Avoid Like the Plague - Supergirl

The Forgettable Fog of James Gunn

“Have Lobo murder him, not Supergirl!”

Homicide in the Public Interest is not something you can have a heroine walk back from later.

More on that in a minute

This movie fails on every level: tone, pacing, world-building, adaptation, and even franchise strategy. But where it falls completely on its face, in a drunken stupor and drowns in a puddle of its own vomit is characterization. There is a genuinely compelling character to be found in Kara Zor-el and James Gunn was absolutely never going to find it.

The first Supergirl first appeared in Superboy in 1949. She was a one shot love interest and had no superpowers. The next was a legitimate test run in 1958 to gauge interest in a derivative character. It was good enough that Supergirl became a thing a year later when Kara Zor-el arrived.

Kara was a product of Silver Age Krypton, which gives her some baggage that modern corporate creators don’t really know what to do with. That Krypton was really just a futurist vision of America. Technology would always make everything better and being ruled by a technocratic The Council made sense. Nonetheless, she remembered this world occasionally observed its customs, holidays, and religion.

Krypton as a techno utopia was doomed to fail eventually. However Richard Donner sped up the process considerably when he turned Krypton into a place of massive mythic weight. This influenced Kara’s backstory but not as much as it should have. Krypton was extensively rewritten by John Byrne in 1986 but Kara was currently dead at the time.

She was resurrected in 2004, her back story was now that she was born on Krypton instead of Argo City. She remembered Kal-El as an infant and was put in suspended animation to save her life.

This version of Kara became a kind of Atlantean Princess. Unlike Superman, Krypton was home. It was a real place to her not an idealized image like it is to Clark. She is forever displaced. The sole survivor of a dead world in a way that Clark can only pretend to be.

And now she’s drunken slattern in a vintage Blonde Tee-shirt.

Tom King’s loathed and detested run on DC comics is noted for his complete disinterest in following the established canon and traditionally entrenched character traits. He was only ever interested in using characters as IP wrappers for his own derivative stories. His battlecary was, I’ll give you the same thing but different. Hollywood instantly fell in love with him.

This character is Tom King’s creation wearing Kara Zor-El’s costume devoid of pretty much all the internality that made Supergirl who she is.

It was never going to be good but at least it would have been coherent. However, this movie had many writers and as a result many Supergirls.

There is no real internal consistency because none of the writers seemed to care what the other was doing. So there are three different images of Kara:

Ana Nagoyan’s Hard-drinking party girl whose self-destruction is framed as empowering. The drunken Punk Rocker in Blondie Tee-shirt. I’ve known real Punkers, she was a revolting besotted mess who slept in the same clothes she wore for days at a time and she was still nicer to be around than they were.

James Gunn’s female Peter Quill. Seriously she felt exactly like Peter Quill

And finally ChatGpt’s Heart broken survivor who can never go home and whose only only remaining family is reaching out to her but feels as alien as everyone else. The Clanker got it closer to right than the wet-brains did.

I’ve seen complaints about Milly Alcock having been badly miscast for this role. This is not accurate. Alcock was perfectly cast for the role she played, It’s just that that role was never Supergirl.

Gunn’s rock solid script. James Gunn was early on asked how his films were going to be different, the guy who started as a screen declared they weren’t going to shoot anything until the script was rock solid. This was an explicit rejection of the Marvel Method of begin with a weak outline, extensively map out the action beats, go back and write the next draft of the stuff that happens between the action scenes. Use of humor to try and paper over the weak spots. It works as well here as it does for Marvel.

This movie is a collection of derivatives. The villain is from Mad Max, the subplot is from Hand Maid’s Tale, there’s scene stolen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the heroine is from a James Gunn movie which technically this is not… even though it is.

That’s one of the film’s biggest issues. Any of the Guardians of Galaxy could walk through this thing and not look out of place. Everywhere you go its the Star Wars cantina with 1970s music, Blade Runner back alleys, quirky aliens, suggestions of seriously weird and off putting sex, and sarcastic ensemble found families. As for her real family? Well that’s Clark and she’s trained Krypto to piss on his picture.

The plot is pretty much exactly what you’ve seen in the trailers. It’s kind of funny, back in the 1980s they used to do the same thing. It was kind of flex, a way of saying, our movie is so great we can tell you everything about it and you’ll still come see it! Of course those movies were actually good. This one is not.

But it could have been a lot better. The plot is True Grit but in Spaaaaaaace. The young girl, Ruthie’s family is killed by Krem of the Yellow Hills who escaped from a Mad Max movie. She tries to find someone to hunt down Krem so she can kill him.

She runs into Kara who is clearly not Supergirl yet, she had rejected the identity that her cousin Clark has created for her. This is actually understandable if you think about it which the makers of this film certainly didn’t. Clark’s Idealized vision of Krypton and the mission Jor-el and Lara have crafted for him are the result of mistranslated recording and Kara knows the subject matter of it before arriving on Earth, but lets forget most but not all of that because this movie does nothing to backtrack James Gunn’s mission of conquest and rapine Jor-el and Lara gave to their son. Truthfully, she only left Earth to be repulsive drunk so the movie could happen.

Kara was a teenager when she arrived, hence the name Supergirl and not Superwoman. It gets brought up in the film. The completely expected “Well, if he’s SuperMAN why aren’t you SuperWOMAN. The smart thing would have been to have Kara wave it away with, “Branding issues.” But it was too good of a “patriarchy bad” moment to pass up.

Anyway, Kara is celebrating her Birthweek, which is honestly kind of defendable, I mean a year is determined by the length of time a planet takes to orbit its star and her planet doesn’t do that anymore. Hours, days and years were doubtless different from Earth’s and a week is probably as close as she can reconstruct it. Regardless, she seems to be a terminal alcoholic and her Birthweek is probably indistinguishable from the rest of the year.

Ruthie tries to talk Kara into her mission, she says nah, stuff happens and Krem shoots Krypto with a contrivance poison that sets a ticking clock cliche in motion. Gunn’s Dogsel in Distress’ life is in danger once again. She’s got three days to retrieve the antidote, which the Brigands (they are called Brigands endlessly so I suppose they’re ripping off Kurosawa too) carry in vials around their necks. This is an absurd contrivance that would get most writers fired on general principle, it must have been Nagoyan’s contribution because Chatgpt has assured me it would request permission to self destruct on the grounds of fatal corruption rather than deliver something like this.

So Kara sets out to find her dog’s antidote and set off pre-determined action scenes.

Along the way she keeps running into Lobo, and honestly he should have been the star of the movie. People actually wanted to see a Lobo movie or at least more than they wanted to see a drunk-ass Supergirl movie. And this plot is obviously True Grit in space. If that is your plot and if your choice for papering over Rooster Cogburn is Lobo or Supergirl… Who would you pick?

This was a story that didn’t want to be a Supergirl story. The biggest problem the writers had was insisting on making Supergirl morally grey. Which you cannot do with a character who has a god-level power set. You can make them evil, which I think is Gunn’s preferred default given Bright Burn’s plot. But if you make that character the hero then you either have to give that character a cast iron unbreakable moral framework that limits their actions from doing anything evil (you know like Superman?) or come up with a bunch of ridiculous contrivances that constantly scale back the hero’s power until it’s time for the next action scene.

Guess what they went with?

Kara was constantly being powered down until some contrivance came along to get her to get her near a yellow sun. Or Lobo would show up.

Lobo did occasionally get them out the fix they were in, and then fuck-off in to the void again until it was time for his next appearance.

The ridiculous part is that there was one scene where he was desperately needed. Krem has been defeated. Supergirl talks Ruthie out of killing Krem because it will stain her soul forever and that is perfectly true. If you kill somebody, you will never be the same man again, trust me on this point. And then Kara kills him. And freaking Lobo was right there! It should have been the only reason to have him there. It’s why I thought he was there. Kara would walk away, Krem would start boasting about all the horrible things he was going to keep doing. Kara’s hand tightens on the sword hilt, she’s going to have to do it, she’ll have to commit murder, but then Krem boasts about having bounties on his head on a hundred systems. Kara smiles as great weight is lifted from her. Krem looks confused and suddenly Lobo appears stage left, “Hello, gorgeous!”

But no, they make Supergirl a murderess because Ana wanted to recreate the scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Giles murders the bad guy instead of Buffy. So, I guess there was one decent writer working on this – Joss Whedon.

Supergirl is supposed to be a goddess-heroine. Compassionate, idealistic, yet sometimes emotional and impulsive. She is indeed in great pain but she is NEVER morally gray.

Perhaps this film’s biggest problem is that James Gunn is a Gen-Xer, and my generation’s besetting sin is that we’ve always mistaken cynicism for maturity. A goddess-heroine doesn’t become more interesting by drinking, swearing, and killing. She just stops being a goddess and turns into a female Lobo.

The biggest problem this film had was the business model driving it forward. When Superman seriously underperformed last year, this film should have been suspended. At least if Supergirl making a profit was the objective. But it wasn’t. This film had one purpose: it was to convince potential buyers that DC actually had box office momentum instead of aggressive book keeping. This wasn’t about making a movie that audiences actually wanted to see, it was like a used car dealer who packs down the differential with sawdust, covers up the rust holes with a gallon of bondo, puts a cheap paint job on it, takes the money and runs before the buyer is any the wiser about what he’s bought.

From that perspective, Supergirl is a roaring success. The deal on Skydance’s Warner buy out is closed.

As of this writing it appears that Supergirl has had a disastrous opening weekend of $38 million, which is significantly lower than The Marvels.

This. Is. A. Bomb.

But the check and cleared and Ellisons are stuck with the repair costs so all good?

The saddest part of this whole debacle is that this film has just enough moments that tell the audience what it should have been. The sweet and sad princess of the eternally lovely and eternally lost island kingdom. Every happiness she finds here is borrowed. Every grief she carries is hers alone and forever. And yet she still finds the strength to follow her moral code and be a goddess-heroine. That is Supergirl. That is who they threw away so someone’s self-insert could get loaded in a Blondie Tee shirt.

Avoid Like the Plague (0 / 5)