didn't come as a shock. But it still was a shock to me. I don't know why it surprised me in the movie. And I know who Ultraman is. But it still surprised me in the film. And you have Lex Luthor. controlling him uh because lex luther once again showing his genius and this was planted throughout the film when he fought the uh hammer of bararia uh with ultraman in that suit but that lex was controlling him you know because lex had figure out all of superman's fighting style or how he fought so he he came up and devised this plan on how to defeat him you know with this fighting. you know, had these team of tech wizards that can orchestrate this fight. And that's how Superman struggled so much, because Lex Luthor figured out how to beat him. He knows his moves, his every move. He studied him. So they go at it back and forth. Of course, Ultraman is having an upper hand. Lex Luthor makes the comment that you know you can't beat brains braun cannot beat brain and superman smiles and he's like yeah i have the brains too i have brains too or something to that effect and he whistles and who comes to the rescue it is none other than crypto another another uh element i think right before that we find out that yes clark is not going to be able to get to beraria to save those people from that army he called the justice game to go help and that's so similar to what we witnessed in the animated series and i was so shocked and surprised by that again i'm like okay this works this works perfectly and so So he whistles for Crypto. Crypto comes and gets Ultraman off of him. And they both team up because at this point, Lex doesn't have a plan for crypto. So they were able to get the get the upper hand to the point where Superman throws Ultraman into the black hole. And I don't know if this is going to set up Bizarro or or what, but. that's that could be a nice way to set up bizarro later on down the line but if we never revisit it again that's fine too that doesn't have to be revisited so uh the rafters come the other squad this little legion of warriors that lex have and superman and crypto just go to work on them he he were he goes to work on them now he's going after lex uh gives lex a nice speech you know as crypto works him it reminded me of uh when the hawk took loki you know the puny god scene in the avengers it was the same thing crypto worked lex lute i'm like man is he gonna kill him i was getting kind of worried for the legs i ain't gonna lie But he probably wished he was dead after that beating. But that was cool. And they end up throwing Lex Luthor into Belle Reeves. And we get the obligatory Superman-Lois kiss at the end of the battle and whatnot. And Superman, he's back at the Fortress of Solitude, getting healed up from all of this. battling he been doing and who drops by but his cousin carla carla zorrell yes played by millie adcock if you are a fan of uh house of the dragon yes her is she she's playing uh carla zorrell's aka supergirl and supergirl that comes out next year but she makes a cameo in this movie to pick crypto We found out is actually her dog all this time Superman was just dog sitting with Before Supergirl, but that was a nice little scene uh to see her in the one thing i didn't like about it was the explanation it i did not like that superman told the superman robot uh oh you know she goes to a planet that has a red sun so she can get drunk because our metabolism here uh we can't get drunk and blah blah blah that's all fine and good and that's true but why are you telling this to the superman robots shouldn't they know that already i'm like okay why are you if they already know who are you explaining it to us we don't need to know that we'll find that out next year when supergirl comes out i didn't need the explanation you know and i already knew why she was drunk you know but it's still kind of baffling why is she still drunk because she is currently under a yellow sun that would have that would have wore off i'm just saying but anyways that was the end of the film uh but well i will say the last scene was also epic in my humble opinion because when superman in the first scene he returned to the fortress of solitude the superman robots uh turned on the message from his biological parents to soothe him so this time when he's healing up in the fortress of solitude the superman robots turns on his parents video to soothe him and this time it was jonathan and martha kent and what was so genius about this and i didn't pick it up until the second viewing. That's why I said it was just little things that I didn't catch the first time that I caught today when I watched it again. It was the fact that when that first scene, when we see his biological parents, that's the scene when he was healing up and the sun rays are healing him. And those... That message was supposed to soothe him, yet when the rays hit him, he was screaming. He was in pain because his bones were getting back in place. He was healing up rapidly. So he was screaming in pain, listening to their voices. At the end of this movie, while he's healing up and watching the footage of Jonathan and Malte Kent when he was younger and his Jonathan Kent. lifting him up in the air and he's posing like superman as a little kid and stuff like that he's smiling and the movie goes off once again another tear rolled down my eye this time i was by myself so i didn't i didn't have to worry about my daughter looking at me but yes yeah i thought that was genius that was so poetic but overall this was this was it. excellent superman movie i i thought that we would get at least a decent movie i wasn't expecting much from it to be honest with you and i got much more i got a whole lot more and i'm excited for this universe going forward as i stated in my initial review and so like i said just to add on this movie is still a b plus in my humble opinion i think it's One of the best Superman movies, if not the best. I'm not going to fight anybody on that, if that's your opinion. Superman movies to be released. I super enjoyed it, and I will be going to see it for a third time before it's all said and done. Well, I got to do it this week, because next week, of course, is Fantastic Four. But I'm super, super happy, and, you know. round of applause to james gunn for giving us a movie full of heart full of hope and a cinematic universe that we can be excited about but once again i would love to know what were your thoughts of superman did you enjoy superman did you think it's up there with richard donner's uh 1978 superman or do you Think it's more along the lines of Superman 4, A Quest for Peace. I would love to hear your thoughts about this version. Email the show, kbradiopodcast at gmail.com. You can also search for the show on all social media platforms. Just search for the KB Radio Network. Also, don't forget about YouTube. Subscribe to the KB Radio Network channel and like this video if you don't. mind don't forget about the five stars the reviews and sharing this show if you're listening on apple podcast spotify iheart radio wherever you are currently listening to the concession stand here on the kb radio network everybody thank you for joining me for this spoiler talk for james guns warner brothers dc studios new film Superman. Want you all to know that I love you. Continue to love everyone. And until we speak again, you all be blessed.

Description

The SPOILER review of DC's Superman. Written and directed by James Gunn, it is the first film in the DC Universe (DCU) produced by DC Studios and the second reboot of the Superman film series. David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent / Superman, alongside Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, and Isabela Merced. In the film, Superman must prove to the world that he is their protector after billionaire Lex Luthor conducts a plan to turn public opinion against him.


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Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Hello everyone and welcome to the concession stand here on the KB radio network. I am your host Kevin Reed and this is the spoiler. I repeat spoiler. Review of Superman, the brand new film from writer-director James Gunn, starring David Cornswet as the man of steel himself, and this is the first film in the DC universe. I absolutely adore this film. I've seen it twice. I had to watch it again in order to kind of grasp, you know, everything that I saw in the first. viewing and i gave my initial review if you want to hear that review the non-spoiler review uh you can find it on my channel but i couldn't get into a lot of things on that review because it would be spoilery you know i don't want to spoil it for anybody uh who haven't seen it so i decided to split them up in two and do a non-spoiler and a spoiler this is more of a talk then it is a rebuke. because I reviewed it already. I gave it a B+. It is an excellent film to kick off this new cinematic universe over at DC. And so I wanted to touch in on some points here concerning the film that I enjoyed and some things that I didn't. Especially since I've viewed it a couple of times now, I have a greater sense of the story and There's a couple of things that I even missed on the first viewing, shockingly enough. Nothing big or major, but just little nuggets that kind of explained some things clearer for me. You know, it wasn't earth-shattling or caused me not to like the movie on the first viewing, but it just added to my enjoyment of the film. this film kicks off we don't get a origin story in this movie this is superman already superman you know clark has he's been through smallville we we didn't have to see krypton blow up we didn't have to see uh paul and uh mark kent raise him up and all this other good stuff and you know him discovering his powers we've been through that we saw it in the christopher reeves version we saw it in the man of steel we've seen it in comics we've seen it on television hey we saw a whole television show dedicated to the upbringing of clark kent so we didn't need to dive back into the origin story if you don't know the origin story of superman by this point god bless you and now the one thing i will say i say all that as somebody who is in his mid-40s have watched multiple versions of superman i will go as far to say every version um on television comics and movies but in regards to little kids or children who are going to see this movie with their parents or friends or whoever and this is their first superman this is the first time they were experiencing superman on the big screen in some cases at all in any media and they probably don't know the origin they probably don't know the full story of superman i think in regards to those people they're not just kids because there are grown-ups who probably don't know to be honest with you but in regards to those people they're probably be a little thrown off by it and that's one knock that i didn't give my initial review. you know just in regards to those individuals who are experiencing the character of superman for the first time and just want to see a superhero film uh whether they're young or old there'll be a little little concerning there they're like okay so how did he become superman uh did he get hit by a meteor or something like that you know they don't know that he's an alien and all this here now all of this is explained throughout the film you know if you sit there and pay attention but i'm just saying as far as somebody for the first time sitting down in the theater and don't know the story of Superman and hope to be introduced to this character from the beginning, you're not going to get that in this type of film. And for me, I appreciated it. For me personally, I love that decision. You know, it's something like Batman. If they make a Batman movie, which is coming, not anytime soon, it'll probably be a... a couple of years from now as far as in this cinematic universe uh james gunn has said that there won't be an origin story we're not gonna see uh martha and uh thomas wayne get shot in the alley in that film thank god because we've seen it in every single iteration of that character you know but i understand for younger viewers who don't know who's not in the comics uh Probably didn't watch the animated series and so on and so forth don't know but hopefully with good Storytelling in the film you can find out and that's one thing about this movie that it does do well It does tell that story that Kal-el which is his given name his biological name comes from Krypton. He's sent here by his parents to avoid the destruction of Krypton and whatnot. He lands in Smallville, Kansas, raised up by the Kants, and voila, there we go. So it is told to us and shown to us in a degree throughout the film. We just have to commit to it. But as a comic book lover, as a fan of these comic book films and properties, I was all in on it. I'm glad we picked it. up at the point at the time that we did pick up in this film this film starts with the explanation that metahumans have been on earth for three centuries at this point you know 300 years on earth so we've had superhuman beings in this version of earth already you know so it didn't make sense to have an origin story when we We have a world established that has metahumans for the past 300 years. And the first image we see is Superman crash landing on the snow. You know, that we saw in the trailer and everything. He's beaten up, he's broken up, and the text on screen explains that this is Superman's first defeat. This is the first time he's lost. And did he lose? I mean... broken ribs and punctured lungs and all this other stuff i mean he the hammer of uh bararia it tore his behind up who we later find out once again it's spoilers we later find out that is ultraman in that suit and he beat him half to death literally and once again i think this was a genius way to start this film because if we find our hero at his lowest this is where we start at his lowest it we get to go on this journey with him you know as he accomplishes go as he vanished the enemy and come out on top we can go on that journey through this story and that excited me for some strange reason i was intrigued by that when that was the opening scene because when you see it in the trailer Of course, and this is in all movies, in all movie trailers, when you see the trailer, you're not seeing the movie in context. It's not like it's a shorter version of the film as far as chronological order. You know, everything is all out of whack. And so I didn't think that that was going to be the opening shot. And to be honest with you, when you really go back and watch the trailers, all of them, I think it's what, three trailers that they released? A couple of clips, but the three trailers that they released were basically the same thing. They were the same scene from the movie, and all of those trailers were the beginning part of the film. You know, I think the last trailer showed a little bit of the third act, but it didn't show everything. But the majority of those trailers were the first act of the movie. and so once again this was the opening scene and i'm like okay so we can only go up from here but no pun intended we're only going up up from here so crypto another factor in this film i mentioned in my initial review i was a little nervous about going into this movie i thought we were going to be oversaturated with this dog and i love dogs you know my daughter has a dog which basically means i'm an owner of a dog by default because it's in my house but i love dogs you know i do and this is coming from somebody when i was younger i was allergic to dogs. I couldn't be around dogs and it's weird how that just went away It went away because this isn't our first dog. We've had a couple of dogs before our current Little crypto that runs around and destroys the house, but as neither here nor there I thought we was gonna be over saying I thought this was gonna be a crypto movie the way they were promoting him You know every promotional material was crypto oh man i don't want to see that not that i don't care for the dog i i want to see a superman movie not a crypto movie but the film gave you just the right amount of crypto and you actually fall in love with the dog at least i did i fell in love with crypto no matter how unruly he was he was still a beautiful dog love that dog It added to every scene that he was a part of. We get to the Fortress of Solitude. We meet the Superman robots, which is from the, I think, All-Star Superman comics. Or was it that? I think it was the animated movie. I think it was one, but they did incorporate it in the comics after. But I think they were introduced in the animated movie first. Either way, don't care. I love them in this film. I love that addition to heal Superman with the rays from the sun magnifying it so he can get soaked in the sun's power to heal him. Superman, he gets off the table. He goes back, immediately goes back into the fight against the Hammer of Berraria. I'm pretty sure I'm saying the name wrong, but anyways, goes back into the fight and loses again. He loses again. and i thought that was cool i'm like man this is cool to see superman struggle because you always look at superman as the the you know the automatic problem solver you know as long as you don't have kryptonite he can destroy anything i mean there's nothing that can stop him uh kryptonite or magic it's nothing that can stop him but they found the way to work it into the comic lore that he can be beat he can be hurt and still be the superman that we know and love so we get introduced to lex luthor played by nicholas hope and i'm just gonna say it right now after watching it a second time nicholas hope is the best lex luthor ever i loved his portrayal of that villain he embodied everything that I remember from the comics. I think that's the most important thing for me. Going back to 1978's Superman, where we got the late, great Gene Hackman playing that character. I love Gene Hackman. I love his Lex Luthor, but that wasn't the Lex Luthor in the comics. Now, a lot of people's first exposure to that character was through the movies. Namely me, you know, before I was old enough to get into comics and actually read, you know, and explore what that character was truly all about throughout the comic lore. He is not this comedic criminal that, you know, petty thug or whatever that was displayed in those films. But that Lex Luthor fit the tone of that movie, fit the story that. they were telling richard donald was telling in that film and so i'm not mad at it you know so this is no disrespect to him he fit that that film uh kevin spacey and superman return fit that film which was pretty much a continuation of the gene hackman's uh lex luthor but i think kevin spacey was the closest thing up to this point the closest thing to the lex luthor that I remember from the comics. and I'm just talking film because Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville has been my favorite Lex Luthor ever, you know, and he's still up there with me, but it's something about Nicholas Holt's performance in this film that made him one of the best comic book villains in all of comic book films. Uh, i'm including marvel in past uh uh dc films he managed to blend and i'm talking a perfect blend here blend a level of menace of entitlement of uh even compassion you know there's there's a genius, all of this wrapped up in one and make. that character so layered which he could have been this mustache trailing villain which you know you script down the layers uh that's basically what lex luther is but he gave that character so much you know and i don't know if it's how the character was written or how it was acted by Nicholas Hope or a combination of both. But it. absolutely worked in this movie love this lex luther the perfect lex luther for this superman for this cinematic universe that we're going forward with and so we get that introduction we get introduced to miss tess macker who plays a bigger role later on and everything up to this point it was it was it was coming together i'm not going to sit here and say that the first 30 minutes of this movie was perfect because it wasn't because up to this point i'm kind of confused i'm like is this a non-linear story are we going to be going in flashbacks and this that and the third i'm like where are we going with this i'm liking what i'm seeing i'm just not understanding where the story is going at this point and i was hoping to get that because i know the movie's only two hours long and we're 30 minutes in so i wanted to kind of get a sense of what's going on up to this point but that was immediately thrown away even though i still didn't know and had questions i was enjoying the next two scenes so much i forgot you know and that was the two scenes that we got basically our only exposure to clark kent you know uh die. Clark Kent in the Daily Planet and the scene with Clark and Lois in the apartment for the interview scene. The scene in the Daily Planet, which on my first viewing, I was kind of, I think in my review, I mentioned that I didn't too much care for David Cornswet's Clark Kent performance. I know why I said that, but after I watched it the second time, I appreciated it a little more. I saw little nuances that he was doing that I didn't pick up on in the first viewing, and I appreciated it more. I still stand by the fact his voice didn't really change, and like I said before, I'm not expecting him to do the whole... Christian Bale Batman switch up with his voice I'm just me you know he just the way his voice comes out and I guess it's just David Cornswet's voice he he has this confident strong voice and it's the same voice he uses for Superman you know that same tone and you know like well you know it is not it's not hard to pick up on the fact that it's the same person that's that's my whole thing now i get the hypno glasses that we do find out and this is in the comics this is comic accurate that he wears hypno glasses to uh you know throw off his appearance to everybody that looks at him and so they won't look at him and say you know what you resemble superman but the glasses throw you off so it was just the voice thing. And I think in my mind, and I, I constantly tell myself that I don't want to compare David Cornswet to Henry Cavill. Don't want to compare them to Christopher Reeves or. or Tom Welling or whoever, Brandon Rolfe. I don't want to do that. This is his version. And I found myself realizing that when I made that statement in my review, I was comparing him. I was comparing him to Christopher Reeve. Christopher Reeve did the best transition of those characters. I say those. It's the same character. Clark Kent in Superman. Just the way he slumped his shoulders when he was Clark. the way he lumbered around and clumsy and just he didn't change his voice to the degree of squeaky but it was just a little subtle thing that he did and you know when he was superman he would broaden his shoulders and stick his chest out and chin up and his voice was more confident and strong and it was just those little things that made christopher reeve one of the best supermen if not the best superman according to my mom uh the best superman to ever put on the suit and i was unfairly putting that on david corn sweat now i do appreciate what the little things that he was doing in that scene now when we get to the scene with him and lois uh this uh i think they're calling it the interview scene uh That's different because he was him. He was just him. He wasn't Clark. He was Kal-El. He was Superman. He was just him. This was my favorite scene in the movie. Yes, the punchy punchy smash smash with the kaiju and Ultraman and the engineer and all that. All that was fun and good. But this was my favorite scene in the film. Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane was probably the best casting throughout this entire film. film the entire cast was banger this was great casting by uh james gunn throughout this entire film he the dude's a genius you can say what you want about james gunn he's a genius he he knows what he wants he has a vision and he executes it uh everybody a part of this film was perfectly but nothing can be as perfect as racial rachel brosnahan as lois she She's the best Lois Lane, hands down, hands down. And I know there's a lot of Margo Kidder fans out there who was screaming blasts from me at me right now. But come on, I'm sorry. And I love Margo Kidder. But come on, Rachel Brosnahan was born to play Lois Lane. Just watch one episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Mabel. I said it back then, and this is before any consideration for a Superman movie at the time. I said, man, she would make a perfect Lois Lane. You know, I always felt that watching that show. And when this came around and they announced that they cast her, I was like, well, that's a duh. That's a no-brainer. And she knocked it out the park. But what made it so great, what made her performance so great, was the chemistry between her and David Cornswet, and it showed so much in this scene. If I had one knock about Lois Lane in this movie, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Rachel Brosnahan, is the fact that she kind of disappears in the third act. She doesn't have much to do in the third act, because we get this powerful scene in the first act. we get another great scene well a couple of great scenes in the second act uh her interacting with the justice gang and her with mr terrific as they go to that pocket dimension that she is great and she kind of get lost in the shuffle in the third act but that's my only knock and that's not her fault but she was excellent man excellent and this scene was so good how they switched it up it went from lovey-dovey to playful banter to actual heated discussion to the point that they basically almost broke up if not completely broke up i know they was on the they were on the fence there when clark left the apartment and it just escalated to that point and this was like uh i don't know how long was this scene it felt like It took up half the movie, but I'm not mad at it taking up half the movie. It was so good. You couldn't cut nothing from that scene. That was just... that was just cinema there you know you letting actors just act letting them do their thing just letting them eat and it it almost stole the movie i i would have i would have sat there for two hours and watched lois and clark just go back and forth at the dinner table and have been happy i would have felt i got my money's worth uh that's how good that scene was but in the midst of that scene we learn a lot of story we find out that superman is kind of a lone wolf you know he marched to the beat of his own drum he doesn't take orders from the president he doesn't take orders from the justice gang he doesn't take orders from the uh some conglomerate or anything like that he he marches to the beat of his own drum he goes where he's needed where he feels help is needed to save lives no matter what and he intervenes in this invasion that we later find out that uh lex luther is orchestrating uh just to have the world turn on superman and so he goes to stop this war and inadvertently gets involved in this geopolitical uh battle i guess you could say and it sparks up a whole nother thing which brings me to a point uh that i wanted to talk about before but i couldn't and it's the i don't know it's the real world implications here you know it it's it this movie mirrors exactly what's happening in the world right now you know you could watch You can go to the theater, watch Superman, go home, turn on CNN, and it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. It's just with different names for the countries and different names for Lex Luthor. Replace Lex Luthor with Elon Musk and you'll get the movie. It's pretty much the same thing. And so it's definitely timely and poignant, if you will. and so lex luther and his uh minions the engineer and uh ultraman they invade the fortress of solitude and once again sitting there in the theater first time when i watched it the first time i'm like how did he just walk up to the fortress you know and they explained it away but you know when i watched it the first time i was like boy they're gonna have to explain this but uh we find out that ultra man is uh the clone of superman you know so they used his dna and that's how they got in but anyway they invade the fortress of solitude we see the engineer just just go to town on the superman robots which was cool cool little fight gets in a fight with crypto we get to see some crypto action there And then we get our big little turning point at this juncture of the movie. When Superman, the first scene in the movie when Superman was brought back to the fortress and the Superman robots turned on the message from Krypton of his parents, his biological parents, who was played by Bradley Cooper as Joel. um and the mother i don't know i've seen that actress in something but i can't recall what i seen her in uh but that's neither here nor there um they play his parents and they're uh tell uh they sent the message and the message got damaged when he came to earth or crashed on earth or whatever so you only get the first half of the message in the first half of the matches message is uh uplifting today it's inspiring you know we sent you to earth to to help and to uh be a beacon of light or whatever the case may be and when the engineer hacks into the computer there at the fortress of solitude she is able to decrypt the second half of the message where we find out that joel and his mother sent them to earth to conquer earth and so this is Oh. all the gas that Lex needed to start this fire you know this this pretty much uh confirms his feelings about Superman you know that he's an alien he's here to uh rule over us or whatever the case may be so this this was confirmation in his eyes and so he releases the message all the while while he's invading um the Fortress of Solitude he has a little distraction going on he unleashes this kaiju on metropolis and this is when we get the fight we see in the trailer and he's fighting the kaiju and uh this is where at this moment when i fell in love with david corn sweats version of superman something that we didn't get to see in other versions of this character on the big screen While he was fighting this giant monster, he would stop and save people. He would save a dog from being crushed by the foot of this monster. He saved a woman from being crushed and saved these people that was in the building. Every time he saved them, he would smile at them. He'll ask them if they was okay. He'll give them little... affirmations i guess you know just breathe you know just just take deep breaths and whatever it's stuff like that and give a smile and that's the superman that i loved from the comics this is the superman that i always envisioned you know in live action and i finally got to see it love henry cowell love him But that was such a dark and moody guy to say he was Superman. But for that film, he fit that vision of Zack Snyder. Now, for comic fans and lovers of the animated show, this is the Superman for you. This is exactly what I wanted to see. And from at that point in the film, I knew that. Nothing else could bother me throughout this movie and nothing did. Yeah, I had some little nitpicks from that moment on, but nothing to deter me from feeling that this was a great Superman movie. And so he defeats the Kaiju with the help of the Justice Gang. This is when we get introduced to Guy Gardner's Green Lantern, played by Nathan Fillion, Mr. Terrific. played by Eddie Nami. I can't pronounce his name. I had it. I practiced it before I started the show, and I still can't get it out. But I do enjoy him as an actor. He stole the movie, to be honest. Every scene that he was in, he stole the movie. I love Mr. Terrific in this movie. And we got Hawkgirl played by Isabella Morset. This was... an interesting decision by James Gunn to include these characters in this story. The easiest thing to do, the low-hanging fruit, of course, you're going to bring in Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. They'll bring in Wonder Woman, bring in Batman, you know, the most notable of superheroes in the DC lore. But he decided to pick these X-Ups obscure characters and that's what james gunn do if you really go through the history of his films who knew anything about the guardians of the galaxy before the movies came out i didn't you know i read comics you know i did not know anything about guardians when he did the suicide squad i knew a couple of those characters i didn't know all of peacemaker i knew nothing about and that ended up being the best character in the film i mean end got his own tv show and has a cameo in this movie and i i love peacemaker and so he has a way of finding the most obscure characters and turning them into something and so this was a interesting choice to pick these particular characters to pop up in this film um i said in my initial review that i was worried about that you know leading up to the film with the trailers and everything that okay we're going to be oversaturated with all of these dc characters and this is supposed to be a superhero or a superman film I don't want to see all of these characters man if you're going to do that just make a Justice League movie but instead we got the right amount of these characters you know because he's building a universe here and so you can't just have a movie with just Superman and nothing else happens you know you have to incorporate these characters in some way and expand the universe out that way and I thought that was genius and using these particular characters was smart. And they did not oversaturate the movie. They were used properly. They came in to do their jobs and they did it perfectly. The only one who got shortchanged in this film is Hulk Girl, is Isabella Morissette. You know, Guy Garner had a great part. Mr. Terrific had a terrific part. Not so much with Hulk Girl. She was just there. And that's my... That's the only part about that whole Justice gang that I just can't get over. Even after the second viewing, it was worse. That's the only part about this movie that got worse on the second viewing. And that was Hawkgirl. Because I can't help but wonder, was her part cut or what? I mean, what happened here? Because we got nothing. And if you followed Hawkgirl in the comics, you would know that that is a very interesting character and i'm not saying we had to do a whole backstory and origin story and tell her arc in this movie but you could have hinted to something about her character we didn't get that in this film but it is what it is you know hopefully moving forward we'll get more you know and so around this time they defeated the kaiju and voila next thing you know lex luther released the footage of the message from his parents and now everybody turns on him now this was another part and him i mean superman this was another part of the movie where i was like uh i get what you're doing i'm a i'm a roll with what you're doing but i wish it was done a little better and what i mean by that is the people instantly turned on superman i mean instant i understand i understand they saw the message i understand that uh that initially the plans were from his parents for him to come to earth and take over but nothing from superman throughout the i think three years he's been Superman, at least. That's the way they set it up in this film. Nothing indicates that he's anything like that. He's a hero. He literally just risked his life to save everybody. And they instantly turned. I'm not saying the people shouldn't have turned. Yeah, but it should have been kind of a rollout to it. As opposed to immediately shouting and cursing him out and throwing cans at his head and all this other stuff. It was like too fast for me. It didn't that just didn't work But I get the context of the story I just wish it was kind of played out a little better, but that's just me, you know, so now we get Superman he decides to turn himself in to the Justice Department Because he's a Boy Scout, you know, he's not gonna go on a run and so he turns himself in and uh rick flagg who uh i love rick flagg and creature commandos i love frank grillo who plays uh rick flagg senior i didn't see the purpose of him being in this movie he was in for two scenes and this was one of them and he he said maybe two words but it was nothing he was just there and i know he he's gonna have a bigger role in the peacemaker season two series uh but i don't know it was just weird that he was just there to be there he he was there he was more useless than hawk girl and that's saying something but anyways he gets turned into lex luther and lex luther puts him in that pocket dimension and this is where we meet uh metamorpho and he uh you know crabs uh kryptonite to weaken superman and This is where we get to see Lex Luthor be as diabolical that I've ever seen in any iteration of this character. Where he literally blows a man's head off in front of Superman. A guy that helps him. A guy that is a fan of Superman. And playing Russian roulette with him and just kills him. And like, okay, well, we'll find somebody else. We're going to get somebody else to find out because he's interrogating him to find out who raised him, who found him as a baby, you know. And, of course, Superman won't tell. And so he killed the guy. And I'm like, man, Lex, Lex is a beast in this movie, man. And Nicholas Hope, I tell you, bro, I cannot scream any louder my praise for this man. as this character just to think that initially he went there when he uh when he was auditioning for this movie he was auditioning to be superman nicholas hope and i wasn't mad at that idea because i like nicholas hope uh from playing in the x-men films and uh numerous other projects that he he was in i really do enjoy him even though i see him more as a batman but I would have took him as Superman. But no. Once again, James Gunn, genius move, saw something else. He saw something else there. And when they cast him as Lex Luthor, I was a little skeptical. Can he pull it off? And then I thought about, well, Jesse Eisenberg. God bless him. As long as he isn't that, I'll be all right with it. Well, he blew that out. completely out of the water but upon witnessing that brutal killing metamorpho he finds he he finds a new i don't know heart he gets the heart he decides that now he wants superman to get out and help him save his baby uh little baby joey once again from the comics didn't ever think i'll see that in film, but we got to see it. He creates a version of the sun to power up Superman. They escape. There's an epic little battle there where Superman is holding the baby about trying to fight off those rafters. And you've got a proton river that's about to suck him into a black hole. And all this is going on. All the while, you've got Mr. Terrific and Lois. they found their way into the pocket dimension and crypto is there as well and it sounds messy on the surface but it actually flowed pretty well i thought this was a really good scene a exciting scene we get out of the pocket dimension and lois lane brings uh superman to home brings him to smallville to be with his parents so he can recuperate from all uh the radiation that he got from that kryptonite and another great scene between david corn sweat and uh oh my god what's his name uh puett puett taylor who plays uh jonathan kent uh what a scene man and once again i'm sitting in the theater and my dog i guess my daughter knew she sensed it on me uh Knowing the relationship between me and my father and how deep that conversation was between Clark and Jonathan Kent. And it was, yeah, it was Niagara Falls. I was in there crying. I was crying because I felt it because those conversations or similar conversations took place between me and my dad. And I remember every when when I watched it, I can just picture my dad telling me everything that Jonathan Kent was telling Clark in that moment. And it just I I did good. I did good. It wasn't complete. My makeup didn't run, but I was it was it was it had a couple of tears that dropped out. But It was a powerful scene, really good scene, and it really reinforced the fact that, because Clark, that he was so worried about... why his biological parents sent him to Earth. And that reassured him that, you know, that conversation with Jonathan reassured him that his real parents were Jonathan and Martha Kent. And those Joel L. and why am I blanking on her name? But the mother name. But they, yeah, they are his biological parents. but that's not what reared him up that's not why he is who he is jonathan and martha kent is the reason superman is who he is and i thought it they did a excellent job by depicting that in one small scene we didn't need an origin we didn't need to see jonathan kent raising him up and teaching them right from wrong and you know we didn't have to have a scene where they sit them on a couch and try to uh reinforce you know oh no you you fight for good truth justice in american way it was none of that you know it was just a small subtle scene and it told you everything that you needed to know and it it worked so well and i was just amazed by how Less was more in this instant. But anyways, meanwhile, Lex Luthor, he's mad now. Superman got free, so he, you know, ramps up the power on that pocket dimension portal thing. And it exploded to the point where it caused the rift. So now Metropolis is about to get swallowed up in this rift. And this was cool. I like this scene. to see the destruction of metropolis now this was destruction done right as opposed to man of steel where metropolis just turned into a scorched earth wasteland during the battle this this made sense this felt comic booky this felt animated serious you know the way the the city was just being torn apart by this by this rift and all the while you have superman going around he's catching buildings from falling on uh this woman in a car you know he he gets in a fight with the engineer and ultraman in this stadium which was cool all the while you have an invasion that's about to take place in um in those two between those two fictional countries and this was another scene that almost had me crying and it wasn't a scene it was more or less just one little part and that's when the little kid was holding up the flag and calling out to superman and i don't know why that moved me it just moved me i was like come on but superman's tied up with this battle and you're like oh my god is he gonna be get there on time because those people about to get annihilated by his army. and so he's in this battle and uh of course he's struggling you know because he's going up against two superhuman beings you know two metahumans and one of them is his clone who we get get that reveal in a couple of minutes but they're going at it in the stadium to the point where they figured out that okay i'm gonna use uh the engineer who is made up of all nanobots i'm gonna take the nanobots and uh smother you and fill up your lungs and kill you you know that's in that that's one way to kill superman i mean he's super but i i don't think he's super enough to whereas he can live without brain breathing and so he comes up with the plan he's gonna fly out into the atmosphere with both of them attached to him and just come back down with the force of a meteor and that's how he gets loose from it and able to uh uh throw up those nanobots and this this incapacitates the engineer who we don't see anymore uh in the movie and that kind of bothered me too i was like well how you knock out somebody that's made of nanobots i mean it that that was weird to me but whatever uh i looked past that because we didn't have time to breathe because superman was going up against Ultraman whose suit was all torn up from the impact of them falling back to Earth. He takes off the suit. And it is none other than a clone of Superman. It was David Cornsweat with a wig on. And if you read comics, you pretty much know who Ultraman is. And that's basically what he is. And so it didn't come as a shock. But it still was a shock to me. I don't know why it surprised me in the movie. And I know who Ultraman is. But it still surprised me in the film. And you have Lex Luthor. controlling him uh because lex luther once again showing his genius and this was planted throughout the film when he fought the uh hammer of bararia uh with ultraman in that suit but that lex was controlling him you know because lex had figure out all of superman's fighting style or how he fought so he he came up and devised this plan on how to defeat him you know with this fighting. you know, had these team of tech wizards that can orchestrate this fight. And that's how Superman struggled so much, because Lex Luthor figured out how to beat him. He knows his moves, his every move. He studied him. So they go at it back and forth. Of course, Ultraman is having an upper hand. Lex Luthor makes the comment that you know you can't beat brains braun cannot beat brain and superman smiles and he's like yeah i have the brains too i have brains too or something to that effect and he whistles and who comes to the rescue it is none other than crypto another another uh element i think right before that we find out that yes clark is not going to be able to get to beraria to save those people from that army he called the justice game to go help and that's so similar to what we witnessed in the animated series and i was so shocked and surprised by that again i'm like okay this works this works perfectly and so So he whistles for Crypto. Crypto comes and gets Ultraman off of him. And they both team up because at this point, Lex doesn't have a plan for crypto. So they were able to get the get the upper hand to the point where Superman throws Ultraman into the black hole. And I don't know if this is going to set up Bizarro or or what, but. that's that could be a nice way to set up bizarro later on down the line but if we never revisit it again that's fine too that doesn't have to be revisited so uh the rafters come the other squad this little legion of warriors that lex have and superman and crypto just go to work on them he he were he goes to work on them now he's going after lex uh gives lex a nice speech you know as crypto works him it reminded me of uh when the hawk took loki you know the puny god scene in the avengers it was the same thing crypto worked lex lute i'm like man is he gonna kill him i was getting kind of worried for the legs i ain't gonna lie But he probably wished he was dead after that beating. But that was cool. And they end up throwing Lex Luthor into Belle Reeves. And we get the obligatory Superman-Lois kiss at the end of the battle and whatnot. And Superman, he's back at the Fortress of Solitude, getting healed up from all of this. battling he been doing and who drops by but his cousin carla carla zorrell yes played by millie adcock if you are a fan of uh house of the dragon yes her is she she's playing uh carla zorrell's aka supergirl and supergirl that comes out next year but she makes a cameo in this movie to pick crypto We found out is actually her dog all this time Superman was just dog sitting with Before Supergirl, but that was a nice little scene uh to see her in the one thing i didn't like about it was the explanation it i did not like that superman told the superman robot uh oh you know she goes to a planet that has a red sun so she can get drunk because our metabolism here uh we can't get drunk and blah blah blah that's all fine and good and that's true but why are you telling this to the superman robots shouldn't they know that already i'm like okay why are you if they already know who are you explaining it to us we don't need to know that we'll find that out next year when supergirl comes out i didn't need the explanation you know and i already knew why she was drunk you know but it's still kind of baffling why is she still drunk because she is currently under a yellow sun that would have that would have wore off i'm just saying but anyways that was the end of the film uh but well i will say the last scene was also epic in my humble opinion because when superman in the first scene he returned to the fortress of solitude the superman robots uh turned on the message from his biological parents to soothe him so this time when he's healing up in the fortress of solitude the superman robots turns on his parents video to soothe him and this time it was jonathan and martha kent and what was so genius about this and i didn't pick it up until the second viewing. That's why I said it was just little things that I didn't catch the first time that I caught today when I watched it again. It was the fact that when that first scene, when we see his biological parents, that's the scene when he was healing up and the sun rays are healing him. And those... That message was supposed to soothe him, yet when the rays hit him, he was screaming. He was in pain because his bones were getting back in place. He was healing up rapidly. So he was screaming in pain, listening to their voices. At the end of this movie, while he's healing up and watching the footage of Jonathan and Malte Kent when he was younger and his Jonathan Kent. lifting him up in the air and he's posing like superman as a little kid and stuff like that he's smiling and the movie goes off once again another tear rolled down my eye this time i was by myself so i didn't i didn't have to worry about my daughter looking at me but yes yeah i thought that was genius that was so poetic but overall this was this was it. excellent superman movie i i thought that we would get at least a decent movie i wasn't expecting much from it to be honest with you and i got much more i got a whole lot more and i'm excited for this universe going forward as i stated in my initial review and so like i said just to add on this movie is still a b plus in my humble opinion i think it's One of the best Superman movies, if not the best. I'm not going to fight anybody on that, if that's your opinion. Superman movies to be released. I super enjoyed it, and I will be going to see it for a third time before it's all said and done. Well, I got to do it this week, because next week, of course, is Fantastic Four. But I'm super, super happy, and, you know. round of applause to james gunn for giving us a movie full of heart full of hope and a cinematic universe that we can be excited about but once again i would love to know what were your thoughts of superman did you enjoy superman did you think it's up there with richard donner's uh 1978 superman or do you Think it's more along the lines of Superman 4, A Quest for Peace. I would love to hear your thoughts about this version. Email the show, kbradiopodcast at gmail.com. You can also search for the show on all social media platforms. Just search for the KB Radio Network. Also, don't forget about YouTube. Subscribe to the KB Radio Network channel and like this video if you don't. mind don't forget about the five stars the reviews and sharing this show if you're listening on apple podcast spotify iheart radio wherever you are currently listening to the concession stand here on the kb radio network everybody thank you for joining me for this spoiler talk for james guns warner brothers dc studios new film Superman. Want you all to know that I love you. Continue to love everyone. And until we speak again, you all be blessed.

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