Supergirl Should Be Fun

A roving review of the new movie and some specific choices I still don't understand.

This is WAY more than you want to read about the new Supergirl movie …

As you may know, if you’re a longtime reader, we are Superman nerds here at JoeBlogs, and that nerdiness does extend to Supergirl. We love Supergirl in this house. We watched every single episode of the Melissa Benoist Supergirl TV show, including the weird musical crossovers with other CW Superheroes, and we loved almost all of them, and we were REALLY excited about the new Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock.

And then we started reading some reviews.

And we were a bit less excited.

Then we saw Ryan George’s hilarious Supergirl Pitch Meeting, and were a bit less excited.

And then we talked with a couple of people who saw the movie … and, sigh, we were even a little bit less excited.

So I’d say by the time we went to see Supergirl on Monday, my movie plus-minus expectation was for maybe a 2-star movie. I was even willing to go 1.5 stars just so that I could feel assured that I would enjoy it.

Sigh. Even at 1.5 stars, Supergirl turned out to be a real bummer.

It was not a bummer because it was bad. I mean, it WAS bad, but that’s not the reason it was a bummer — I can thoroughly enjoy a bad superhero movie. It was a bummer because I did not understand a single choice this movie made. Not one. The thing that made Superman so fun and so wonderful was that it had a point of view. Superman is all good. How do you navigate this treacherous and cynical world when you’re all good? Plus Superman had absolutely glorious side characters — Mister Terrific steals the movies at times, Ms. Tessmacher at other times, Clark’s parents at others — and a love story and a delightfully disobedient Krypto and a few scenes that were just wonderfully silly and cringy and made you feel like a kid reading comic books.

Supergirl had none of these. I talked about the choices. They were staggering. Apologies if there are a few spoilers in here:

Choice 1: Let’s put the whole movie in space.

Why? Why is this movie not on Earth? Why would they put the whole movie in space? What’s the reason for this? And what kind of space is this? She goes into some space bar that where the lounge singer is singing “The Girl From Ipanema.” If you are creating a space world where the lounge singer is singing “The Girl from Ipanema,” that’s a good sign that this movie doesn’t need to be in space. It could be in Cleveland.

Choice 2: Shoot the dog.

We know basically two things about Supergirl. One, she’s angsty. It isn’t exactly clear WHY she’s angsty other than her having to leave her exploding planet, which, yeah, I had to move right before high school, I sort of get it, but I mean, at some point you might want to let it go. Anyway, two, she loves her dog Krypto more than anything in the world. So instead of making this an adventure about Supergirl and Krypto — I mean, that might have actually been fun, you know? — they have the bad guy, whatever his name is, shoot Krypto with a poison dart. Why does he shoot Krypto with a poison dart? No idea. But apparently it’s really bad futuristic poison, like really bad, like there’s only one antidote in the whole universe and the bad guy wears it around his neck for reasons that must have made sense at 3 a.m. in the writer’s room, and also it will take THREE DAYS for the poison to kill Krypto. Three days.*

I realize this will sound cynical, but rat poison probably would have done it quicker.

*This is hardly a major point, but for some reason it’s driving me crazy … Supergirl found some healing person on whatever planet they were on, and she said that Krypto would die in “three moonfalls.” So three days. And then Supergirl set her Kryptonian watch (one of the few things she brought back with her on Krypton) to for three days so she could occasionally look at it to let us know that time was running out.

But here’s what she said: “Three days. Seventy-two hours.” … Wait, this planet also has 24-hour days? What a coincidence! Why in the hell was this movie in space?

Choice 3: The bad guy (whatever his name is)

Superhero movies need charismatic bad guys in order to work. Lex Luthor. The Joker. Darth Vader. Thanos. This movie has a bad guy with a face full of ball bearings and, for some reason, a button on his neck that he has to press in order to speak, like he’s on perpetual mute. When we first see the guy show up at a family’s house, he demands to eat some of their pie. As bad guys do. And then, he’s apparently there to steal these precious swords that the man makes, but instead he kills the whole family, except for the 13-year-old daughter, and then does not steal the swords at all.

So, what was the point of that?

And then he steals Supergirl’s ship because he has to get off the planet, and then he shoots a poison dart at the dog because he just does, and none of it makes any sense, and this guy doesn’t seem to have any powers at all, and the only reason that this movie even happens is because they keep putting Supergirl on planets with red suns so that she doesn’t have any of her powers.

Choice 4: Keep taking away Supergirl’s powers by putting her on planets with red suns.

Good thinking. What we all want is to watch a Supergirl movie where Supergirl doesn’t have any powers.

Choice 5: Jason Momoa.

If you gave me 10,000 tries, I couldn’t tell you a single reason why Jason Momoa’s character is in this movie other than he’s Jason Momoa. I mean, the character just kind of shows up for no reason at all; he doesn’t further the plot in any way; he doesn’t seem to have any motivations other than to smoke a cigar and drive a motorcycle.

Choice 6: Motorcycles

Who knew there were so many motorcycles in space?

Choice 7: Pairing Supergirl up with a 13-year-old girl

I don’t get it. I mean, I’ll give the 13-year-old girl this — she’s the only person in the entire movie with a clear motivation. Her family was slaughtered. She wants revenge. OK. I mean, she’s also SUPER annoying and intermittently helpless and swashbuckling, but at least we know what she wants. We can understand what she wants.

And Supergirl’s entire motivation in the movie, beyond saving her dog in the three days the bad guy (whatever his name is) generously gave her, is to make sure she does not get her revenge because, I don’t know, revenge is bad or something, it leads down dark roads, even though Supergirl makes sure that she gets her revenge in a vicious very un-Supergirl way.

Look, I’m not saying Supergirl needed a love interest — I admire the pluck of making a Supergirl movie where she specifically doesn’t have a love interest. But a whiny 13-year-old girl? Who thought that would be fun?

Choice 8: More motorcycles

Did the writers watch a Mad Max Marathon before diving into this movie?

Choice 9: Have the movie end on a planet that has both a green AND yellow sun.

Sure. Why not.

Choice 10: Keep Milly Alcock out of the Supergirl costume until the end.

In the end, this movie had one thing going for it — Milly Alcock is awesome. She’s got total Supergirl charisma. They could have done so much with her. They could have made Supergirl funny, quirky, silly, fierce, loving, cynical, all these things.

Instead, they made her a mess. And they waited until the very end to even put her in the Supergirl costume (and when they did, it made absolutely no sense).*

*Again, this doesn't matter at all, but these writers gave Supergirl this odd origin story where Krypton doesn’t actually blow up. Instead, it partly blows up, but they’re able to put up a force field over a small area and preserve part of the planet. Don’t ask me how that science works. Anyway, because of that, Kara actually grew up on Krypton. When she gets to Earth, she doesn’t speak a word of English. She can only speak Kryptonian with a thick Kryptonian accent.

And yet, next we see her, she speaks perfect English with no accent at all.

Maybe speaking without an accent is yet another power you get from the yellow sun.