James Gunn’s Superman opens with its title character already beaten. Not roughed up, beaten, crash-landed face-down in Arctic snow after losing to something called the Hammer of Boravia, too hurt to fly himself home, whistling weakly for Krypto to drag him back to the Fortress of Solitude. For a character whose entire cultural identity runs on invincibility, that’s a strange place to start.
It’s also the smartest choice the film makes. If Superman isn’t invincible, what’s actually making him heroic? Power alone can’t be the whole answer, since power just failed him. The film spends its runtime answering that question through everyone standing near him: Clark, Lois, Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, Guy Gardner, even Lex Luthor. Superman (2025) doesn’t argue heroism means having Superman’s abilities. It argues something more interesting, that heroism takes different shapes depending on what a person has to work with, and Superman’s own version of it means more once you see it sitting next to several others.
Superman: Heroism as Choice
Back at the Fortress, the robots do exactly what competent medical staff would, they tell him to rest. Against Dr. Robot’s direct advice, Superman gets up and flies straight back to Metropolis to fight the Hammer again, and loses again. That’s not someone confident in his own invincibility. It’s someone who can’t sit still while people are in danger, even when his own body is telling him this isn’t a fight he’s currently equipped to win.
That instinct drives the plot. His earlier intervention, stopping Boravia’s invasion of Jarhanpur before the film even starts, is what puts him under the scrutiny the entire story hangs on. He didn’t have to get involved. Nothing about his powers required it. He chose to, because people were going to get hurt otherwise, and the film treats that choice, not his strength, as the actual source of his heroism. Is Superman heroic because he can save people, or because he keeps choosing to, when simply not getting involved would’ve been so much easier? The film leans hard toward the second answer, and it’s right to. Strength that gets used is common in this genre. Strength that gets chosen, repeatedly, at real cost, is rarer.
Lois Lane: Heroism as Accountability
The film’s sharpest scene isn’t a fight. It’s Lois sitting Superman down for something between an interview and an interrogation, pushing him on exactly why he thought unilaterally stopping a foreign invasion was his call to make. She’s not hostile, but she’s not letting him off easy either, pressing on the gap between good intentions and good judgment: wanting to help doesn’t automatically mean you’re right to act, especially not when the person acting has more raw power than anyone else on the planet.
That scene does more character work than most of the film’s action sequences combined. Lois isn’t there as Superman’s romantic interest who happens to also have a job. She’s the person willing to question him because she cares about getting the answer right, not because she doesn’t trust him. Superman can physically stop an invasion. Lois can make him sit still long enough to explain why he thought that was his decision to make, and that’s a genuinely different kind of pressure to apply to someone with that much power. Notice that her heroism here requires zero physical ability. Sometimes the heroic move is refusing to let the most powerful person in the room get a free pass on their reasoning.
Mr. Terrific: Heroism as Expertise
It would be easy, and lazy, to call Mr. Terrific simply “the opposite of Superman,” brains to his brawn. That undersells what the film’s doing with him. Superman represents extraordinary power. Michael Holt represents extraordinary expertise, built through fourteen PhDs, discipline, and self-invented technology rather than an accident of birth. Both men are genuinely exceptional. They just got there through completely different means.
Watch what his T-Spheres actually do across the film, hacking systems, generating barriers, solving problems a punch simply wouldn’t touch. There’s a sequence where Lois’s investigative instincts and Holt’s technical skill work together to get people out of a dangerous extradimensional trap, and neither could’ve managed it alone using Superman’s methods, because Superman’s methods weren’t built for that kind of problem.
Edi Gathegi plays him with a dry, unbothered competence multiple critics singled out as the film’s standout performance, and it’s not hard to see why. He never tries to be Superman, and the film never asks him to. His visual identity backs this up directly: where Superman’s S-shield is instantly recognizable, Mr. Terrific’s superhero style reads as tactical and technological instead, a costume built for someone whose power comes from preparation, not symbolism. The film doesn’t need Mr. Terrific to become Superman. It needs him to prove the DCU has room for someone who solves problems in a completely different register.
The Justice Gang: When Superman’s Example Spreads
Here’s the real turning point, easy to miss if you go character by character too quickly. Before they’re individuals worth analyzing separately, Guy Gardner, Hawkgirl, and Mr. Terrific are a group that starts out reluctant, self-named the “Justice Gang” almost as a joke, uncertain whether they even want to be pulled into Superman’s orbit of responsibility. They’re not villains, but they’re also not automatically signed up to risk their lives the way Superman does by default.
What changes is that they get involved anyway, stepping in during Boravia’s second invasion attempt while Superman’s occupied in Metropolis. The interesting question isn’t what powers they bring to that fight. It’s why they chose to show up at all, given that nothing forced them to. Superman’s presence in their world seems to have shifted what they consider their own responsibility, without turning any of them into a copy of him. That’s the film’s real argument taking shape: Superman doesn’t need everyone to adopt his specific worldview or methods. His example just needs to be enough to nudge other people, with their own very different values, into deciding to act.
Hawkgirl: Heroism Through Experience and Action
Hawkgirl doesn’t get much interior monologue in this film, and she doesn’t need it. What she gets instead is a moment during that second Boravian invasion where she ends the threat from Boravia’s president directly and violently, with none of the hesitation Superman tends to bring to a fight. Where Superman leans toward restraint and finding the option that costs the least, Hawkgirl represents something blunter, experience translated straight into decisive action.
Neither approach gets treated as automatically superior. Superman’s instinct to hold back and search for a better path is admirable. So is Hawkgirl’s refusal to hesitate when hesitating would clearly cost more lives. That tension raises a real question the film doesn’t fully resolve, whether heroism can stay practical and even violent without curdling into something morally hollow. Hawkgirl’s the character who forces that question onto the table instead of letting the film coast entirely on Superman’s gentler model.
Guy Gardner: Heroism Doesn’t Require Perfection
Guy Gardner is, by almost every account of the film including its warmest reviews, kind of insufferable, arrogant, self-important, constantly convinced he’s the most capable person in any room. Nathan Fillion clearly enjoys playing him that way, and the film leans into the comedy rather than softening him into someone more conventionally likable.
But here’s what makes Guy actually useful to the film’s larger point: he shows up when it counts, uses his Green Lantern ring effectively during the fight against Boravia, and contributes real value to a team that needed him there. That raises an uncomfortable question worth taking seriously, does someone have to be admirable as a person to be heroic in their actions? The film’s answer seems to be a pretty clear no. Guy gets to be immature, arrogant, and occasionally exhausting to be around, and none of that cancels out the fact that he was genuinely useful when the moment demanded it.
Lex Luthor: Ability Without Responsibility
This is where the film’s argument sharpens into its clearest contrast, and it connects directly back to Mr. Terrific. Michael Holt represents intelligence paired with responsibility. Lex Luthor represents intelligence paired with control instead, and the difference between those two men is really the entire moral spine of the film.
Luthor isn’t dangerous because he’s stupid or clumsy. He’s dangerous precisely because he’s exceptionally capable, arming Boravia in exchange for half of Jarhanpur’s territory, running a sophisticated public relations campaign to turn opinion against Superman, and ultimately creating Ultraman, a cloned weapon engineered specifically to be Superman’s physical superior, all as a coordinated plan rather than a single villain’s tantrum. Nicholas Hoult plays him less as cartoonish menace and more as pure, curdled envy, someone convinced he’s earned admiration through effort and intellect that the world keeps handing to an alien instead. So what actually separates extraordinary ability from heroism, if raw capability alone clearly isn’t enough? The film’s answer, developed across every other character discussed here, is responsibility, the thing Luthor has never once demonstrated any interest in.
Clark Kent: The Human Foundation of Superman’s Heroism
By this point in the film, and in this argument, it’s worth circling back to Clark specifically, because his role only fully makes sense once you understand everyone else’s. Clark spends real screen time at the Daily Planet, bantering with Jimmy Olsen, sparring conversationally with Lois, doing actual journalism rather than playing the hero. None of that requires spectacular ability, and that’s exactly the point.
Superman can pull someone out of a collapsing building. Clark can sit with that same person afterward, actually listen to what happened to them, and turn it into something other people read and understand. That’s a distinct skill from anything Superman does mid-fight, and the film treats it as genuinely valuable rather than just a convenient disguise. Clark’s continued connection to ordinary human life, rather than floating permanently above it as a symbol, gives Superman’s more dramatic heroism something to stay grounded in. Without Clark, Superman risks becoming purely a symbol other people project onto rather than someone who actually understands the people he’s protecting.
What These Heroes Reveal About Superman
Line all of this up and something clearer emerges than a simple ensemble cast. Superman gives the film compassion and choice. Lois gives it accountability. Mr. Terrific gives it expertise. Hawkgirl gives it decisive experience. Guy Gardner gives it an imperfect but genuine contribution. Clark gives it humanity. Lex gives it the film’s clearest warning about ability without responsibility.
None of these characters exist purely to make Superman’s world feel bigger or busier. They exist to make Superman himself easier to actually understand. Mr. Terrific’s expertise, placed directly alongside Superman’s power, helps show that his abilities are more than spectacle; they are a choice. Lois’s willingness to push back reveals the danger buried inside unquestioned good intentions, however sincere. Lex provides the clearest contrast, showing where extraordinary ability stops and responsibility has to begin. Clark, meanwhile, keeps Superman from becoming an abstraction by grounding his heroism in a genuine concern for specific, ordinary people.
Conclusion: Superman Isn’t the Only Definition of a Hero
Return to the question the film opens with, lying face-down and defeated in the snow: what actually makes someone heroic? Superman remains the film’s central heroic ideal, and the movie never really argues otherwise. But it deliberately surrounds him with other, genuinely different forms of heroism instead of treating his version as the only legitimate one. Heroism here can look like raw power, or intelligence, or the willingness to question someone you trust, or blunt decisive experience, or simply choosing to help despite being flawed and occasionally insufferable. It can also mean actually accepting responsibility for how real ability gets used, the one thing Lex Luthor never manages.
None of that diminishes Superman. If anything, it clarifies him. The film’s version of Superman is more compelling precisely because he isn’t presented as the only possible template for goodness. He’s one version of it, a genuinely admirable one, and his example gives the people standing around him enough room to go find their own.
