i saw superman yesterday. the plot is that lex luthor is up to no good.

(there will be uncensored spoilers throughout the rest of this thing.)

the film has a lot of funny movie logic, but basically does what it needs to do. i liked how perfunctorily the monsters of the week were treated, the excessive number of times superman stops what he's doing to stop something from falling on someone¹, and lex luthor's technique of beating superman by micromanaging bizarro from a mission control center with a walkie talkie.

the movie's g-rated and almost completely bloodless.² every time superman bodies someone, there's an obligatory chaser shot of the goon writhing around alively. the themes and characterization are accordingly light.³

afterwards, i was like "well, that was kind of bad but i also enjoyed myself"

but whence "that was kind of bad" ? were my expecations that this movie was going to be anything other than what it was? if i enjoyed myself, what's the actual problem?

i think it's that i actually have a secret fascination with the idea of superman, and am really curious about how other people run the thought experiment of "what would happen if one person had the ultimate monopoly on violence?" james gunn chose to write a dramatic story, not a polsci wargame, and so i was a little disappointed.

the superman movie i want to see is utilitarian superman hellbent on creating the conditions for global liberal democracy utopia.

some things he would do:

• throw all the nukes into the sun
• drop the worst guys into a volcano on live TV
• abduct all the world leaders and take them to an private island resort for 6 months where they have to microdose LSD and do team building exercises⁴
• launch a global journalism fund that creates multinational newsrooms around the world with a rigourous commitment to truth-finding, calling out corruption, and fostering a cooperative consensus of reality
• instruct all governments to implement a plan that will end all factory farming in 2 years
• create united nations v2, staffed by the recently reprogrammed world leaders, mandated to create a constitution that sets the rules for how superman can be democratically controlled from there on

and i think there are a tonne of ways you could complexify the plot for dramatic tension, if watching a rube goldberg machine isn't your thing:

• the slippery slope from superman smashing the killer drone factory in ukraine to intervening in light border skirmishes between india and pakistan to zipping around the philippine sea to search every fishing ship for weapons.
• the supermedia organization criticizing superman the most vocally, testing his commitment to the ideal of free speech
• arguments from citizens that authoritarianism is bad, no matter how benevolent it is (though this is a cliché found in every gritty comic book)
• moral leadership not filtering down into each country's institutions i.e. the CIA rejecting its proselyte president, and each tier of the state needing its own session at Camp PLUR
• phycisists and economists insisting he simply becomes a transitional power source

if you wanted to be extra cynical⁵, you could have the movie show superman's transformation from ambitious idealist to the very veidt-style existential threat that humanity unites to defeat, but i think i'd prefer the version where, despite some bumps and unintended consequences along the way, things mostly work out, and the world reaches a stable form of peace and prosperity.

i think that's the more subversive choice: taking superman's incorruptibility seriously and exploring what world peace might actually look like. to ask what if the real conflict isn't "will superman become evil" but "can humanity be forced to be free?"

that would be the real punk rock thing to do.⁶