Superman; the hard, gruelling, back-breaking work of being kind.

So yes, Superman is everything you've heard - heartfelt, true to the source, leading with kindness, humane, bright, brilliant and political in the best way. It is also brilliantly shot, the sound was amazingly mixed, and the performances were both goofy and entirely Shakespearean.

Gunn drops us in Media Res - a very typical comic book beginning - counting us in by multiples of 3, until Superman crashes into frame. From then, the action and dialogue move at a neck-breaking pace, giving just enough information to allow us to keep up, but never too much. Each moment of maximum action and tension is cut with the deeply human and grounded core of Clark Kent - just as his authors in the comics had always developed.

Our Clark in Gunn's universe speaks almost identically to the one from the comics, too – that signature mix of innocence and hardened realism, wrapped up in ultimate hope and optimism. This doesn't feel like a film that falls into saccharine territory either – what Gunn is attempting to cover here (THANK GOD, BECAUSE NONE OF THE OTHER DUDES WERE GOING TO!), is that being nice, being kind, having hope, is hard work. It's saving even the squirrel. It's being mad at your coworkers for setting off explosives in the monster, instead of dragging it to a zoo somewhere. It's being gravely injured, and then trying to take off again to save more lives.

This is the Superman movie everyone has been waiting for - just another episode in the saga of a character we all know and love for being hopeful, kind, careful, and loving. Mixed in with Gunn's signature craziness - the fast pace, the gross outs, the brilliant sound design, and the real-life, grounded, often political point at the centre of it all - this really is one of the best superhero movies to come out in a while.

There's so much more to cover – this is the first film this year that I actually will go and see twice in the theatre – but in the meantime, thank you James, and thank you DC for making the genius decision of handing these characters to the one man in Hollywood skilled and learned enough to do them justice. (Gang)