I was wondering what I was going to do for a movie review, as the last three genre movies I watched weren’t quite what I wanted: The Sheep Detectives had promise, but it was too cutesy for me in the end; I watched Mortal Kombat 2 mostly because it had Karl Urban in it, and I like Karl. But in the end, it wasn’t as good as its predecessor—kind of Shakespearean in that it was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” I really wanted to like The Mandalorian and Grogu, but I felt it was aimed at a much younger audience, though it had its moments. So, since I didn’t hate James Gunn’s Superman with David Corenswet, I decided to see Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie.
I’ve been a big Superman fan since *gasp* the 1950s, when I used to watch the Man of Steel on a small black-and-white TV, though in the last twenty years or so my reading of Superman comics has been extremely spotty, so I’m very much not up on trneds and current villains and pals. So a lot of my “canon” has probably been changed and/or skewed (I regard the comics as canon, more or less) since I stopped regular reading.
I’ll try to do this review without major spoilers, but hear with me if I goof. Okay, Superman’s Kryptonian father, Jor-El, had a brother, Zor-El, who lived in Argo City. Heeding his brother’s warnings about Krypton exploding, Zor-El created a shield that went up over the city just before the planet went boom! From the movie, it enclosed part of the city, but a lot of those who couldn’t get to the centre of the city died. But as most people know, when Krypton died, the remnants of the planet’s crust and (I assume) centre were changed by the explosion into the element Kryptonite. So far the movies have used green Kryptonite, which weakens Kryptonians, and eventually kills them. But in the comics, there are other colours of Kryptonite—Red, Gold, Silver, Black, each with its own effects; here’s what little I remember: gold takes away Kryptonian powers permanently, red has unpredictable effects, and that’s about all I recall. Although Zor-El created an electronic shield to keep in the atmosphere, the ground under Argo City turned to Kryptonite and eventually poisoned all the inhabitants, who died.
But in this movie, Zor-El, after his wife died, made a one-person craft (well, one person and one puppy) and sent Kara off to Earth where his brother had sent Kal-El, who would grow up to be Superman. I’m sure there are reasons he didn’t or couldn’t make more craft to carry more Argonian citizens.
Arriving on Earth, Kara met Superman, although he couldn’t understand her Kryptonian language. A really bad joke ensued during their meeting,but I won’t spoil it here. This movie occurs, according to Gunn, between the Superman movie with Corenswet and the next Superman movie, Man of Tomorrow. But the first meeting of the two is obviously well before Superman. We also learn in this movie that she is around nine or ten years younger than her cousin. Given all the changes in movies and canon, I regard it as being “all timey-wimey” and more than a bit wibbly-wobbly.
The film opens with Krypto (in case you didn’t know, the dog is a CGI dog based on James Gunn’s own dog, a rescue) knocking over a bottle and peeing on a newspaper in which the headline is something about Superman saving lives, with a subhead about Supergirl saving cats. Kara, not in “super”uniform (though the camera panned over a folded uniform on a shelf) is under a blanket and clearly under the weather after a binge. She is in her personal spaceship, which looks like a dirty tornado hit it. She gets up and answers a video call from her cousin Superman, but cuts him off mid-sentence after he asks how the birthday week is going. It’s clearly going well if you consider binge drinking “going well.” She zooms off in her ship to find a yellow sun which will help her recover. (I think it was explained in the Superman movie that she has to drink on a red sun’s planets or alcohol won’t affect her; Kryptonians’ powers only work under a yellow sun (a long-tem canon thing, although the drinking part is pretty new).
We shift to another house on the same planet, where a band of brigands, led by Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) comes into the house of a master swordmaker; chaos ensues and Krem kills the whole family except for a young daughter Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who arms herself and sets out to seek vengeance. Krem, however, is left without a spaceship, which was blown up during the aforementioned debacle. He finds Kara’s ship while she and Krypto are walking in the hills. Krypto takes a dislike to seeing a scarred bandit and tries to attack Krem, who shoots him with a poisoned dart. Krypto is left in a coma and Kara is left without a spaceship, as Krem steals it. Kara consults a healer who tells her she has approximately three days to find the antidote—which brigands carry on their person, or the dog dies.
So here we have the motivation for the rest of the movie—motivations, that is: Kara needs to find Krem and the antidote; Ruthye needs to find Krem and kill him. So, naturally, they meet up. At a rural bus stop (!), a bus which reminded me of the catbus in Totoro, Kara meets Ruthye; the bus is hijacked by a different group of bandits, and Kara is launched sans spacesuit into space; however, this planet has two suns: a green one anda yellow one, and the yellow one revives her. (I’m leaving out and condensing stuff to avoid too many spoilers.)
Eventually, after fighting a bunch of aliens and, incidentally, meeting Lobo, an alien bounty hunter (Jason Momoa) who did appear in the comics (He rides a jet motorcycle and looks like he belongs in KISS longside Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley. He’s described as immortal in the movie, smokes cigars (!?) and swings some sort of blade on a long chain.), she meets Krem again.
And in the most controversial scene in the film, she dissuades Ruthye from slicing Krem into bologna. I’ll leave you to discover why that scene is controversial. James Gunn did not direct this film, but it is part of the “Gunniverse,” if you will. I saw somewhere that he said the movie was a feminist movie, depicting two young women making their way past tragedy to some kind of stand, I guess, developing character, etc. I don’t know about that. And oh, yeah, the dog doesn’t die.
But the movie raises questions about moral stances—in one scene, Kara uses her heat vision to persuade some brigands to give up information, threatening them with death or mutiliation by heat vision. What kind of moral stance does that show? In the Superman movie, questions were raised about where does bullying begin? If you literally have the power to make anyone do anything, to impose your moral code on them, how does that differ from bullying? That question arises here too, I think.
So… what’s good about the movie? Excellent graphics and fair-to-middling acting. Milly is good as Supergirl—not that she’s to my taste; I actually prefer TV’s Supergirl, Melissa Benoist, who at least washes her hair. (Yeah, I’m old-school. I’m so old-school that I like a Supergirl who’s not morally ambiguous—you’ll find out what I’m talking about when you see the film.) On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a rebel, someone who doesn’t put up with any crap. Even though he was a distraction from the main thrust, I enjoyed Momoa’s turn as Lobo. Even though he’s CGI, I like the dog Krypto.
What I didn’t like about the film was that a lot of it looks just plain grungy—too many alien bars, too many brigands, and too much fighting that didn’t really advance the plot, thin as it was. And there’s that moral ambiguity I mentioned. I know Superman’s a Boy Scout (let’s ignore the movie where he kiled Zod; pretend it doesn’t exist) but I like him that way. You know exactly where he stands.
The movie was also too long for what it was; and too much canon was ignored. I don’t think Kryptonians—even super-powered ones—should be able to spend great stretches in vacuum without breathing. (That’s not limited to this movie; and I also don’t like the super-breath freezing thingy. That’s not possible if their lungs are anything like ours.) All in all, though I’ll watch it again when it’s streaming, I can only give this about a medium—say, five out of ten—rating.
NOTE: This column is in no way written, edited, proofed or composed by AI, though some of my photo editing software uses it in some capacity. This is a human column and will remain so.
Canadian readers—please note that you only have until July 18 to vote in this year’s Prix Aurora Awards! I’d be grateful if you vote for me, but whether or not you do, please vote—it’s important for all Canadian SF/F fans! For more information go to Aurora Awards – The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA).
If you have any comments—if you disagree with me about this, or have any corrections to something I said which is wrong, you can comment here, or I’m on Facebook—or you could email me (stevefah at hotmail dot com). Whether you liked it or not, let me know. My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!
Steve has been an active fan since the 1970s, when he founded the Palouse Empire Science Fiction Association (PESFA) and the more-or-less late MosCon in Pullman, WA and Moscow, ID, though he started reading SF/F in the early-to-mid 1950s, when he was just a sprat. He moved to Canada in 1985 and quickly became involved with chairing or helping run Canadian cons, including ConText (’89 and ’81) and VCON. As a fan, he’s published a Hugo-nominated (one nomination) fanzine, New Venture, and he’s founded two writing groups (Writers’ Bloc and Writers of the Lost, Ink). He’s emceed and auctioned art at many West Coast and Northwest conventions including one Westercon. As a writer, he’s published a couple of books and a number of short stories (including one in Compostella [Tesseracts 20], and has collaborated with his two-time Aurora-winning wife Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk on a number of art projects. As of this writing he’s the proofreader for R. Graeme Cameron’s Polar Borealis and Rhea Rose’s Polar Starlight publications. He’s been writing for Amazing Stories off and on since the early 1980s. His column can be found on Amazing Stories most Fridays.
