Supergirl

Bluesky

Supergirl first appeared in 1959, 21 years and some days after Superman. Or maybe in 1949, in Superboy, spun-off that year though he was seen in 1945 in More Fun Comics, where Aquaman also débuted. She's ever been a bit younger than the Man of Steel, though across even just those continuities already mentioned there's enough variety that it could get confusing. If you cared, and I'm not sure this outing for Supergirl does enough to manage that.

It's entertaining, but so heavily indebted to Guardians Of The Galaxy that alien bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa, also Aquaman) might call it in. There's a young woman looking for revenge, an inciting incident that is expected to sustain the film when Supergirl's birthday celebrations don't. That double-act also recalls the (far superior) The Marvels. The potential for humour and action would find company in Polite Society, but Supergirl suffers from what seems to be DC's curse: it wants to be mature, to be difficult, but by attempting that by foregrounding inebriation and urination, it seems to be taking the piss.

It's writer Ana Nogueira's début feature. She's probably better recognised from small, though sometimes recurring, television roles. She co-wrote a short with the similarly CV'd Michael Stahl-David, one based on the popular party game Mafia. That salon diversion relies on secret identities and the slow reveal of information; it might be better know to you as Werewolf. Some flashbacks grounded in a constructed language for Kryptonian and yet another origin story for Krypto can't hide that Supergirl, here at least, isn't a double identity. It's maybe not even one.

Director Craig Gillespie has directed tales of strong women, of heroism, of particular oddity and majesty. I'm not sure this is as good as any of them. Some of that's the burden of continuity.

The plot draws heavily from the comic miniseries Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow, but while one pitch for this film apparently drew from True Grit and there's precedent for superheroic retellings in Shane-influenced Logan there's a screen early on showing Casablanca. There are scum who've drifted here, but they too are more than borrowing. Fury Road carries Max's name but it's as much Furiosa's film as the one that bears hers. This is Supergirl's film, but at times it feels only just.

Eve Ridley and Milly Alcock work well together. Young Ruthye and Kara Zor-El have an aptly dysfunctional chemistry, but even that has shades of previous outings for Deadpool and Terminator 2. It's not got the edge of either of them, despite murder, trafficking, and a made-up swear-word (bastich) uttered by Lobo. He's, variously: an antiheroic parody of, among others, Wolverine; an ironically unironically adopted satirical entity like The Punisher; an alien bounty hunter spun-off from a spin-off of Green Lantern; not much use in this film, despite working in places as comic relief.

There's a good soundtrack, which varies from Wet Leg to Modest Mouse. There are films which use them better though, and an almost inevitable corridor fight is inventive enough to choose to do it in the aisle of a space bus and with some teleporting, but the one in Nobody doesn't need anything fantastic to be good.

Supergirl struggles for either. It might be the quantity of exposition, the second-screen friendly restatements of stakes. It might be the inconstant use of text in the corner helpfully telling us what colour suns are on this or that planet so we figure out what our heroine can do. It might be that with the possibility of defying expectations or breaking with near non-existent continuity with the freedom granted by the multiversal mechanics of The Flash this grounds itself. Not just in terms of lack of soaring ambition, but letting a spark fall to earth.

Pleasant as it is, it's also brief. A bit over an hour and a half, and with a babysitter-friendly 'post-credits' style scene that's helpfully before the credits. The villain's undoubtedly a bad guy, but the moral questions around the tale of revenge are more interesting than anything the film examines itself. There is the almost obligatory statement that there was no profitable consideration for the depiction of smoking, that caused by what Lobo puffs on when he glowers his rectangular way adjacent to proceedings. That air of unreality is the synechdoche for Supergirl. Big, and sometimes bright, close, but no cigar.

Source