Craig Gillespie’s far-out adventure is something of a quirky oddity compared to bigger blockbuster outings – so why is it failing to fly at the box office?
James Gunn’s Superman was the major make-or-break moment for DC’s latest cinematic reboot. And yet its follow-up may ultimately prove just as revealing, not least because it offers up a first real indication of the kind of universe Gunn intends to build once the novelty of the man of steel’s return has worn off. Will every chapter of the DCU be chained to the kind of world-saving spectacle we remember from the older Zack Snyder films? Or is there room for stranger, smaller stories to take place in the same shared reality?
With Supergirl, the answer appears to be yes. Craig Gillespie’s film heads in some unexpectedly far-out directions, makes one particularly bold change from its source material, Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s acclaimed comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and quietly suggests that DC’s greatest strength may lie not just in trying to out-Marvel Marvel. Here’s the lowdown for those who’ve seen it – and don’t forget to let us know your thoughts in the comments on how this affects Gunn’s wider universe.
Gunn’s Superman gave us an optimistic Kal-El who really does subscribe (despite the best efforts of his parents) to the basic tenets of Kryptonian decency: protect the weak, see off the bad guys and try to leave the universe in a better state than you find it. His cousin couldn’t be more different, and now we know why. While Supes arrived as a baby on Earth, and sees his superpowers under the yellow sun as a gift to be used in the service of humanity, Kara Zor-El spent her early years on the Kryptonian exo-city of Argo, watching everyone around her being slowly poisoned by kryptonite radiation. Perhaps this is why she spends most of her time travelling to red sun planets just so that she can get drunk.
Either way, Kara doesn’t behave like a superhero at all. When the orphaned Ruthye Marye Knoll begs for her help to avenge the deaths of her family at the hands of nefarious brigand leader Krem of the Yellow Hills, Kara just carries on drinking. It is only when her beloved mutt Krypto is poisoned with a dart from Krem’s personal arsenal – and the villain steals her ship – that she decides to set out after him in search of the antidote.
Which brings us to the film’s expanded sense of scale. Where the previous DC Extended Universe mainly saw aliens as an occasional threat to Earth from mysterious places out there in the great beyond, Supergirl imagines a functioning intergalactic community populated by sentient humanoid and non-humanoid species alike. As she journeys from planet to planet, there’s a sense that this DC universe has more in common with Star Wars or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy than Man of Steel or Justice League, with their isolated alien incursions and quasi-biblical visitors from the heavens. There’s a definite space-western feel to proceedings, even if it’s hard to reconcile the improbably orderly cosmic bus stop Kara uses to hop between worlds with the otherwise lawless frontier beyond. Mos Eisley certainly never had anything quite so efficient.
Once Supergirl arrives on Bilquis, it becomes apparent that this isn’t just a colourful interstellar chase. The old DC films might have had Krem and his Brigands bent on galactic domination; in this one they are kidnapping young women from isolated frontier settlements and murdering anyone who stands in their way. There are shades of Mad Max: Fury Road and Unforgiven here, in the abiding sense that this is a universe where technology may have advanced at light speed, but gender equality still travels by horse and cart.
This is also where the film begins to ask whether someone with Kara’s powers can keep pretending the suffering around her is none of her business. Obtaining the antidote to cure Krypto and reclaiming her ship might still be her first priorities, but when the universe out there is this dark and twisted, Supergirl starts to realise that looking the other way is just another way of choosing a side.
In the original comic book, Kara persuades Ruthye that killing Krem will not mend her broken soul, or bring back her family, and ultimately imprisons him in the phantom zone. In the film, Supergirl herself executes the horrible space pirate. This is a fundamental shift from the eight-issue miniseries’ moral position, that revenge offers no lasting peace, to a perspective that is more ambiguous in tone. Perhaps Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira simply decided Kara’s journey from nihilistic party girl to cape-wearing cosmic saint was a little bit too neat in print, Nogueira’s comments certainly point that way. Certainly, this felt like fair frontier justice to me, even if Superman might not have been too impressed. What did you think?
As in the comic book, Kara loses her powers under a red sun, regains them in the glow of yellow and experiences something akin to kryptonite poisoning when the light turns green. It’s a canny way to break up her journey across the galaxy, but also stores up issues for the future of Gunn’s DC universe. We’ve already seen how easy it is to travel between planets in this version of reality, so what’s to stop all those red sun aliens travelling to Earth and taking over? As far as we’re aware, our home planet has only a handful of metahumans to defend it, including two Kryptonians. Never mind Zod or Doomsday, it would presumably only take a saloon full of low level baddies to decide they quite fancied the look of Earth and trouble could be seriously brewing.
By the time the movie ends, all Kara has really done is take down one particularly despicable alien bad guy, and helped one grieving girl step back from the brink. On the grand scale of things, this is not Crisis on Infinite Earths. But perhaps it’s part of a wider trend towards lower stakes drama in blockbuster genre films?
The most recent Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, came in for criticism because no planets were destroyed, there were no sudden revelations about the secret lineage of any of the main characters, and the fate of the entire galaxy wasn’t perpetually hanging by a thread. Supergirl feels like the DC equivalent. Kara doesn’t spend her time fighting off alien invasions, and the film never needs to inflate its story into yet another cosmic emergency simply because it has access to a galaxy full of populated planets. That is something of a new direction for superhero movies, which have often avoided the more idiosyncratic, self-contained comic-book stories that have flourished in print in favour of bigger, louder exercises in blockbuster franchise plate-spinning.
Whether audiences – and critics – are ready for the kind of smaller, stranger superhero stories that rely on character, texture and tone rather than apocalyptic spectacle remains to be seen; the movie’s mixed reception suggests not. But if comic book movies are to survive as a medium, there will at some point be a need for the quirky little frontier tale of grief and redemption in among the multiversal, reality-shattering pile-ups. If superhero films really are the new westerns, they can’t all be High Noon. Some will need to be True Grit in a cape.
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