Supergirl opens in theaters on June 26.
Walking into Supergirl, I was excited. I had real expectations. Before you even get to the DCU of it all, I’m officially a fan of Craig Gillespie. He’s a guy who makes movies that are all better than you’d think they’d be – Cruella and I, Tonya and Lars and the Real Girl and even The Finest Hours, that boat-broke-in-half rescue movie was surprisingly really good. These are movies that could’ve easily become forgettable entries in their particular genres, like just another biopic or live-action remake or movie about a guy who’s in love with a sex doll. So the prospect of tackling a superhero movie with that particular ability to elevate a film in an otherwise tired category was intriguing.
Where the DCU is concerned, I’m here for James Gunn’s universe. I’ve liked what’s gone into it so far and I loved Milly Alcock’s first appearance as Kara in her cameo in Superman. I think this version of Supergirl is a blast and her solo outing didn’t do anything to change my mind on that front. But this is also where Supergirl starts to become a tale of two movies. For everything that the movie does right, that thing’s got an alter ego that’s doing it wrong. As a result, the movie is this shuffling, few-steps-forward, few-steps-back kind of slog that never really finds a rhythm.
Supergirl Images
For example, the reluctant hero thing is actually very difficult to pull off. It’s hard to play “I don’t care” in an engaging way, because if the character on screen doesn’t care, then I certainly don’t care either. Alcock manages it here about as well as you could hope for. Kara’s a mess and there’s no real concern with her ever not being a mess as part of her journey. It’s very fun. The other side of that coin, however, is that she doesn’t have much of a journey. She’s not a markedly different person at the end of the movie than she is at the beginning. Not because of anything she did or didn’t do as a character or an actor, but because the story she’s been put in doesn’t give her much to do and the result is a movie that sort of flattens out and drags.
When she first meets Eve Ridley’s Ruthye, the young girl out for revenge against the man who murdered her entire family, Kara is protective, sticking her neck out to do the right thing for a kid who’s in over her head. By the end of the film, Kara… does exactly the same thing. Part of the point there is that it highlights the impact she has on Ruthye. (Ridley ultimately gets the lion’s share of the character work in the film, and her character’s journey winds up feeling far more complete than Kara’s.) So while Milly Alcock’s performance is a real strength of the movie, and she does pull off the reluctant hero trope, it is still a very familiar trope and the shorthand that’s used in portraying it is a real weakness.
Familiarity in general is another villainous plot Supergirl tries to thwart. On one hand, the movie wears its influences proudly. The comparisons to James Gunn’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy have been obvious since the trailers first dropped, and we knew the True Grit/archetypal Western structure would be a big part of the film because of the source material, Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow run. A Mad Max influence is just as obvious in the grimy, lifeless terrains and dying worlds on which most of the movie takes place, planets where people scratch for survival. But the old, reliable Mos Eisley Cantina should get a shout-out as well. The alien design and practical makeup FX and costuming throughout the movie are genuinely top shelf, and clearly the customers in Star Wars’ most wretched hive were on the filmmakers’ minds.
While I’ll happily take ‘True Grit meets Mad Max by way of Guardians and Star Wars,’ there’s still a dulled edge to the whole movie.“
And yet, while I’ll happily take “True Grit meets Mad Max by way of Guardians and Star Wars,” there’s still a dulled edge to the whole movie. Instead of taking the post-apocalyptic vibes of Mad Max, they lift a whole plot point straight from Fury Road and handle it, frankly, a little clumsily. And instead of the emotionally relevant needle drops of Guardians, Kara gets slow-paced montages set to a Jimmy Eat World cover that I found… well, it was baffling.
The film’s two other headliners fall into these buckets as well. Matthias Schoenaerts as the film’s villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, looks incredible. His whole appearance would make the creature design team from A New Hope proud. The beads studded into his face, the machinery grafted into his body, the weird little red button he needs to activate to speak, all of it adds up to a striking and genuinely pretty cool image that would have felt at home in the Thunderdome.
But… they don’t ever do anything with it.
Krem, for all the post-apocalyptic biker gang aura he generates, gets nothing else to go on. He has some affectations that Schoenaerts was clearly having a good time with, like how he’s eating something in almost every scene, but that’s all they really are – affectations. There’s nothing that makes him scary or formidable other than a few throwaway lines about his relative strength and the way other people on screen fear him.
Meanwhile, Jason Momoa’s Lobo finds his way into the movie as well, and the mostly-impervious anti-hero bounty hunter is just as much fun as fans have been anticipating. Cigar-chomping gets thrown around a little excessively any time a J. Jonah Jameson or a Hellboy or a Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day show up on screen, but Momoa more than earns the descriptor in all the best possible ways in Supergirl. He looks the part as well, with face paint and prosthetics that cut the kind of imposing figure the fan favorite deserves.But… Lobo doesn’t need to be there.Characters come and go in movies, sometimes with very little fanfare, sometimes playing crucial roles in the story. And they don’t always have to be the latter. The issue with Lobo is that he feels a little extra tacked on. The one scene he has with Kara has real reshoot energy. It’s added on to a scene that didn’t need any extra motivation to get to the next scene, nor is he a particularly unique foil for Kara that propels her character in any meaningful way. He just happens to be looking for the same group of guys that Kara and Ruthye are after. The only real added value he gives the movie is a few (admittedly fun) one-liners. And maybe that’s all Lobo needs to be. Ultimately, he shows up to put his immortal stamp of approval on Kara’s actions, but that feels both unnecessary and more than a little pandering, and it leaves me not entirely sure what to do with him.So the story of this movie continues to be, “they did it right on one hand, but on the other, not so much,” and as just the second entry into Gunn’s DCU, that issue spills over into all the stuff that comes with being a part of a currently-expanding expanded universe. On one hand, Supergirl needs to continue building outwards to some extent, and this is another of the film’s strengths. Her scenes with David Corenswet’s Superman are wonderful. That’s not to say that Superman saved the day here, or that Supergirl needs Superman to be interesting. It’s that the dynamic between the two of them is great – one positively looking toward the future, while the other still nurses old wounds. I’m definitely looking forward to more of this duo on screen.Cigar-chomping gets thrown around a lot, but Jason Momoa earns it.“But on the other hand, where her solo film is concerned, Supergirl needs to flesh out Kara’s backstory. The structure of how and when flashbacks are deployed in Supergirl aside – because my personal preference would have been a straight chronological telling of the story as opposed to stopping in the middle to tell us her backstory – I did find myself way more interested in her time growing up on a floating, life-boat of a city after the destruction of Krypton. There’s work being done there on both fronts, as the film continues to build on the changes made to Kal-El’s origin story from Superman while introducing another side to that story via Kara. The “present day” of the film, with all the cribbing from True Grit and Mad Max and Guardians, feels far less fresh and interesting than Kara’s shielded childhood on Argo, even if both have their entertaining moments.Again though, this is Supergirl’s biggest challenge. There are a lot of things that work throughout this movie, but there are just as many reasons why they don’t quite add up.
