The moment that got the single biggest reaction at the packed screening of Superman that I attended was when Superman saves a squirrel. It takes place during the kaiju battle, it’s over in seconds, and it’s composed of two shots. In the first, we see a wall of debris roaring toward the innocent creature, and a streak of blue and red whisking it away. In the second shot, Superman (David Corenswet) flies into the frame in a peaceful spot away from the battle, gently sets the squirrel down, then returns to the fray.
It’s played for laughs, and it got a huge one at my screening. It’s a perfectly executed visual gag. The timing is immaculate. The contrast with the scale of the monster disaster engulfing Metropolis is absurd. It’s a joke at this Superman’s expense, consistent with the movie’s portrayal of his niceness and wholesomeness as adorable and kind of dorky, almost to the point of being naïve and short-sighted. This is a Superman who likes cheesy pop-punk, lets a dog bully him, and can’t tell when an interview — or a talk with his girlfriend, or both at the same time — is going badly. He has godlike powers, but he’s also kind of ridiculous.
Thanks to the charm of Corenswet’s performance and the warm tone writer-director James Gunn brings to the movie, though, the audience’s laughter at him is never mocking or mean-spirited. It’s affectionate and delighted. Such scrupulous goodness is absurd, but it’s still good, and in a world of many other metahumans, it’s what makes him special.
There’s a meta layer to the joke, too. It’s one of several barbs Gunn directs at the previous cinematic incarnation of the character, as portrayed by Henry Cavill and conceived by Zack Snyder in 2013’s Man of Steel. In that film, Superman allows his rageful personal battle with Zod to trash Metropolis at the presumed cost of many human lives. In this animal-loving movie, Superman won’t allow an existential battle with a giant monster to claim the soul of a single rodent. It’s the stake in the heart of the Snyderverse.
Alternatively, you can read it as a tribute to a more innocent era in superhero cinema. The 1966 Batman movie has a wonderful comic sequence in which Batman runs around trying to dispose of a bomb, but everywhere he turns there is a marching band, or some nuns, or a stack of butane canisters, or a family of ducks. 2025’s Superman can relate: Some days you just can’t get rid of a massive kaiju.
But there’s also a level on which the squirrel moment isn’t a joke at all, and that Gunn’s intent with it is deadly serious. I think it’s possible to argue that this seeming throwaway two-shot sequence resonates so strongly in the theater because it locates the movie’s emotional and philosophical core, and the core of Gunn’s conception of the character.
Repeatedly, Gunn shows Superman using his powers to save individual people (and animals) from danger, and these moments carry as much weight in the storytelling as his fights. The squirrel gag occurs within the context of a larger set piece in which Superman is mostly trying to contain the damage done as the Justice Gang battle the kaiju, including pleading with them not to kill the rampaging beast. The climax of the fight is not the Gang’s gross execution of the monster; it’s Superman using his might to gently lower its body to the ground in a park, leaving the neighboring buildings without a scratch.
That moment is echoed later in the movie in a spectacular scene in which Superman stops a toppling building from collapsing into a bridge and wiping out the citizens of Metropolis who are fleeing across it. The tiny figure holding up the mass of falling masonry all by himself is pure old-school Superman iconography. But again, Gunn’s focus is telling. He doesn’t seek to maximalize Superman’s heroism by depicting a huge crowd of people below, gesturing at the thousands of lives the hero is saving. Instead, he makes the moment personal, showing us a single, desperate mother on the bridge whose car has stalled, and who manages to escape because of Superman’s timely intervention.
The best shot in the film’s original trailer — and the first inkling I had that Gunn had perfectly understood the assignment — shows Superman, in slow motion, whooshing in to shield a little girl from an explosion of debris, again during the kaiju fight. It’s a very close mirror of the squirrel moment, only with staging that’s dramatic and cool rather than comic and goofy.
For Gunn’s Superman, every life is sacred, and every moment of heroism is intimate and one-to-one. When he finally confronts Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) face-to-face, he speaks to him angrily but with compassion, because in his eyes, Lex also needs to be saved. It’s not just that this Superman is here to save the world; he’s here to save you. Even if you’re a villain — or a squirrel.
