All the Supergirls, all at Once

      Supergirl: Rated “PG-13” Runtime 1h 48m

Director:  Craig Gillespie

Stars:  Milly Alcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa

Back in June the new Supergirl film dropped. It was based on the DC comicbook series which was originally published in 2021. The collected graphic novel came out in February 2022, which is where I came aboard with this story. So, before I get into the film itself, I need to take a couple of little side trips. According to IMDB the story for the film is about how Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El, A.K.A. “Supergirl, joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home.”

    To be sure, while The Woman of Tomorrow story from the comic is—at its core—the same as the story from the film, it does take a different track once the base story is established. (We’ll get to how in a bit,) Needless to say—as much as I liked and thoroughly enjoyed the film, The comic from which it was adapted is so much incredibly better that the film that came out of it. In fact, I’ll go further and say that The Woman of Tomorrow story is far and away the finest Supergirl story I have ever read. It has depth, subtly, nuance, character development, and, what’s most important, A story that keeps you hooked from beginning to end. Kudos to Tom King for penning a most amazing story.

When I started reading comics in the early ‘60s I read my fair share of Supergirl comics, so what follows will (hopefully) make sense). In 2016 Scarlett Johansson guest hosted on SNL and the sketch comedy show used her appearance to skewer her upcoming role headlining the Black Widow movie (be patience, this will all tie in shortly). What they produced was a faux trailer for the film Black Widow Age of Me where Johansson as Black Widow spent the entire three-minute trailer worrying about her hair, her clothes (she breaks a heel walking in NYC) and her dating life. All of which pretty much sums up the majority of the Supergirl comics that I read back then. When Supergirl first came to CBS (2015) and then to the CW in (2016) on her own TV show many of the early episodes also seemed to concern her worrying about her hair, her clothes, her dating life.

She did seem to grow out of that, but still…Interestingly enough, when the Black Widow film dropped, it was nothing short of a slam-bang action/adventure spy film and nothing at all like either the Supergirl comic,

    After the success of the Christopher Reeves Superman films (1978, 1980, 1983) Tri-Star Pictures decided to make a Supergirl film, casting the 18-year-old Helen Slater in the title role. Unfortunately, what they delivered was what I now (after watching it again) consider quite possibly the worst superhero movie ever made. From what I was able to determine, there was little if any story, barely a plot, and absolutely no quality control of DC comics overseeing the final product, because no matter how silly the Supergirl comics of the 1960s were, this film was worse.

It starts out with her on Argo City (the chunk of Krypton that got blown off of and thus saved from destruction when the planet exploded). The domed city itself looks like it was cobbled together with cast off props and sets from 1976’s Logan Run, and even though the cast was stocked with film luminaries like Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, Mia Farrow, and Brenda Vaccaro, all of their very impressive talents were wasted on what passed for this drivel that was this script. From Argo City she went to Earth winding up in an all-girl’s boarding school, the sole purpose of which was to catch her classmates in various states of undress. Farrow plays a sorceress who comes into possession of a supposedly “magical” globe from Argo City that Kara went to Earth to retrieve. (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke)

That film ends with her saving the day and flying off into space to save Argo City. And yet, even before the new Supergirl film had come out there were cries from the peanut gallery of how Slater was a better Supergirl than Milly Alcock (who wasn’t “pretty enough” to be Supergirl—personally, we happen to think that Alcock is drop-dead gorgeous). But enough of all that.

Here in this modern version of Supergirl, we are given a deeper look into the maid of steel. We see a woman who watched her world die…twice, came of age on a world alien to her, with everyone she once knew now dead, living in the shadow of her world-famous cousin, with little if anything to call her own. While the story bounces back and forth between Argo City, Earth, and deep space, we see the pieces of her life much akin to the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that don’t quite fit together in any way that makes sense.

    At 25, she has been traveling off world to planets circling a red sun so that she can drink herself into sensory numbness in order to escape the emptiness and pain of her own unfulfilled life. Traveling with her dog Krypto, she lands on Holzherr where she crosses paths with the Brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills. Krem has recently murder the family of Ruthye Knoll. He was looking to acquire swords from Ruthye’s father, but wound up killing everyone save for Ruthye, who manages to secure the help of Kara to extract her revenge on Krem.

Kara and Ruthye follow Krem to Bilquis where they—along with Lobo (Jason Moma)—brawl with Krem and his brigands before ultimately confronting them on Barenton (a planet orbiting a pair of suns, one yellow and one green, which is toxic to Supergirl) where they have their final showdown. Now while the film’s story is shorter, and less complex than the comic, it is no less thrilling. To be sure, the film has added a human trafficking of young girls element to the storyline that wasn’t in the comic (perhaps current real-world concerns bled into the script). Or it was added to the mix simply to speed up the final confrontation and ultimate resolution who can tell. Either way it added an air of immediacy to the story which wound up playing out in a very different conclusion to the film than to the comic.

It goes without saying that we very much enjoyed the initial brawl in the bar, the the fight on Bilquis, as well as the final confrontation on Barenton , as well as the dust up with the space tech pirates, giving the film all of the action we have come to expect in a superhero film, but it also gave us all of the emotional content an actual story needs, Kara's connection to Krypto, her interactions with her cousin Kal-El, and even How she interreacted with Ruthye. We could tell that Ruthye's grief and need for revenge was real, and how Kara's own grief initially kept her from recognizing Ruthye's. We even rather liked how when Superman gave her her costume telling her "It's so people will know we're good" wasn't just a schmaltzy line, but a call back to the last thine Kara's mother said to her. "to be good" (not nice, but good), showing that the writers knew what they were doing when they wrote that line. 

    In the final analysis, none of that actually matters. The film was good, Alcock was amazing in the role of Supergirl, and Moma was fun with his cameo of Lobo. Finally, while we mourn the loss of seeing Sasha Calle play Supergirl (Kara Zor-El from the 2023 superhero film The Flash we do look forward to seeing Alcock fill the role in upcoming DCU films.