SUPERGIRL, Not the Story we Wanted — A review

SUPERGIRL, A REVIEW

Here’s the real problem that people have with Supergirl. It’s not the movie they wanted.

Audiences often don’t know what they want, which is why they are so cranky. They’re like toddlers screaming ‘Wah!’ until something just right comes along. It’s why the entertainment industry spends to much time chasing its tail and looking for a safe bet.

Offended yet? Here’s another. People like stuff or they dislike stuff on their gut. All the whining and screaming, the talk afterwards, the celebration or the disgust… that’s just rationalization. They liked it, or they didn’t like it. If they didn’t like it, they’ll just keep finding reasons to hate it. If they liked it, everything is forgivable.

So here’s what went wrong with Supergirl. She’s supposed to be a virgin, not necessarily literally, but definitely metaphorically. She’s Superman’s younger, blonder, smaller cousin, more innocent, less jaded and not as knowing, she’s supposed to be the Kryptonian not battered by life. It’s right there in the name SuperGIRL. She’s supposed to be a GIRL. She’s supposed to be innocent, like high school or junior high school, optimistic, idealistic, protected, yadda yadda yadda.

So if you get a movie about a Supergirl who is a PTSD borderline alcoholic perfectly willing to eviscerate an enemy… Well yikes! Everyone’s running for the exit.

Which is a shame, because this is a good movie. Not necessarily a great one, it’s got some flaws. But a good movie.

And it’s arguably actually true to the character.

Okay, let me digress here, because I want to take us back to the origin of the character. I’m not that old, but I was a comic book fan as a kid, back when DC was reprinting a lot of its stuff in giant sized fifty page spectaculars. So I got to read the origin, back at an impressionable age. Here goes:

It’s the Silver Age, back when Superman was pretty much all powerful. As they used to say, he could destroy the world by listening hard. He moved planets around to play pranks. He was basically a cosmically powered dickhead, with a cast of characters that were better suited to a sitcom, and a lot of his adventures were about messing with his supporting cast.

One day a rocket falls to Earth. Superman goes to investigate, and voila, to his absolute amazement, out pops Supergirl! In costume and everything! She explains to the astonished Man of Steel that she’s his long lost cousin, here to stay on Earth with him.

Since Krypton exploded thirty or forty years ago, and everyone there is dead, the existence of a teenage girl decades later, is a puzzler, both for Superman and the writers. But no worries, Supergirl explains that she’s from Argo City. Y’see, back when Krypton exploded, a chunk of it carrying a whole city was flung intact into space. Luckily, the quick thinking residents of Argo slapped a dome over their city to keep the air in, and paved the ground with lead to keep the kryptonite out, and they lived happily ever after… For a while.

But no, you can’t have a whole city of Krypton floating around, Superman was already having troubles with being the last survivor, given the bottled city of Krypton, and an infinite number of villains hanging about in the Phantom Zone, to say nothing of the dog. Another free floating city! Too much. So the residents of Argo all died, poisoned eventually by kryptonite. But not before they could send their sole survivor, Supergirl, to earth to join her cousin. It neatly wrapped up the origin, established Supergirl as another sole survivor, but a smaller sole survivor — a city rather than a planet, so she wouldn’t overshadow superman.

Superman, after all this explosition, astonished that there’s another of his race in the world, sticks her in an orphanage.

Yep. You got that right. He gives her a secret identity, Linda Lee, and a comb that changes her blonde hair to brown, and sticks her in an orphanage. She’s not even allowed to be supergirl, he wants her to grow as a normal orphaned teen, and he’ll just call her from time to time as his secret weapon, when he needs a little more oomph. Eventually she gets adopted, and her name changes to Linda Danvers.

Here’s the best part of it. Supergirl is totally okay with all of this! Talk about positivity.

She’s the one that chooses Linda Lee as a secret identity. I vividly remember the comic story, because it includes her moving cheerfully into this rathole of an orphanage, and using her heat vision (called X-ray vision back then) to fix the cracked mirror in her room.

But Holy Cow. Talk about cold blooded. An orphanage! His only living relative in the universe. So what my life is already full up, off to an orphanage. Someone who crossed the universe looking for his help and shelter. That’s nice but I can’t be bothered, off to an orphanage. An alien completely unfamiliar with anything of Earth, an ultimate stranger in a strange land. You’ll be fine, off to an orphanage. The second most powerful being on the planet, in desperate need of mentoring. Nothing will go wrong, off to an orphange. What the hell, dude!

This was the Silver Age. Also known as the age of Super-Dickery. It’s not atypical. Stuff happened there that would leave people in permanent crippling trauma, but it was just treated as weightless and without consequence, it would be laughed off. To be fair, this is the era of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and the weird politics going on. But that’s another era.

From the vantage point of hindsight, I have to go: What the hell, what the living hell!!! I can’t say that enough.

He sticks his cousin in an orphanage! Who does that! She traveled the Universe to come into his care, and he sticks her in an orphanage!

But having her around perpetually would just complicate things, and the supporting cast was already set. So orphanage it is, and everyone, even Supergirl, is justfine with that.

Oh and she can’t be a superhero, she’s his secret weapon. Great, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of supervillains, but sure, take the second most powerful being on the planet and bench her. Wouldn’t want Superman to have anyone showing him up. Yeah, Superman really was a dick.

It’s just a comic, the writers were a story mill churning out, they couldn’t go too far from the formula. But with the vantage of modern sensibilities, Superman comes across as shallow, superficial, self absorbed, uncaring and insecure to the point that Supergirl’s existence is an inconvenience to his life and a threat to his ego. What a dick! I can’t say it often enough.

Of course, time moved on, Superman didn’t start out as a dick, it was just a phase, and as the comics went on, he went back to being a symbol of kindness and decency. I like Superman nowadays.

But back to Supergirl. Back then, she was as shallow as everyone else. The character became semi-popular, she got her back up stories, eventually her own comic series, a wild assortment of costume changes. She got her own super-cat, and then a super-horse, but let’s not go into that. It was tough though, between Superman and Wonder Woman, she didn’t really have a niche or a real role. She was killed, brought back, killed, revised, rebooted. There are parallel universe versions, pocket universe versions, supernaturally amplified versions, future versions, it gets hard to keep track.

But back in her origin story, you could have a supergirl in full costume, popping out of her rocket ship and explaining how she’s the survivor of a doomed city, everyone and everything she knew died or was dying in front of her, including her family, she’s the last one… and there’s no emotional fallout at all. She’s fine. She’s cheerful, optimistic, and looking forward to her new life pretending to be human, in an orphanage, yay!

Look, I’m going to say it — that’s an incredibly messed up backstory. But the old silver and post-silver age comics never really alluded to it or dealt with it. Sometimes, for story purposes, they’d mention she was much more familiar with Kryptonian culture, having actually lived it, than Superman who came to Earth as a baby.

But it was always there. I’ll repeat that. She was always a survivor who had watched her entire people die in front of her when she was old enough and mature enough to understand it.

John Byrne, when he was rebooting Superman, eventually brought back a Supergirl and played with that notion. And then in the last few years, Tom King and Bilquis Evely actually wrestled with it directly, in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, doing a version of the story we saw in the movie. I didn’t read that comic, I’m not familiar with it.

But in modern terms, that’s an origin story dripping with tragedy. Survivor of a doomed city, watching everyone sicken and die. Her parents die. Even if she wasn’t directly watching, she’d know. I can’t imagine what it would have been like in Argo city, the people going quietly in their homes, the ones checking out voluntarily, people dying in the streets, the ones choosing to go messily settling scores or just wallowing in arson and violence. And over it all, death, inevitable suffering and death, a doom every single person there had been living with since their planet died. An entire city suffering PTSD and then dying, until only a dead radioactive city wanders in orbit. That’s where Supergirl comes from.

My god, the survivor’s guilt must be incredible. She’d be a walking Post-Traumatic Stress case. And on Earth, completely invulnerable, unable to even feel pain or discomfort, able to do anything physically, but inside just wreckage. And of course her cousin is sympathetic and supportive, but he doesn’t really understand what she’s been through. No one can.

This is the Supergirl the movie gives us, right from the start. It’s just not the Supergirl we want, so the rejection is instant. The whole movie is about her not being the Supergirl we unconsciously want, so it’s just ninety minutes of agony, two hours of biting down on tinfoil as every particle of our being craves someone innocent, cheerful and without baggage, Superman, but light and carefree.

I get it. I seriously get it.

You know what though? I liked it, and I liked it a lot. It’s a valid interpretation of the character, perhaps a much more valid interpretation than the original story which carried all that backstory and gave it no emotional weight whatsoever.

Milly Alcock’s Supergirl is a woman weighted down by massive existential tragedy, living when everything she loved died, she didn’t even make the choice to survive, that was done for her. No wonder she wants to drink herself unconscious. No wonder she goes to red sun worlds to reduce or suppress her powers so that she can numb her feelings. No wonder her dog is her only bright spot, a connection to life that she’ll do anything for.

What we’ve got is a story of a person in despair slowly learning to transcend that despair, learning to live and step outside of herself, to believe in something. It’s Supergirl’s journey from being a self-absorbed self-pitying burnout to actually finding commitment and purpose, to standing up for truth, justice and freedom.

And along the way, she’s got a ‘mirror’ sidekick. Marye Knoll, played by Eve Ridley, a girl who has watched her family slaughtered and now wants nothing but revenge on the villain. It’s not a perfect mirror, Supergirl has no one to blame for the death of her world, but the girl has a target for her pain. Still, Supergirl can see herself in that girl, and as it goes along, she fights to save that girl from the abyss she lives in.

Comparisons to True Grit, both the novel and both versions of the movie, are inevitable and genuine. But honestly, this movie has deeper resonance. Ultimately, Rooster Cogburn, the grizled old has been in True Grit, is a man without any real past, he’s just old and burned out, there’s no trauma that weighs him down, just years. His relationship to the girl or woman that kicks him out of his self absorption and drags him into her mission is perfunctory, where for Supergirl there’s a slow process of identification that reflects emotional journey. Thematically, it works better.

Milly Alcock’s Supergirl is a tour de force of a performance. Alcock takes her Supergirl from a burnout who can barely stand up, is convincing as she almost indifferently stands up for right, and goes through the quest. She’s almost chameleon-like in her ability to slip into roles to play with people, and convincingly dangerous and deeply cunning even without her superpowers.

There’s a sociopathic edge to Alcock’s Supergirl that lets you know she’s entirely willing to hurt or kill people. When you’re in that much pain, wreaking devastation is almost trivial. Or for that matter, making nice, playing a spacegoing valley girl, putting on and taking off faces, is casual. Her entire existence is a primordial scream with a genial mask on it.

To be fair, Eve Ridley’s performance is more restrained, she’s not given much to work with. She’s a kid seeking revenge, maybe without truly understanding what it will cost. Jason Momoa’s Lobo is just… there, it’s the same movie with or without him. He doesn’t actually matter.

The biggest weakness is the villain, Matthias Schoenarts, as Krem, a guy who apparently fell asleep during a face-piercing session. Krem is played basically as an Eastern European pimp and child sex trafficker, superficially charming, restrained and mellow, casually conversational as he’s doing evil. In the age of Jeffrey Epstein, he’s simultaneously a bit too real, and a bit too unreal. He’s just really unpleasant, but not in a watchable way. Which maybe is why he doesn’t get the screen time he really requires to showcase both his evilness and establish him as a challenge to Supergirl.

There’s one, count them, one single scene where we see that Krem has super-strength maybe on the level of Supergirl. Geez. He does his mayhem in a casual entitled way, with the lack of engagement of Eurotrash at a Dubai Port-a-Potty Party. He just doesn’t step up to the plate.

And to be completely fair — there’s a problem with the story. The plot depends on Supergirl from time to time having to do things that are stupidly inconsistent with a character who is steadily shown to be deeply cynical and cunning to the point of near-treacherousness. Without getting into spoilers, there are things that you have to wonder about, and if you’re not wholly invested, these become glaring irritants. The film asks you to just accept it, but if you’re on the fence… that’s a problem.

There’s plenty of action, and on the whole, the action scenes are well done, as Supergirl battles at various power levels. It’s actually a good choice to put her on different planets, under different, mostly non-yellow suns, so that she has to work at it. Given the power scale of Supergirl and Superman normally, finding characters to battle them, or situations to challenge them is always going to be difficult. There was a reason Superman was a dick in the 50s and 60s. Here they bypass that, and we’ve got some of the best Superhero fight/action scenes in a long while. They’re standouts, and they make the movie worthwhile.

The production design is really good at reflecting Supergirl’s abyssal darkness, the cynicism and darkness that drags her down. Every planet is a dirty, grim dark hole of decay and depravity. It’s all busted, decaying, underlit and with an undertone of violence. That said, there’s very little visual lightness, there’s nothing to represent or suggest a capacity for hope or hopefulness. They do make the attempt, but they production design is so impressed with its own grimness, that they can barely be bothered to show us a butterfly, or a moment of genuine beauty to remind us, and Supergirl, that hope is a precious thing.

But these are quibbles — technical rational dissections. If you like the movie, if you get or embrace the character and the emotional through line, the journey, then yeah, you might not even notice them, or you’ll be willing to forgive them or look past. If you’re not getting it in your gut, then these things become unbearable.

My verdict is that Supergirl is a good movie, not quite great but maybe within sight of it, and a movie which is true to the premise of the character, which gives us a brilliant performance by Milly Alcock, and great action scenes and a lot of fun. If you ask me, I think in the long run, it’ll probably rise. Over time, people will like it more and more, they’ll learn to respect it.

But right now, this is just not the Supergirl that people wanted in their hearts. Maybe they didn’t know what movie they wanted. But deep down, they had this idea of who Superman was, and that defined the idea of who a younger, more innocent Supergirl was. And this just wasn’t it.

Too bad. But then, life’s not fair, is it.