Between being a part of the U.S. Army Military Police and spending the past 15 years involved with video production, Andrew List has taken his lifelong connection with the character of Superman and expressed his views on him in the new independent film, Superman: Solar, which, following an Indiegogo campaign, has been filmed and released for everyone to see.
“I’ve been attracted to the character since I was a kid,” explains List. “I would watch the movies over and over and continued to like him as a I grew up, but for different reasons. As a kid, it’s exciting to see a guy transform into this incredible being, but as I got older, it was his humanity that kept drawing me back to him. He’s this guy who, if he wanted to, could be an Omni-Man, Homelander or ‘Superman: Red Son.’ He could be a tyrant and force people to do his bidding, but he chooses to live among us. He chooses to be stuck in traffic. He chooses to have a regular job. He chooses to relate to all these things that make us human, so he understands all of our human problems and relates to them so deeply.”
This he credits to the way Clark Kent was raised by the Kents in Smallville, where he learned what it was to work hard, care about people and all of the small, but important, things in life. “That’s what’s always been Superman’s greatest thing to me,” he notes. “As humans, we often will look at a situation and say, ‘Not my problem.’ But Superman never has that outlook and it’s something that I think we can all strive to try to be better at. It’s a hard standard, obviously, but he’s someone who will fight off aliens, land and then say, ‘Hey, there’s a guy with a flat tire. Let me help him change that real quick.’”
He point out that Superman: Solar has taken inspiration from All-Star Superman and Superman: Grounded, but, most importantly, from things in the character’s history that he’s always wanted to see brought into live action. Helping him to do so is Glenn Kiil in the dual role of Clark Kent and Superman, the two of them having met each other when they served in the U.S. Army.
In speaking with List, one can’t help but sense how he’s been touched by the optimism and hope that Superman represents, but it also raises the question of what, in these more cynical and divided times, the Man of Steel can represent for the 21st century.
“This,” he offers, “very specifically will be touched on in the film. There’s a point where he tells Lois Lane that he’s here to do what’s right, to which she asks who decides what’s right? He says, ‘Well, I do, Ms. Lane,' which leads her to ask him if that means he’s going to by a tyrant. He replies, ‘No, but I want my decisions to be my own. If I make the wrong ones, I’m the one that’s going to be responsible for that. I don’t want someone telling me what to do and I don’t want somebody else making those decisions for me.’ Obviously I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is that everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but they’re not entitled to violence. Not everybody will love Superman, because that’s the reality of this day and age, but that doesn’t ever sway Superman himself. What makes him Superman to me is that regardless of whether or not people are saying, ‘I don’t like this guy doing what he's doing,’ he’s still there to say, ‘I’m here to do what’s right. I’m still here to help somebody get a cat out of a tree and I’m still here to stop that asteroid from striking Earth.”