Superman (2025): Information Is A Weapon

[Image: Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor.]

You know, some previous depictions of Luthor have aimed to make him relatable. Imagining he and Clark Kent were childhood friends. Or, imagining that somewhere inside him there’s a buried kernal of humanity. The audience stays engaged because they’re waiting for one of those rare occasions when Luthor’s humanity re-appears, even if only briefly.

Also, some previous Lex Luthors have been entertaining to watch: clever, unpredictable, cool, even funny.

This film’s Lex Luthor is nothing like that. He’s a straight-up asshole, a walking bag of hatred.

We’re told Luthor hates Superman because Sup makes humanity look weak. We’re also told he wants to make himself a king.

I think what this Luthor really wants is to prove to himself and to all others that he is superior.

This places him in the trap that all egomaniacs fall into: the trap of having to continue proving their superiority, over and over again, with more violence in each iteration of the vicious cycle.

But one must grant that Luthor is smart. He’s watched and studied thousands of hours of film footage of Superman in combat, so he knows how to beat him down to a stalemate, if not a defeat.

And he poison’s Superman’s reputation in social media.

To put it another way: Luthor fights Superman using a weapon that Superman cannot defeat with a punch-out: information.

Most commentators on social media have hit upon the theme of Superman as an immigrant, or Superman as an unflagging champion of basic goodness.

But I think the more interesting theme of this film is Luthor’s use of information as a weapon.

Information - sound bytes, headlines, talking points, hashtags, misdirections, innuendos, and outright lies (of course a lie is the opposite of information, but we’ll let that slide here) - information reproduced and repeated ad-infinitum across multiple forms of mass media, until it’s easier to acquiesce than to criticize or doubt — information has the power to configure reality itself.

Superman becomes a villain, an tyrant in waiting, only because Luthor and his army of poison-pen writers say so. His power of say-so is greater than the first-person eye-witnessed lived-experience of people who Superman helped or saved.

We do not see the world as it is. We see it as men like Luthor make us see it.

Which, by the way, makes Lois Lane absolutely shine here. She’s a reporter; her whole job is to find and to share the truth. She, perhaps more than Superman, is Luthor’s counterpoint. Her brain overcomes the brawn of Luthor’s technology.

This, by the way, is also an instance of a particular trope in American film storytelling. It’s the trope of how an individual or small group of people can defeat a more powerful enemy, so long as they have the truth on their side. It is a very seductive idea. But I digress.

The film also gives us several other analogues to real world events. An off-the-books concentration camp set in a parallel universe; a manufactured war happening somewhere in eastern Europe.

The ugliness behind the fantasy of Luthor’s say-so is exposed and unvarnished. It was frankly uncomfortable to watch. Remember what I said about relatable Lex Luthors?

Yet all this heavy thematics is delivered with James Gunn’s trademark absurdist humour, which I certainly enjoyed. The audience in my screening tonight loved the dog.

Look, if all you want from a Superman film is a fun bit of fantasy escapism in which the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and there’s a dog who makes everything funny, you’ll get it.

Heck: at the rolling of the credits, the audience in my cinema tonight applauded.

But if you think a little more about these themes, you might get the hint, the whisper, the possibility of a deeper movie. One where Superman’s most important super-power is his possession of the truth.

Again, a seductive idea.

I just have a terrible feeling that the Lex Luthors of the real world are winning.