THB #848: Supergirl

“We coulda been a contenda!”

If Kara Zor-El been a reluctant 20something Supergirl and the movie had not turned a teenage girl without superpowers into a distracting sidekick… it would have been enough for us.

If Kara was driven from self-abuse to unironic heroics in the course of trying to save the life of her beloved Krypto and the filmmakers solved the puzzle of the ebb and flow of her powers instead of repeatedly getting caught up in gimmick events… it would have been enough for us.

If Supergirl had an interesting and well-acted supervillain and not repeatedly confused the audience by making his actual skill level unclear… it would have been enough for us.

Supergirl is an incredibly frustrating movie. There are so many elements that “they” got right.

Milly Alcock is really right for the role in so many ways. She does ennui well. She does anger well. Her looks bounce from model gorgeous to “she looks a little odd” from moment to moment, which I found very compelling. And she can deliver a line, with gusto or just throwing them away, with the best of them.

Matthias Schoenaerts is a great actor of range and gets a wild and always interesting make-up job that does a lot of work for his character before he does any acting. So much potential there.

The idea of a character with super powers who works hard to avoid her power, but is also reliant - by habit - on those powers and sees the world as a cesspool is a really interesting idea vs the Gunn Superman notion of the innocent good guy who just wants people to be decent.

Craig Gillespie is a skilled director. His inexperience in big action works against him at times, as he loses spacing in some of the fight sequences. But he knows how to highlight dialogue and to let the comedy have its room in the midst of chaos.

So what went wrong?

What’s wrong is such a movie industry cliché that it’s almost embarrassing to make the accusation against the movie.

Without spoiling anything… as this is all in the trailers and ads… the story of Supergirl is that she is a young woman who has superpowers from the yellow sun, but intentionally seeks out red-sun planets that weaken her to allow her to get drunk and in trouble. She is depressed. She doesn’t feel at home anywhere.

But… when she sees someone being bullied, she reactively responds by defending the victim.

Supe Doggy Dogg

In the midst of one of these moments, in which she is fighting a lot of alien men and some women, a gang of Villains, whose spaceship was destroyed while assaulting an innocent family, decide to steal Supergirl’s spaceship. (Why does someone with her powers need a spaceship? Hmmm… the movie doesn’t really answer this, but it’s kind of her mobile home in space… somewhere to keep her minimal amount of stuff.., blurry, but the kind of detail I will forgive in a movie.)

But much more upsetting to Supergirl, limited by the red sun she is under, is that when her dog, Krypto, flies at the ship to stop the Villains, he is shot with a poison. She must save the dog. Turns out, he must have the antidote that only the villains have. He has 3 days to get the antidote before dying.

That’s it!!!

That’s all they needed! You have your story! You have a clock! You’re already pretty much at the end of the first act. Add some frills, but that is the story!

But it wasn’t enough for them.

“Go away, kid… ya bother me”

To be more detailed… part of the that first act is these Villains killing the family of Ruthye, a 13-year-old girl (again, as seen in the ads). Of course she is going to cling to Kara. But as a narrative element, what does she add? She adds vulnerability. She adds a little sister figure for Kara. But the hard question is, how does this help the experience of the storytelling?

Moreover, one of the key horrors of the Villains is that they are kidnapping lots of young women mature enough to get pregnant in order to propagate their group. Though the girls are scantily clad, this doesn’t seem to be a sex thing. The Villains want their reproductive abilities and apparently discard them when they have delivered (and maybe raised?) the kids.

Why isn’t their female reproduction slave system enough to help inspire Kara? And isn’t Ruthye, in many ways, a reflection of those reproductive slaves, just around the age of her own reproductive era. How many ways does the movie need to make the point?

This is a character movie, not really an action story movie.

What an audience, generally, wants here is:
1. Supergirl doesn’t want to be super.
2. Supergirl gets dragged into action and establishes that she needs the yellow sun for full power.
3. Supergirl gets motivated by the threat to her dog.
4. Supergirl realizes that the Villains are worse than their assault on her dog (kidnapping women).
5. Supergirl tries, but can’t seem to beat the Villains
6. Supergirl isn’t just unable, but her life is actually threatened.
7. Supergirl’s vulnerability triggers an idea of how to beat the Villains
8. Supergirl beats the villains.
9. Supergirl becomes the hero - still sassy - that the audience always wanted her to be.

Before you say, “that’s too simple!,” YES, it is. But again, this is a character movie. Lots of character - and obviously, action sequences supporting this infrastructure - to be added. But you also can’t lose track of the frame on which the sculpture is built.

And, you might wonder, why is the 13-year-old Ruthye such a problem in my view? Because her story takes time from developing the characters in a character movie and also gave the filmmakers some lazy outs and distractions from problems they never worked out, bur surely could have. It’s Supergirl not Supergirl & Ruthye.

“I yam what I yam”

It’s not Supergirl & Lobo either. But if you want to add Lobo, showing up with his own quirks and motivations, and then zooming away when he is satisfied by something simple? Great! He brings his own atmosphere/gravity. Ruthye does not. She doesn’t have powers. It’s almost as though when the idea of pulling Krypto out of most of the movie, the filmmakers decided they needed some other vulnerable sidekick for Kara… but the thing that worked about Krypto in the Superman film was he was not so vulnerable or controllable. Ruthye is feisty, but still a kid in a very dangerous space.

Does Kara find her inner superhero because she becomes a big sister to a girl or because of something within herself? Which is a more interesting choice?

Moreover, why are the kidnapped reproductive slaves NOT explored? The movie basically reduces them to civilians in harms way in a cage over in the corner. What they face is no small thing. They aren’t collateral damage in a laser fight. But their stories just kind of sit there with an occasional reminder they are there.

I don’t want to be a “shoulda/coulda” film critic who insists on their idea… and to be honest, this idea just hit me while writing this review. But what if the main Villain, Schoenaerts’ Krem, decides that he can take advantage of Kara in her vulnerable state and impregnate her, giving him a superchild?

This is an extreme idea. Perhaps silly. Worth trashing. But the reason I am expressing it is that it is personal to Kara. And that is what we don’t really get in this movie. Too many distractions. Not enough depth in the key players… including Krem.

Audiences love the superhero broken down to their most vulnerable and then, just at the last second, the power of the yellow sun (or whatever… the villain’s girlfriend in a Bond movie) saves the hero and now, that hero will be super again and kick everyone’s ass. And this movie does a version of that… 3 or 4 times.

In the spirit of James Bond, you can do a small version of this at the top, as a prologue, and then, they audience is willing to wait the entire movie to get there in a gigantic way. But you can’t do it over and over and over. (The only example of this being untrue, in my memory, is Avengers: Infinity War, in which we had that comeback expectation of many of the decade-established superheros only to have Thanos crush them anyway. The film toyed with our expectations, wearing us out, even though we all knew that, somehow, things would be made right in Endgame.)

I did not hate Supergirl. I really enjoyed a bunch of it. But it kept disappointing me. When it needed to go deeper, it went shallower. When I wanted a clever turn, it too often did exactly what seemed too obvious.

There is one big fight sequence and it suddenly struck me that I (almost) wanted the movie to give us a hard number of bad guys that needed to be taken out and to see them counted down as they were smashed. Very silly, cartoony notion. But even without the visual countdown, the problem was that as an audience member, I didn’t know what exactly Kara was up against before she had to face the inevitable boss man. The audience wants to know. They want to root. The audience wants to anticipate and then have moments of easy satisfaction as well as surprise beats they didn’t see coming. It’s Action 101, but we still love the ride when it’s done well.

Anyway…

I’m not going to linger on the 2 problems that were not solved at all. 1. How she ends up wearing The Suit. 2. The very end, which seems so anti-climatic and nothing that it makes Colin Firth’s shrug at the end of Disclosure Day seem like a powerful choice.

I am still so frustrated by Supergirl. It had all the ingredients for a great souffle… but it feels like someone kept obsessively opening the oven to check on it and let the over door slam, deflating the poor thing.

Until tomorrow…