When an unexpected and ruthless adversary strikes too close to home, Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, reluctantly joins forces with an unlikely companion on an epic, interstellar journey of vengeance an...
We’re nearly a year off from last year's Superman and the start of the new DCU, and now we’ve crash-landed onto our third (technically fifth) installment: Supergirl. Its her first solo outing since Helen Slater’s Supergirl movie in 1984—forty-something years ago—and only her second ever. TWO solo films. That’s the entire legacy of live-action Kara Zor-El on the big screen; her cousin’s had more reboots than she’s had individual outings so when I tell I walked into this thing rooting for it, praying for it to succeed, I need you to understand I mean that.
Good news: at least it’s better than the previous Supergirl movie. Bad news: it’s still kinda….frustrating.
Ok, Craig Gillespie……this was just weird and not in any endearing way. His direction comes off as misguided at best and sheer negligence at worst, taking the wrong lessons from the right person and making a simple narrative as leaden and routine as possible. He’s basically trying to grab the aesthetic of imitating a James Gunn flick without the musculature underneath that makes it hold. Not to say the spunkiness he dowsed in I, Tonya and Cruella doesn’t peer through every once in a while, but given his history with films about spirited, rule-breaking women carrying everything on their backs, the lack of any sheer force of personality in a story based on a comic that has no shortage of that is staggering.
I understand the visual significance behind Neil Lamont’s production design and the broad focus on outer space and most of these locales having this desert landscape vibe to where everything looks the same: using the sheer vastness and expansive of each new planet to highlight the isolated loneliness of our two leads. For what’s essentially a sci-fi space western, there is enough authenticity through these environments that you can somewhat inhabit the world alongside everyone else, and each location, drawing from different types of architecture, does lend more credence to the other-worldly vibes; the only major downside to that is how often the illusion keeps breaking and it sure as shit doesn’t help when every location has this stainy texture because it drastically shrinks the scope and scale of this supposed world-hopping odyssey. Sure, the visual identity and the lived-in quality of these worlds are doing something—but they’re doing it in a way that ends up working against the film as much as for it.
When discussing the crux of this film’s presentation, it’s a sliding scale between dull or uninspired and sometimes the two are mutually exclusive to the point of being genuinely maddening. It doesn’t even have the decency to stay consistent about which one its being to where entire sequences actually stretch out into something halfway intriguing only to not follow through…..which is why I guess I expected a little better from Rob Hardy. I can make peace with some of his framing and overall shot composition; his cinematography has some real scope to it, appropriately cinematic for what’s being presented here. But—look, I swear I’ll stop complaining about this in a second—I just can’t get over how every shot feels specifically tailored to drain away the vibrant painterly imagery from the comic, and leaving us with this dogshit dishwater brown and beige reminds me of the worst effects and visuals of Rebel Moon. Yes, I get it’s supposed to reflect the gritty tone it’s meant to establish, and they do control the color grading better during interior shots, but this washed-out, desaturated look has been run so far into the ground at this point that it’s just genuinely unpleasant to sit with.
Both Tatiana S. Riegel and Fred Raskin‘s editing is broadly fine. I can’t really think of any specific editing sequences that stood out in the end.
Full disclosure: the pacing has me conflicted. You don’t exactly feel the length of it: it’s brisk, to-the-point and the momentum ensures it doesn’t overstay its welcome but because it crams in so much, the rushed, hollow nature of it means it burns through plot points like a checklist. And keep in mind: we’re talking an hour and forty-five minutes. That was literally the first thing that gave me pause when it came to this movie, and I was right to be concerned; for a story bouncing across so much messy material, that’s not a runtime. It’s a speed limit the story actively strains against if you stop to think about it. Visual effects and CGI are heavily inconsistent, which makes the practical effects that stand out that much more impressive (albeit sad), much of the humor is flat and flavorless, emotional stakes are legible and defined enough but muted to such an extent that they don’t register, and thankfully, the action sequences are mostly fine; I specifically liked how much the choreography leaned into Kara being more of a brawler with and without her powers. The tone is where I kept going back and forth, though. It handles the heavier material serviceably enough, paying off its more somber beats adequately—but the second it tries to loosen up and have some fun with itself, it coasts.
Three separate composers were cycled during this movies production—Ramin Djawadi, Junkie XL and Claudia Sarne—before landing on Claudia. Bless her heart for trying, but her musical score barely has any weight to it. Only the final bit of the score “Supergirl Suite” is the one I distinctly remember; the rest of the techno shouldn’t feel like tuneless chugging, but it does, and the soundtrack in general I don’t have a strong affinity for, except for the last needle drop that just does not fit at all. Much of the sound design is up to par, the combined costume design from Anna B. Sheppard and Michael Mooney, in a vacuum and in practice, are actually pretty good and for the normally pretty dependable PG-13 rating, this is pretty standard fare.
I need to stress this: this movie did not deserve a cast like this. Everyone is locked the fuck in and playing ball the best way they can, wringing something real out of the material that gave them barely anything to grip—committing so fully and visibly to the bit that the way they burn through this becomes its own kind of tragedy. Dialogue-wise, it’s fairly remedial without much punch to it and many of the characters have….the building blocks to stand out as vaguely two-dimensional but have a too clean cut generic quality that makes them either stand out unfavorably or barely stand out at all. I struggle to understand what the point of adding Lobo in this was and Krem as the antagonist is frustratingly bland and one-note, to the point where the changes they made from the comics to make him less generic somehow made him more generic.
Eve Ridley holds her own with a script that keeps her pigeonholed to the same annoying position, Matthias Schoenaerts hardly has to try to make Krem mildly entertaining to no avail, David Corenswet brings the movie to life in the few precious scenes he’s in and Jason Momoa, despite being given practically nothing substantial to do, is chewing up the scenery as the character he’s always wanted to play.But out of everyone this movie lets down, Milly Alcock takes the hardest hit—and that stings, because as Supergirl, she is flat-out the best thing in it. There’s a scrappy, coiled quality to her performance that earns every inch of Kara’s chip-on-her-shoulder toughness without ever tipping it into unlikability; she makes the messiness feel lived-in rather than written-in and given she has the only character in the film with actual layers to her, it only further enlarges the weight on her shoulders.
Based on the Woman Of Tomorrow graphic novel, on paper and in broad strokes, this plot strips the core narrative of that story down to its most basic fundamentals: Kara gets assigned to protect a little girl and help her get revenge on the ruthless jagoff who murdered her family all the while helping her further come to grips with the loss of her own race and family….and on that front, it keeps enough of that to feel sufficient. Think True Grit fused with some Mad Max sprinklings and the occasional DNA snippets from Star Wars, Dune and GOTG, and given how much more interesting Kara’s backstory ends up being then Kal’s, this had the bones to make for a very captivating coming-of-age story. It’s a very simple plot armed with a universal emotional core….that never quite materializes, fitted with the type of “And Then” storytelling that irks me with a barely episodic plot structure that somehow spins its wheels…but also doesn’t. The decision to structure this as an interplanetary road trip ends up gradually becoming an exercise in repetition, each new world essentially functioning as a palette swap of the last, differentiated only by which character actor shows up to get punched; it just goes through the motions.
It just plays off like somebody’s first time ever writing a movie script; unfortunately, it really does show.
Normally, in a movie like this, the twofold motives between the two protagonists would give the story some propulsion; if anything, it’s the exact opposite and its kinda sluggish moving on from one planet to the next. At nausea, the same conversation gets regurgitated over and over again regarding revenge and the inevitable cycle that comes with it; it verbalizes all the weight out of it and simplifies the morals behind it to where nothing new is really said about the subject. Not only that, but between Supergirl’s narrow, high-stakes, clock-ticking mission to save Krypto and Ruthye’s dark, heavy quest for blood-soaked cosmic vengeance, they’re both operating on different spectrums of grief and coping that should work (one running away from the trauma while the other runs toward it at the expense of her humanity) but weaving those together under the framing a buddy-cop road trip movie feels superfluous; you end up losing focus on the puppy because of the heavy trauma, and you stop caring about the kid's trauma because the movie portrays her as an annoying distraction. And that’s not going into how many of its other themes—the refusal to numb past trauma and live out your life in the face of it, twisted moralitiesy on justice, identity, sense of self, and condemning the exploitation of vulnerable children—get enough teeth taken out of them to neuter the full on what’s meant to be real world issues; go figure, if Superman was about an “illegal alien” foiling a billionaires plan to ethnic cleanse an entire country for his own selfish gains, this one follows a similar trend woman stopping a brutal child trafficking ring and sliming a pedophile.
Paradoxically, some of those themes do help make it a very good companion piece to Superman—the throughline of the immigrant experience, finding where else to call home when home is either ash or riddled with messy complications, choosing compassion and a moral understanding of right and wrong over the easy catharsis of senseless violence resonates across both films in ways that feel intentional and what this film does get right—giving us more insight on the big twist regarding Jor-El and Lara from the first Superman and giving us the full picture on the extent of Kara’s isolation, carrying the tragic grandeur of losses both personal and collective—is one of the few precious moments the film actively locks in and embraces the operatic scale of its conflicts. Genuine pathos exists underneath all this clutter that the film, for all its fumbling, does manage to land occasionally.
The more optimistic side of me would’ve said to just “Be patient and wait for the film to open up” but even when it begrudgingly does, it’s still frustratingly undercooked in a foundation where I can actively see a sharper sense of gallows humor, a more sustained reckoning with Kara’s grief and the batshit cosmic violence she’s been chosen to inherit. It wants to burn a little longer to make itself earn its own catharsis, and the film keeps dousing those flames…..which is infuriating because the writer of this film, Ana Nogueria, is a very avid fan of the Woman Of Tomorrow comic. She had enough insight to know what she was adapting and how to make certain changes when necessary so either she was on a massive time crunch and had to cut out and dumb certain elements down to save time…..or the director and the marketing team actively fucked her over. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was both.
Part of me is hoping this is just a minor speed bump; after all, the two films released after the first Iron Man film—Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2–weren’t that well-received either when the MCU was first starting out, so this does have a chance to bounce back, no matter how slim the chances are.
“Supergirl” is the personal kind of frustrating movie-going experience to sit through because it’s not a disaster. It’s merely wounded, hastily patched with the seams showing, and every once in a while, you glimpse at the real thing underneath, aching to get out. And the film’s inability to deliver on that is what makes its failures so much more acute; it’s infuriating in precisely the way something almost good can be.
