by Nick Ferro, Editor
As I sit down to compile my thoughts on the second theatrical and latest entry in James Gunns’ new DC Universe I am inundated with conflicting thoughts. On one hand, Supergirl was my most anticipated movie of this year for many reasons. I liked Milly Alcock as the casting choice; I thought the angle of making her a party girl hiding from a traumatic past was both interesting and fresh. I had recently been introduced to the original source material Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and fell deeply in love with it as a story. But most of all, Supergirl is a relatively new yet familiar character in which a brand-new cinematic universe can mine for a fresh new take on a very well-trodden landscape. As much as I wanted to go into Supergirl with unbiased objectivity, I simply couldn’t. Not really a big deal, right? The movie might not be as good as I was hoping, and I can clarify that or the movie might to me be better than a general audience might think and I can write around that too. WRONG! Buckle up because the levels in which this movie fails is almost baffling.
Supergirl tells the story of Kara Zor-El the lone survivor of Argo City, a chunk of Krypton that survived the planet’s destruction. Hanging out in a red sun galaxy so she can get drunk and party for her 23rd birthday she encounters a young girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) who is seeking a champion to help get revenge on Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) who murdered her family. Kara is immediately not interested in helping, until Krypto is shot with a poisoned arrow by Krem and only he holds the antidote. With only three days to save Krypto, Kara must act quickly which requires the movie’s pacing to increase to breakneck speeds as we hop from one set piece to another. In between moments of weird sci-fi aliens and bar fights Ruthye is able to spend some time getting to know Kara’s backstory through flashbacks.
On the surface, Supergirl is a story about not letting grief consume you with a secondary message of how revenge will not make you feel better. Sadly, the movie’s message is puddle deep. Kara is a broken person who feels like she has no real home other than on the road in the company of Krypto. Her relationship with Krypto, shown in the opening, is the most developed relationship in the whole movie. Which is a problem when they are immediately separated in the first 15 minutes. The screenplay adds phone calls from Clark (David Corenswet) to tell the audience what he believes Kara’s arc should culminate in, but it feels more like a cameo to remind audiences of a movie most of them were on the fence about (for the record, I loved Superman and feel like it was a great start to a new DCU). What should be the true relationship of the movie, Ruthye and Kara, results in them barely interacting outside of the same three lines of dialogue: “Stay here,” “you can’t come with me,” and “revenge is bad.” The movie never gives the audience a reason to feel like they are growing closer as travel companions. There is never a moment where Ruthye gets a moment to show her worth for Kara, earning even a begrudging respect (a moment that she does have, but with another character, not Kara). They experience these events at the same time, but not together.
It also doesn’t help that Kara is doing her best to be quite unlikable. Which I get, she’s been through a lot, but the screenplay fails her in so many ways. Rather than keeping up the façade of the tough loner not wanting to get involved, she is constantly doing or saying the right thing or contradicting something she said a minute earlier. Had they made her rougher around the edges, her relationship with Ruthye with an eventual “softening” it would have felt more earned despite the lack of relationship building. But instead, we are treated to a nice person acting crabby and rude for most of the movie until she decides not to be crabby and rude anymore.
Half way through the movie, Lobo (Jason Momoa) is introduced as a way to emphasize how good Kara actually is because she has at least been showing a conscience throughout. The Lobo character is one fans of the comics, and animated shows will know and love but never has there been a character more shoehorned into a story that felt like nothing but pure fan service. Was Lobo interesting and cool? Sure. Momoa is literally the PERFECT casting choice for this character. However, his inclusion in the movie was anything but. On top of most of his scenes being surrounded by CGI flames and offering a few deus ex machina moments, he barely interacts with our leads, and it felt like this Supergirl movie got in the way of his Lobo movie.
Aside from the script being lackluster and the story feeling rushed, the effects felt very unpolished. Once again Hollywood has opted to save a buck and not give the animators the time to create a finished product. The solution: Make everything dark, dim, move too fast to see, or full of dust and clouds to hide the action. This was incredibly disappointing because were promised: Nothing gets greenlit until it has a perfect script and we can deliver the best experience. It isn’t a good look when your second movie has a pretty generic bottom of the barrel script on par with the lowest tier MCU entries AND looks like you cut every corner imaginable to rush it to theaters before being ready. I am even more upset by this decision because Supergirl, and more importantly, Milly Alcock deserved better.
Every time a comic book movie with a woman in the lead role comes out, so too emerges a small vocal troll army of the internet’s slime filled dredges. Supergirl was almost certain to be the target of “review bombs” or negative impact simply because the main characters dared to be born without a Y chromosome. For the past year, Alcock has already been facing an onslaught of men, who I can only assume, have never known a woman’s touch, disparaging her looks all over social media. All this to say, Supergirl already had an uphill battle, to not treat this movie with the most care, resources, and creativity available to deliver the best version of the character possible feels like such a disservice. A disservice that feels like an unforced error when you consider the source material it was derived from. Which brings me to this movie’s biggest crime.
Woman of Tomorrow provided the bones of this story and for the most part they hit the major set pieces and moments which make this qualify for the loosest definition of an “adaptation.” However, where Supergirl fails, Woman of Tomorrow succeeds, which is it’s messaging. Woman of Tomorrow tells the story from Ruthye’s perspective and although she can be seen as an unreliable narrator at times, she is ultimately recounting a story of a woman who is deeply broken but despite that, still finds a way to be good. Which Supergirl tries to pay lip service to but in my opinion fails. Throughout the story you see Supergirl being put in positions where she could simply walk away and continue on with her quest to save Krypto but always ends up helping those in need. By doing so she leads by example, so when the time comes for Ruthye to take her revenge the message “revenge will never provide you with healing” really hits home and the decision made on how to deal with Krem is ultimately one that services that ideal. This movie spits in the face of that message while still trying to claim it as its own. I won’t spoil either version of the story, just know that the movie and book endings are vastly different and not for the better.
And speaking of the most forgettable generic comic book movie villain, the movie makes Krem of the Yellow Hills this all-powerful evil man, leader of a group of evil men, who do unspeakable things. But in the original story he was just a regular man. One who did evil things and joined a group of evil men who gave him refuge but ultimately him being just a man was tantamount to Ruthye’s arc as well as Kara’s. By making him this larger-than-life figure capable of standing up to Kara on her best day took away Ruthye’s ability to have her own agency in this story which ultimately took away from Kara’s message to her at the end.
I simply do not understand the Hollywood desire to take a revered story and try to adapt it without keeping any of the key details that make the story revered. The sheer flipping hubris of thinking you can do it better is beyond me. Is it fair that I am comparing the movie to its source material and not judging it solely on its own merits? Probably not. But if they didn’t want to risk the comparison they shouldn’t have tried to poorly adapt this story in the first place. In my defense, I did my best to judge it objectively up top and saved my nerd rant about story adaptations for the end.
One positive I will leave you with to prove that I didn’t hate this movie is that I really did like the message that Kara’s mom gave to her before leaving for Earth. I don’t remember the whole speech which really struck me as the only piece of great writing in the whole film, but I loved her message of, you can still be tough and brash and bold so long as you are good. This is probably the most subtle bit of female empowerment messaging in the whole movie and as a father sitting next to his two tween girls that is a message that I hope they both take to heart.
Supergirl has many, many flaws. It is not a movie I have any desire to watch again which pains me greatly based on my level of anticipation and hope. But I am sure some people will have fun with it, and I hope it finds its audience. However, if you want my advice, skip the movie and go buy or rent Woman of Tomorrow because you will get the best version of this story and will not be disappointed.
Rating: Didn’t Like It
Supergirl is currently playing in theaters.
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