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Review: Supergirl is not the disaster its low box office suggests
It’s a pretty good movie, but it needed to be a great movie to thrive in an oversaturated superhero market.
Pour one out for Supergirl, the latest installment in the DCU’s Gods and Monsters chapter, which has been beset by online troll attacks, mixed reviews, and a very disappointing opening weekend box office—not the outcome Warner Bros. was hoping for with this follow-up to last year’s Superman. It’s actually a pretty good movie, as such films go, but it’s not a great movie. And in today’s over-saturated superhero market, that’s just not sufficient to get people out of their homes and into theaters, rather than waiting for the film to come to streaming platforms.
The studio tapped Ana Nogueira to write the script, a holdover from the former DCEU plans for a standalone Supergirl film. (The character appeared in the finale of 2022’s The Flash, played by Sasha Calle.) The project was reimagined when James Gunn and Peter Safran took over and launched the “soft reboot” DCU. Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, I Tonya) signed on to direct.
The story is adapted from the comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which was partially inspired by the 1968 classic Western, True Grit. Gillespie envisioned his film as a kind of interplanetary road movie, with Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Milly Alcock) teaming up with Jason Momoa’s wild bounty hunter, Lobo, in a dynamic reminiscent of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. Lobo ended up being more of a cameo appearance; he is not featured at all in the comic miniseries, which focuses on Kara’s budding friendship with a vengeance-seeking alien child. That’s the arc the film settled on, one that harkens back to the DC Comics Silver Age.
The film opens with a montage showcasing a rebellious Kara celebrating her 23rd birthday by bar-hopping around red star planets with her space dog, Krypto—because she can actually get drunk there, as opposed to healing/empowering yellow star worlds. (Green star worlds will kill her, which predictably becomes relevant later on.) She mostly ignores the concerned calls from her cousin Kal-El/Superman/Clark Kent (David Corenswet). She’s breezily cynical, while he embraces a naive optimism and keeps encouraging her to return to Earth and try to make it her home. But for Kara, home is wherever Krypto is.
Kara also isn’t inclined to be a superhero, although she does help young Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) when some bar lowlifes try to steal the sword that belonged to Ruthye’s father. But she declines Ruthye’s plea to help her find the man who slaughtered her family: a Brigand leader named Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). Kara changes her tune when Krem hijacks Kara’s ship and shoots Krypto with a poison dart. Poor Krypto will die in three days if she can’t retrieve the antidote from Krem. The two team up, one seeking a cure, the other revenge. There’s also some sex trafficking thrown in, just to drive home the villainy of the Brigands.
As with last year’s Superman, I was initially skeptical and then pleasantly surprised by how entertaining Supergirl proved to be. The plot is refreshingly straightforward without overpacking itself with super-character cameos like its predecessor. Like Kal-El, Kara must make peace with her past, but it’s a darker past, and hence so is the overall tone of the film. There are some humorous beats, but Supergirl works best when it’s not trying too hard to be funny.
The strongest segments were the flashbacks to Kara’s childhood on Argo City. In this telling, while Kal-El was evacuated to Earth as a baby right before Krypton was destroyed, Kara’s father, Zor-El (David Krumholtz), figured out how to dome off the city in a separate chunk so it survived; Kara was born under the dome. But the surviving Kryptons eventually start dying of radiation sickness from kryptonite under the city, including Kara’s mother, Alura (Emily Beecham). After her mother’s death—Krypto adopts Kara during the funeral procession—