Supergirl

The woman of tomorrow gets dragged by a messy script

Craig Gllespie’s Supergirl is a bombastic summer superhero eyeball scorching spectacle with killer performances, but a thin script.

Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), Superman’s (David Corenswet) cousin and another survivor from the destruction of planet Krypton, was not raised on a farm in Kansas. She grew up in the floating city of Argo, the last bit of Krypton preserved by her father Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and her coming-to-America story is very different. When the inhabitants of Argo begin dying off from Kryptonite poisoning, Zor-El conceived the idea to build another escape pod like his brother did for baby Kal-El and send Kara to live on Earth with Kal-El, and therefore survive.

Zor-El and Kara’s mother Alura (Emily Beecham) send her to Earth with very different moral guidance than Jor-El did for his child. As we know from Superman, James Gunn put his own spin on the legend by revealing that Jor-El meant for his son to conquer and subjugate the people of Earth, but him being raised in Kansas by the kind-hearted, salt of the earth Martha and Jonathan Kent gave him human-centered ethics. Kara’s mother, however, insists that whatever her situation presents, she should always choose in favor of good.

Superman welcomes her and her lively scruffy dog, Krypto, to Earth with open arms, but she seems to consider Clark to be something of a bumpkin, and Earth a low-rent backwater. Compared to Krypton, she’s not wrong. She lived among gods and does not feel compelled to fit in with the talking monkeys. She’s depressed, displaced, and goes to planets with red suns to drink, as the red sun reduces her superpowers and allows the booze to take effect.

This is where we meet her on her 23rd birthday, in a bar on a remote red-sun planet, drinking her face off. In the midst of her revels she is confronted by Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a teenaged local whose family was killed by a brigand named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye wants revenge and needs muscle to get it. While Kara is explaining to Ruthye that she can’t help her, Krem steals Kara’s spaceship and in the process wounds Krytpo with a poison projectile. Krypto will die in 3 days if he doesn’t get the antidote.

Now Kara has a reason to hate Krem and to track him down to acquire the antidote for Krypto. The clock is ticking, Ruthye’s vengeance is a side-quest, and Supergirl swings into action. Along the way she is coincidentally assisted by Lobo (Jason Momoa), an incredibly powerful bounty-hunter addicted to chaos. Lobo is pretty much Loki on a Harley.

Before we dive into grievances and nitpicks, I need to make something clear. There has been a lot of misogynistic bullshit from incels, Snyder-bros, anti-feminists, and just plain garden variety douchebags in the social media leading up to the Supergirl film. It should not be tolerated, and the boys who trade in such click-bait manosphere sewage are horrible, disgusting excuses for humans. Come at me brah, it won’t end well for you.

I wanted to love Supergirl. I’m a dedicated Guardians of the Galaxy, Peacemaker, Suicide Squad, and Creature Commandos fan, and I’m a James Gunn fan. I loved his Superman movie, and I’m looking forward to Man of Tomorrow. While Gunn didn’t write nor direct this film, he was producer and has final say on the DCU, so he bears significant responsibility for it.

Milly Alcock is perfect in every way. She’s the right actor in the right role at the right time. She does the best anyone could with the material at hand. Eve Ridley is adequate as Ruthye, but exists as an “inciting incident” and backstop for Kara’s moral evolution, and serves little other purpose. Lobo does not need to be here at all, but it’s fun that he is. One gets the feeling Gunn is thinking of a Lobo movie and wants to test the waters. Momoa chews the scenery with violent glee, and we’re here for it. Krypto is the best. We loved him in Superman and we love him here. The movie delivers for a big screen spectacle. The CGI is what we expect, as is the action. For a two-hour summer romp, Supergirl is whimsical brain-candy. But that’s not what we expect from a DCU joint.

My beefs with the film are many and varied. This gets a little spoilery, so stop here if you haven’t seen it yet. Caveat: I have not read the Woman of Tomorrow comics this film is based on, so I don’t know how closely Ana Nogueira’s script follows that story, but there are problems.

Krem is more of a practice dummy than a fleshed out villain. There’s no backstory for him and his brigands, they’re just bad to be bad. Taking nothing away from Matthias Schoenaerts’ performance, which is top notch, the character is an NPC. If it weren’t for the actor bringing life to this dull two-dimensional construct it would be boring.

Using Krypto as the emotional fulcrum is a cheap trick. It works, for sure, but still, going for the easy win there is not really putting in much effort. James Gunn had to state last year that Krypto was not going to die in the movie, which makes sense given how much he loves animals. It’s a good thing too, we should not see Kara Zor-El become John Wick. Also, not for nothing, if that CGI dog had died, audiences would have run riot and burned the theaters to the ground.

The most distressing thing about Supergirl is how derivative it is… and again, I didn’t read the comics, so it may be the newer works that cribbed from Shuster and Siegel, but we’ve seen everything in this movie before. Setting the action primarily in a desert wasteland, with the main character saving women the brigands have abducted as breeding stock, brigands in leather with shoulder pads and biker boots… all sounds familiar? Krem is essentially just Vernon Wells’ Wez from Mad Max: The Road Warrior, and this film winds up being, more or less, Fury Road / Furiosa in space, with Lobo as Mad Max. I did appreciate that Supergirl and Furiosa share the same DNA as warriors, that is quite satisfying. With Kara reluctantly helping the young girl seek her revenge… that feels like True Grit in space. Another note is that the way Krypto’s being poisoned fits into the script is just like Rocket Raccoon’s plight in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Then there’s the problem of the Yellow, Green, and Red suns acting as Deus Ex Machina Stella throughout the film. Krem has his brigands lurking on a planet with a green sun because he knows that green radiation poisons Kryptonians. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to given that there are only two known survivors, but he has pissed one of them off, so it’s a prudent precaution. Yet, the planet he picked is in a binary star system, and guess what : the other star is yellow. So, you’re hiding in a place where half of the planetary daily cycle empowers your enemy to come kick your ass up one wall and down the other.

These are a lot of nits to pick for a film based on a comic book… but even fantasy worlds should adhere to the rules established by their authors. This part of Supergirl is just sloppy plotting.

One feels bad for Alcock, as this may be the last time she gets to wear the cape, and again, her performance is not what drags the film down. She shines like a yellow star. There’s a rumor circulating that the movie was force-edited in response to test screenings, and if so, there’s still hope for a “Gillespie cut” in streaming later.

Directed by: Craig Gillespie

Written by: Ana Nogueira, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster

Starring: Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Jason Momoa, Matthias Schoenaerts

Rating: 6/10