Pop culture is not a smooth evolution. It is a pendulum, heavy and rusty, crashing from one extreme to the next. For nearly twenty years that pendulum stayed buried in the dark. We lived through an age where superhero films equated maturity with misery, grit with realism, and hope with childishness. Christopher Nolan set the template. Gotham became a post 9/11 fever dream, a city where justice arrived wrapped in trauma and Kevlar. Brilliant, yes, but also a tonal gravity well.

Then came Man of Steel, which did not only borrow Nolan’s mood but amplified it into operatic devastation. Snyder’s Superman was beautiful and brooding, mythic and distant. He punched through skyscrapers like a god in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He saved so few people that Batman had to join the franchise just to file a complaint, and kind of kick his ass, at least until he heard the now infamous “Martha.” Metropolis stopped feeling like a city and started feeling like collateral damage with a ZIP code.

This version of heroism, tragic and violent and hollowed out, did not emerge in a vacuum. It arrived in a decade infected by a political virus that chewed through norms, decency, and the social contract. It trained us to fear outsiders, to distrust empathy, to see cruelty as strength. It demonized immigrants while selling patriotism like a counterfeit cure. And culture, being a mirror, reflected that sickness back at us.

Hope collapsed. Cynicism became currency. Optimism became the punchline.

But here is the twist no one saw coming. Optimism became the most rebellious thing in pop culture.

That is why the new Superman movie hits like a Molotov cocktail filled with super powering sunlight.

This film turns away from the rubble and steps into the day. It does not apologize for sincerity. It does not wink or smirk to reassure us that it is self-aware. It offers something far more dangerous. A Superman who actually saves people. A Superman who believes in connection. A Superman whose power is measured not in collateral damage but in compassion.

In 2025 that is hardcore.

THE CULTURAL COMEDOWN FROM DARKNESS

To understand why this film feels revolutionary, you must track the psychology of the genre. Nolan’s films were a response to real fear, surveillance, terror, uncertainty. They made sense. But instead of evolving, superhero cinema froze around that fear until the only stories we told were soaked in shadows.

Snyder’s Krypton was a war zone, and his Earth was not much better. His Superman felt less like an immigrant and more like a walking natural disaster trying not to sneeze. It was gorgeous, operatic filmmaking, but it was also the kind of storytelling a culture turns to when it is exhausted and angry and convinced the future is already lost.

Then came the real-world years of institutional decay, weaponized cruelty, and walls built not from concrete but ideology. We were told to fear people crossing borders. We were told outsiders threatened our way of life. We were told that humanity was a closed club and that compassion was naïve.

Which is ironic, because Superman, the greatest hero ever created, is a literal undocumented alien.

But that truth got buried beneath the noise. Until now.

THE NEW SUPERMAN MOVIE. HOPE AS COUNTERCULTURE

The new Superman film snaps the pendulum free and sends it arcing back toward the light. It shows us a hero who runs into burning buildings instead of using them as set dressing. A hero who does not treat humanity as a species to observe, but a community to protect. A hero who speaks softly, stands his ground, and shows up when it counts.

What is shocking is not the spectacle. It is the sincerity.

In an age where irony is the default and cynicism is the algorithmic drug of choice, sincerity is subversive. Optimism is anti-authoritarian. Genuine hope, unbranded and unmonetized, is punk rock.

This Superman does not brood on rooftops. He listens. He helps. He engages. It feels forbidden, almost dangerous, because we have been conditioned to believe that gentleness is weakness and that compassion is politically inconvenient.

This film says no. Hope is not retreat. Hope is revolt. Hope is the refusal to let the darker timeline win.

SUPERMAN THE HUMAN, SUPERMAN THE REBEL

The new film rejects the old idea of Superman as an outsider peering in. It insists on something louder, riskier, and more intimate. It insists that an alien can be fully and defiantly human. Not genetically, not legally, but in the ways that actually matter. Compassion. Responsibility. Connection. Choice. The movie argues that humanity is not a birthright. It is a practice. A discipline. A decision you make every day to give a damn. And Superman, more than anyone, chooses it relentlessly.

This reaches its peak in the final confrontation with Lex. It is not a brawl or a demolition derby of gods smashing cities. It is a philosophical knife fight. Superman stands there, grounded and unmasked in every sense, and delivers the most radical line of the entire genre.

“I am as human as anyone.”

It is not denial. It is defiance. A rebel yell of belonging. In that moment he is not the Other. He is the reminder that humanity is big enough, generous enough, and hopeful enough to include even someone who arrived from the sky in a rocket. The rebellion is not in claiming difference. The rebellion is in claiming kinship.

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHTER THAN THE DARKNESS WANTS

The new Superman is not nostalgia. It is a counterpunch. A bright, defiant, immigrant hearted answer to a decade of darkness. A reminder that kindness is not weakness, empathy is not naïve, and hope is not passive. Hope is action. Hope is resistance. Hope is a fist raised in the sun.

And right now, there is nothing more punk rock than a hero who still believes in us and who stands tall enough to say, without fear or apology, “I am as human as anyone.”

About the Author

Marke is the producer and co-host of the Saturday Morning Cereal Podcast, the show that celebrates the themes of Saturday Morning TV that we not only grew up with, but that grew up with us. He and the team talk with the talent and creatives who continue to shape the pop culture we love.

Hosted on Spreaker.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and visit mattypradio.com for more episodes, interviews, and Comic-Con and pop culture coverage.