*½/****
starring Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, Jason Momoa
written by Ana Nogueira
directed by Craig Gillespie
by Walter Chaw Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is mean. It’s so easy to be mean. That’s the message of James Gunn’s Superman, isn’t it? It’s certainly the message, as I understand it, of the Superman character: What’s powerful and truly rare is kindness, especially in the face of great evil. Early on in Supergirl, Supergirl (Milly Alcock) breaks an alien’s arm in a nasty sequence that feels like the truck-stop epilogue to Richard Donner’s/Lester’s Superman II, in which Superman (Christopher Reeve) reveals a real pettiness that feels cathartic in the moment but leaves a bitter aftertaste. I don’t want another small, bullying despot. It isn’t edgy. The world is full to bursting with paper tigers and tinpot dictators–amoral strongmen enforcing their will through violence. The world is on fire; rage is the match. It doesn’t change anything for me that the antihero is a woman in this incarnation. Your mileage may vary, but aren’t you tired? This Supergirl also declines to show mercy in a vicious sequence involving a felled enemy, helpless before her summary judgment. I don’t know this character as well as I know Superman, though I did read Tom King’s elegiac, thoughtful Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, upon which Gillespie’s film is ostensibly based. Supergirl doesn’t understand the text. And to the extent it does, it betrays it.
The Brigands, a band of marauders led by Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), massacre the family of alien girl Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who dedicates her life to avenging them. That’s it. It’s a little bit True Grit, I guess. At a bar, Ruthye meets Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Supergirl, who’s celebrating her birthday with a week-long bender on a planet with a red sun, where she doesn’t have invulnerabilities, which is to say superpowers. Except that whether or not she has her powers is driven by the whims of a script credited to one person but obviously written by committee. The inconsistency of the lore is irritating and distracting. Convenient and condescending. Notice the sloth, alas, and you give defenders an out that you’re some kind of comic-book nerd. Ignore it, and you’re a shill. The third possibility is that the picture’s a mess of rewrites and add-ons, and no one had the headspace to keep track of it all. Supergirl is sloppy. Its pieces don’t match. Most frustratingly, its source material, which Gillespie proudly states he didn’t read until late in principal photography, not only solved the major logistical gaffes in this film but also called them out ahead of time. Own-goals are never great, particularly when they’re this avoidable. All of this suggests evidence of intense studio interference: a plug-and-play, journeyman director without a clear authorial voice mismatched with IP that demands a point of view; an inexperienced screenwriter better known as an actor on teen television shows and counting on this as a major career break; and a “showrunner” struggling to reconcile his idiosyncratic tastes as a filmmaker and fan with the pressures of putting one of the studio’s ailing divisions back on course. It’s a recipe for disaster, and if Supergirl isn’t quite that…it’s close, man.
In the middle of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, there are consecutive panels that seem to preemptively critique the film eventually made from it. (See above.) While films like The Furious are setting new standards for large-scale fight sequences, seeing them as opportunities for character development and meticulous, unconventional yet always discernible choreography, Supergirl defaults to those elephantine free-for-alls where an indestructible, all-powerful being punches things and drops sharp (read: stupendously not-sharp) one-liners like, “This looks bad…FOR YOU!” Enter Lobo (Jason Mamoa), an intergalactic bounty hunter who smokes space cigars while riding a space hog and pops up here for no good reason but to set up a standalone Lobo flick that probably won’t happen now if there’s a God. (I can’t believe we’re still doing this shit after the DCEU 1.0 ate its own ass.) “How do we make this current? How do we up the stakes?” you can hear them asking in test-screening huddles, thus the sudden need to free The Children late in the game. (This is on top of the shamelessly manipulative detour into dog peril as Krypto is space-poisoned.) It’s like Temple of Doom, except the enslaved children are only introduced in the last half-hour. How about Momoa? How do we get Corenswet in this? Wait, how do we make this girl edgy? In the comic, by the way, she’s turning 21, a milestone in American culture–and in the film, she’s turning 23. Is this driven by a fear that Alcock, 26, couldn’t pass for 21? That’s the sort of issue someone with a seat at the table raises to justify their corporate-placeholder job that day. Most of the film’s terrible creative decisions give off that scared-executive vibe, but worry not: soon, A.I. will have their job of dehumanizing art into a bland commodity.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is about a woman–who has, like her cousin Superman, suffered unimaginable loss, arguably more acutely since she was a tween at the time–taking on the responsibility of teaching a girl about the zero-sum game: the existential emptiness and soul destruction of vengeance. And what is Supergirl about? It’s about what happens when creators cede creation to the focus-grouped needs of an imagined audience. What’s meant to be empowering is patronizing–a caricature of grrrl power that aligns with James Cameron’s reductive belief that women could be heroes, too, if only they acted like boys. The first hour of Supergirl offers a glimpse of a fuller, more Mos Eisley/Troll Bridge level of pleasurable chaos and invention. Interstellar public transportation portrayed as a metal Catbus full of the universe’s lower class. The first Men in Black felt like this. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick, too. But all too soon, Supergirl elects to be mundane instead of spectacular: Icarus dying as an old man instead of a meteorite. If you’re gonna strike out, go down swinging. And, of course, there’s Alcock, who manages to lend pathos to her extended, told-in-flashback creation story on the floating city of Argos, the very composition of which poisons its citizens. Alcock is a wonderful actor trying to anchor a movie at odds with itself while also setting the table for a possible franchise. That her Supergirl is still legible as a three-dimensional being worth cherishing, even rooting for, reminds me a lot of Inde Navarette’s “understanding the assignment” performance in Obsession. If Supergirl‘s metronomically spaced speeches about choosing the light side over the dark make no sense in the context of a film with neither vision nor moral fortitude (imagine a Return of the Jedi, itself marred by no small measure of pandering, where Luke just murders the fuck out of Darth Vader), that’s not Alcock’s fault.
What I’m saying is that Alcock–and Supergirl–deserved better than this vengeful, ugly, lazy crap. Imagine thinking a movie about a woman superhero didn’t just need a male superhero to lend it interest, but that said male superhero should be…Lobo. Lobo, who, at one point, laments that he’s been stabbed “in the abs!” At another, he calls Supergirl “ditz,” which sounded to me in the moment like “tits” and is either way evidence of the film’s Noel Coward-it-ain’t wit. Imagine the superhero movie that establishes its protagonist as driven to do the right thing solely because a common foe has injured her dog. Who, it’s implied, only understands what it means to be “good” at all because she has a cousin, a real super man from Kansas, willing to teach her. Not because she’s suffered great loss and experienced tremendous growth and wisdom as a result, but because a man told her what to wear and encouraged her to spend more time at home. Which she ultimately agrees to do after her cold-blooded murder of an unarmed opponent. Or you can let all the cooks in the DCEU kitchen imagine it for you. In IMAX, even!
