2008 may seem recent, but it was a different era: Twitter was a bird sound, not a digital colosseum that rhymed with your ex. We didn’t make, judge, or keep friends based on ideological leanings. And people went to movies on vague trailers, not pre-digested social media takes.
Enveloped by this innocence and with zero expectations, I watched Iron Man. I left the cinema entertained and shocked. Beyond its stylised mayhem, the film was a middle finger at the American war machine, the famed 'military-industrial-complex'. It laid bare the grubby marriage of capitalism and carnage in the Middle East, laid out in the deliciously cynical Stark-ism: "Peace means having a bigger stick". A line so brutally honest, it echoed through the next decade and a half of global geopolitics and American foreign policy.
Fast forward to 2025, and the divided world is busy live-streaming its vivisection. Enter James Gunn, a man permanently wired for subversion, now handed the keys to DC's crumbling empire. He remembers what worked for Iron Man – the political guts, the self-aware critique baked into the spectacle: he was playing in Marvel's sandbox, after all. So, when he was handed the mission to revive Superman, aka rescue DC, he went to pilfer the Iron Man playbook.
The catch? It is 17 years old, and patrolled by heavily armed, perpetually offended ideologues from both flanks. Gunn himself knows the sting of cancel culture (courtesy the Left), and the American Right, which smells "woke" in everything, waiting with pitchforks for him to stumble.
So, how does Superman fare as a political film? Let's just say it is less a bold manifesto like Iron Man, and more a nervous whisper. If Iron Man strutted onto the stage declaring the emperor had no clothes, Superman carefully points to his shoelace being untied… maybe… if you squint to decode the metaphor generously. Superman, in essence, is what Iron Man would be if made in the hyper-sensitive, outrage-addicted 2025 – a beautifully rendered, slightly cowardly, politically schizophrenic mess, terrified of its own shadow yet possessing a fundamentally decent heart.
The 'copying' of Iron Man in Superman might not be intentional and extremely subtle, but to those of us who remember the 2008 film, it's as clear as Tony Stark's narcissism. Here's a catalogue of the 'inspirations' that I could gather in just one viewing of Superman.
The "Save the Foreign Kid" trope: Stark jets into a cold hellscape and plucks a child, his father and the entire village from certain doom. Superman? Same dusty hellscape, same wide-eyed kid. But in 2008, the village and the kid could look Muslim wearing a winter woollen skull cap. Not in 2025, where the main kid in question, raising a Superman flag, appears more black, with a slight Middle Eastern influence, and has a definite intention to conceal his Middle Eastern heritage and accentuate his black identity.
Journalists and moral awakenings: Tony Stark beds a reporter whose subsequent investigation exposes the sins of Stark Industries, which has been funding both sides of the carnage. Her questioning of Tony awakens him to the truth. Similarly, Superman's wide-eyed naivete is shattered when his reporter girlfriend, Lois Lane, turns a romantic interlude into a hard interview spotlighting the messy implications of his unilateral interventions.
The billionaire boogeyman: Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) was the greedy, envious businessman, the dark capitalist in Iron Man. Lex Luthor here? He's Stane after nearly two decades of crypto, Twitter troll farms, and Elon Musk. He radiates the specific billionaire malaise that Mr Musk also exhibits: a chronically unhappy demeanour despite unimaginable wealth, coupled with bottomless, petty envy and the emotional maturity of a spoiled child. He's not just evil; he's influencer-level degenerate.
The noble foreign sacrifice: In Iron Man, it's Yinsen, the brilliant doctor who saves Stark but dies buying him time. A meaningful, heroic death that cements Stark's purpose. In Superman? There's a Middle Eastern man who… feeds Superman? And then dies, inside a pocket black hole (huh?), for… feeding him? It's like Gunn is poking fun at Yinsen, or too scared to show a non-Christian actually saving Superman.
The robot posse: Stark had J.A.R.V.I.S. and the charmingly incompetent Dum-E and U. Superman gets… numbered bots? Generic, helpful automatons woven from the same plot points. Because apparently, even Kryptonian tech needs a minion brigade.
The symbolic burger: Stane offers Tony a greasy American burger, a loaded symbol of complicity and shared guilt. Superman winks hard with Lex Luthor offering a burger to the villainous ruler of Boravia. An utterly superfluous bit that exists, I suspect, purely as a Marvel fan easter egg and a not-so-subtle dig at the infamous Netanyahu-Trump "bonding over burgers" moment. It's meta-commentary delivered via fast food. Deliciously cynical, utterly pointless to the plot. Peak Gunn.
Copy Book Ending: And the big fight at the end of both films? Again similar? What does Iron Man fight – Stane, in a cloned, bigger Iron Man suit who hadn't yet figured out the 'icing' problem. In Superman? Not the same, similar. But I won’t get into its details, because that would be a spoiler of sorts for those of you who haven’t seen it.
Therefore, structural theft occurs at multiple levels. But the soul of the borrowing, the political critique, is where things get… interesting.
Iron Man landed in 2008 on an America that was bruised but still relatively cocky post-9/11 and could just about stomach a movie where its weapons merchant hero realises he’s but a merchant of death. The critique was direct, brutal, with a slight sugar coating of rock music and Robert Downey Jr.'s trademark smirk. It asked: "What if we are the bad guys funding the chaos?"
Cut to 2025, and directness is suicidal today (ask Gunn whose single, ancient tweet got him fired from Marvel). Hence, Superman's critique is filtered through many layers of allegory, metaphor, and sheer terror of offending anyone with a Twitter account and a grievance. The core conflict – wealthy, militarised Boravia vs. displaced, impoverished Jarhanpur – is forced to look like it isn't even inspired by Gaza/Israel, even though it seems obvious to anyone following the news.
Boravia's tanks and planes are pitted against Jarhanpur's emaciated civilians clutching homemade weapons (including, yes, I saw, an obligatory AK-47 – the Kalashnikov being the universal symbol of desperate resistance, apparently). The Boravian ruler? A wild-haired, semi-bald, "security above all else" zealot who is corrupt inside? If that's not Benjamin Netanyahu cosplaying as a comic book villain, I'll eat my copy of Joe Sacco's Palestine.
But Superman can't say any of this. Instead, the political weight rests on the questions asked. Lois Lane grilling Superman about the arrogance of intervening unilaterally on foreign soil? That's a political moment. And it’s potent precisely because Superman is an alien. An immigrant. A fact baked into his very DNA by his creators – two Jewish kids from Cleveland imagining a saviour from the stars.
In 1938, it was a hopeful metaphor for a nation that was literally the land of immigrants. In 2025, it's a kryptonite for the Right. An "illegal alien" with god-like power intervening in human affairs? The mere premise is enough to trigger Fox News into a week-long fit.
This is the Gordian Knot Gunn tries to untie. Iron Man critiqued American policy as an American story. Superman critiques global power imbalances and interventionism via the lens of an outsider, which should be bolder, but feels safer perhaps precisely because he's not "one of us". It allows the critique to be deflected: that's just Superman's problem, not America's.
Gunn's convoluted route isn't laziness; it's a survival instinct. The directness of 2008 would get him crucified twice over before the first trailer even dropped.
Both films are, ultimately, about the "American Way". Stark embodied its flawed, entrepreneurial, destructive genius. Superman stands for its aspirational ideals – truth, justice, and helping the helpless. Both films dissect the flaws in those concepts. Stark learns his weapons fuel the chaos he fights. Superman learns his good intentions can trample sovereignty and ignite global panic. The stark (pun intended) difference lies in the cultural context of the times the films were made in.
In 2008, America could laugh at itself a little. It could stomach a hero confronting his complicity. 2025 America? It's a nation perpetually on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown. Nuance is dead. Metaphor is suspect. Semantics is a war zone.
Gunn, already cancelled once by the Left for decade-old edgy jokes, knows that a single misstep – a line too direct, a villain too obviously modelled on a real-world figure – could see the Right unleash their outrage hounds. His Superman is hence the ultimate tightrope walk, also making him the perfect man to write and direct it. He hasn't been cancelled by the Right yet, but the potential hangs over the film.
In today's perverse logic, true political neutrality might just be getting equally hated by everyone. Only then can you claim the dubious honour of having truly spoken truth to… well, everyone's power.
This is the America (and the larger world to an extent) Superman flies over now. An America so fractured, so ideologically septic, that if Jesus Christ himself descended onto DC (Washington, not the comic publisher) tomorrow to preach the Sermon on the (Capitol) hill verbatim – you know, that bit about loving thy neighbour, giving to the poor, turning the other chee – he'd be instantly branded a radical socialist Antifa Marxist supersoldier by the Right, denounced as a patriarchal oppressor by the fringe Left, and swiftly transferred to a black site in Guatemala by Homeland Security before he could even attempt that whole "resurrection" trick. There wouldn't be a cross; there'd be a deportation order stamped "CANCELLED".
Superman desperately tries to copy Iron Man's soul, hoping the old magic still works. But the magic was in the fearless clarity of Marvel, Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and screenwriters Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, John August and Art Marcum. The magic was of the times – unencumbered by everyman's politics.
Gunn's Superman is a fascinating, often visually stunning, occasionally heartfelt artefact of our paranoid age – a superhero film trying desperately to say something meaningful while wearing a muzzle of its own making. It's half-hearted when Stark was brazen. Yet, beneath the layers of self-protective cynicism and obligatory bot sidekicks, it still tries to point towards hope, towards helping the helpless.
It's right-hearted, trapped in a world that punishes you for telling the truth to power. It might revive DC, but it'll also be a grimly hilarious monument to how hard it is to tell a simple truth about power when everyone's too busy preparing their cancellation notice. Peace might mean having the bigger stick, but survival in 2025 means knowing exactly who you're allowed to point your finger at. And Superman, bless his Kryptonian heart, is still figuring that out thanks to Gunn.