With its queer protagonist, colorful aesthetic, and political undertones, it had all the ingredients for a cinematic breakthrough that could have re-centered the existing rhetoric surrounding Mexican and queer realities. Instead, we got a fever dream of queer clichés and a narrow-minded European fantasy of Mexico—a superficial spectacle that stumbles clumsily over the very identities it claims to uplift.

Gunn's Superman inadvertently maps the persistence of Hollywood's most enduring hierarchy: the sounds of heroism versus the sounds of Otherness or, frankly, evil.