Supergirl and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures
Directed by Craig Gillespie
The James Gunn led DCU seems to have hit its first snag since his takeover in 2023 as audiences and critics are divided on this in a way that seems more than a little absurd. It’s not that I find it impossible for Gunn and co to make a less than stellar movie, but opinions on this are varied enough that I start to wonder what’s really going on under the hood that brought us to this point. Is this a misunderstood gem that audiences were just unable to fully connect with, or is this just as bad as some are saying it is? Let’s find out!!
Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) is your typical twenty-something Gen-Z mess. She grew up seeing everything she knew and loved slowly die away before getting thrust into adulthood with a mandate to save the world, and frankly, she’s not in the mood for any of it. Rather than join her cousin Kal-El (David Corenswet) in the superhero business, she travels the universe with her dog Krypto to find rad parties to crash and calm meadows to nurse her hangovers. However, she can’t seem to outrun all the jerks in the world, and an altercation with a nasty Brigand (Matthias Schoenaerts) leaves Krypto in a bad spot and Kara with only a few days to set things right. The journey will prove difficult, especially with a fellow vengeance seeker Ruthye (Eve Ridley) tagging along and being questionably useful, but with so much on the line, Kara has no choice but to step up to the plate and fight for those she cares about. Will this journey prove to her that she can be just as heroic as her cousin on Earth? What tragedy has brought her to this place, and can she ever find peace from the ghosts that haunt her every day? Maybe it’s not even that complicated; perhaps she just wants to chill and have fun! You ever think of that, Clark!?
It’s been interesting to see the reception that this movie has received because, once again, I feel like I’ve landed face first into an alternate reality where everyone else saw a mediocre comic book movie while I saw a genuinely fantastic film. It checks all the necessary boxes for a big budget studio film with giant set-pieces and strong effects work, but it has a heart and soul that really captures something that I don’t think a lot of superhero movies have grasped. Milly Alcock gives a fantastic performance that understands the nuances of Kara’s trauma in a way that deviates from what we’ve seen in other interpretations of the character without reimaging her from the ground up. At worst, you can say that it feels a bit derivative of what Gunn was doing with the Guardians of the Galaxy series, but there’s a reason those films resonated with so many people and this is hardly the first film to jump on that bandwagon; though, I’d argue that it’s the most successful at understanding what made them so special and isn’t just copying the aesthetics. I’m frankly baffled by the lack of enthusiasm from not just the usual suspects on YouTube, but by general audiences who simply did not turn out for this movie. I mean, sure, I know what got the chuds’ dander up, but professional film critics are rarely as driven by outright hostility towards women, so something else must not have clicked. It’s a shame to see play out in real time as it’ll no doubt lead to some bad ideas about course correcting from Warner Bros, but for what it’s worth I think they put together an excellent movie that will one day find its audience.
If I were to take a stab as to why this bounced off of so many people, it’s that it has a completely different structure and style to almost any other superhero movie. Most movies in the genre have a plot that is very external in terms of its threat; giant monsters, nefarious villains, schemes to take over the world, and so on. There’s a certain language to this that has been fine-tuned by the MCU’s interconnected universe, and I think that there’s now an expectation that everything needs to be a small piece of a larger puzzle; that it all has to tie together to the greater cinematic universe. This movie takes things in a different direction as it’s a story made for Kara’s sake, and not the DCU’s, and frankly, I found it to be a refreshing change of pace. Much of this movie is to be taken at face value which I think fans might have been put off by, but to focus on that would be to miss all the ways that it works in service of Kara’s character arc. Why do the Brigands act so cartoonishly villainous in the movie? It’s because they’re the bad guys and they represent something that Kara struggles with, the furthest possible place her isolation could take her, and that’s all that the movie needs them to be. Detachment is a huge theme in the movie and so many of the characters provide nuanced viewpoints that Kara has to contend with, and while there is a superhero action movie happening around all of that, with jokes, flashy effects, and a literal ticking clock to keep the pace from sagging, this is ultimately a very personal movie that cares more about Kara’s internal struggle than the finer details of this corner of the universe she finds herself in. It seems to me like this is what people have been asking for since the term Superhero Fatigue entered the discourse; to feel unencumbered by inter-movie continuity and to just tell an interesting story. We’re here to work through Kara’s trauma and the succession of fun and charismatic side-kicks and secondary characters provide her different avenues to address it while giving fun performances to keep things fun and accessible. Matthias Schoenaerts does a phenomenal job of imbuing the big bad Brigand with pathos and terrifying charisma, Jason Momoa feels more at home playing Lobo than any other role he’s ever played, and even Eve Ridley as the young girl tagging along on a quest for revenge has plenty of fun moments that keep her grounded and relatable even if her quest is one of the most generic plots imaginable. It works for her because the actor is committed to the role, and the simplicity of her quest gives us a clear and concrete point of view that Kara has to contend with in her ongoing struggle to understand who she is and who she wishes to become which is a story I think is much more worthy of telling than another on-the-nose space adventure against another world-ending threat.
I have been rather glowing in praise for this movie, but I’ll concede that it does start to waiver at the end with a third act that feels clunky. Nothing about it is egregious enough to derail the movie, but a few cracks start to show that I feel are indicative of the typical Superman story. With the big blue boy scout and his fellow Kryptonian heroes, you really only have two ways to create tension; find a way to depower them or have a lot of things happening at once. Both methods are used several times to try and keep the third act going, and in doing so, the finale feels somewhat contrived and more than a little bloated. Kryptonite is rarely used in a way that doesn’t feel contrived, but it doesn’t help the movie that they find three or four ways to use it back to back in an effort to stretch out the big battle at the end. On top of that, since the only power Kryptonians don’t typically have is being in more than one place that the same time, the film has to layer on set-piece after set-piece to keep Kara occupied, and it becomes overwhelming in a way that leaves it all feeling like white noise. Thankfully the movie ends on a much stronger note once the threats have been adequately dealt with, but this is a challenge that these movies will run into and hopefully they’ll find more interesting ways to overcome them.
Angry chuds on YouTube have been a thing for a long time and can be easily ignored, but the lukewarm reception this got from more traditional outlets is a bit head-scratching. If it’s simply superhero fatigue then I’d have hoped they’d save it for something less interesting or at least a movie that exhibited more of the genre’s most obnoxious traits. This bucks the trend enough to feel fresh while still remaining congruent with the new direction for DC under the Gunn regime and I’d say it’s as good as his own film about Superman from last year. I’d certainly recommend seeing it if you still haven’t yet, and it’s perhaps another abject lesson in not listening to the loudest voices out there as volume is rarely correlated with thoughtful insight.
The Reviewers Unite 