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Goodbye, Man of Steel
Sean Dietrich
Aug 23

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First, a little about me.

I’ve been a Superman fan since I was old enough to fill up a diaper. I used to attend school wearing Superman pajamas beneath my civilian clothes, posing as a mild-mannered first-grader. My mother made me stop this in college.

So when opening credits to Superman began, I was actually excited. We in the theater audience applauded. I was wearing one of my Superman T-shirts. I own three.

I, like many other working stiffs my age, have been waiting to see the new Superman movie—the highest grossing box office hit of the year. Which was why most of us in the theater were middle-aged.

Of course, we all knew the movie would suck. That’s just Hollywood. But maybe the movie would have SOME redeeming qualities.

Um…

When the movie ended, nobody was applauding. Most of the people, young and old, were just sitting there, blinking.

I left the theater wondering what the name of Christopher Reeve we had just watched. Not only because the movie was, perhaps, the worst movie in the history of human civilization. Not only because the film featured a beat-you-over-the-head political message involving fictitious Russian presidents, refugees, and—I’m serious—social-media spider monkeys whose sole job was to post false political information online.

It was because of what the movie says about the American Kid.

This is the world our kids live in. THIS is the bleak reality we’ve given them. It’s no longer a world where Superman stops bank robberies, or rescues fair maidens from the railroad tracks.

Neither is it a world with bicycles, baseball cards attached to the spokes, building forts, or playing in the woods until dark.

In short, the Superman movie was all about technology. The heroes all used smartphones. Heroes and villains alike used social media as one of their main weapons. Every scene centralized around some form of AI.

Likewise, the movie took darkly violent turns. We, the audience, were treated to an execution scene wherein an innocent shopkeeper was placed onto his knees then shot in the head, Gestapo-style, as Superman was forced to watch.

Some of the adults in the theater actually turned their heads during that scene.

One of the moms in the theater whispered to her husband. “I can’t believe they showed that.”

It was not the Superman of my childhood. There was no bending of steel bars with his bare hands. No stopping bullets with his chest. In fact, there WERE no live action sequences—computer generated effects occupied at least 99.99 percent of the footage. There was a dog in the movie, but it wasn’t even real.

“That’s an AI dog,” a kid in the theater announced.

When we exited the theater en masse, nobody seemed particularly thrilled. Nobody was even talking. The young people were all playing on their phones, silent as lambs. The parents were playing on their devices. No conversations. No socializing.

When I got outside to the sidewalk, the sunlight hurt my eyes. And I was deeply saddened. What have we done to our society? Has the American childhood become one giant technologically induced attention deficit disorder episode?

I was lost in thought when a few kids exiting the theater noticed my Superman shirt.

“Nice shirt,” one said.

The kid wore an identical shirt.

“You, too,” I said.

Then I asked what they thought of the movie.

They laughed. “It sucked.”

And just when I couldn’t have agreed any more heartily with them, they unlocked two bikes, bid me farewell, and rode away.