“You trust everyone and think everyone you ever met is, like… beautiful.”
“Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”

It feels like in order to get anything made in Hollywood these days, it has to be part of a franchise. So if it’s becoming more difficult to tell an original story, it can be smart to do the next best thing: use IP to explore interesting themes and make a statement. After all, some of our favorite genre movies are the ones that take familiar characters and tropes, and then use them to do something more.

This is a movie about one of the most famous superheroes of all time. It includes cartoonishly evil villains, space aliens, sci-fi portals, and a flying dog. It’s also a movie that is overtly political and willing to criticize the American government. While other studio blockbusters steer clear of politics, this one drives fast right on down the middle.

At some point in the last decade, the term “virtue signaling” was popularized online, referring to the act of expressing moral values for the purpose of showing others how good of a person you are. In reaction to this, a new phenomenon has emerged: “vice signaling.” This is when a person proudly expresses immoral or offensive opinions, seemingly with the intent to show how much they don’t care about what others think or feel. It seems like there’s a lot of that going around these days.

We’re all taught that we should be kind and honest and care about others, but doing those things requires vulnerability and introspection. It’s much easier to build a wall around your feelings and be an asshole. Plus you get to feel like you’re different from everyone else, like a rebel: “I’m not gonna be what they want me to be.” A younger version of me certainly saw the appeal.

But what happens when this attitude becomes mainstream? Are you really so different from everyone else when everyone else is as much of a dick as you are? Are you actually a rebel when your behavior and statements resemble those of the president of the United States? This is the political climate in which Superman is released.

Right now, a lot of people think it’s cool to not care about others, so this movie gives us a hero who is radically compassionate. Granted, it’s expected that the hero will be a good person who tries to save people, but it does feel like a response to the current time. And it goes even further by making it political: sometimes doing the right thing means going against the American government.

Superman is meant to show us the best of what humanity can be. So in a time when people seem encouraged to do their worst, Superman returned.