Last year, DC Comics’s new cinematic universe came out with three projects, two on HBO, and the Superman movie. I ended up really liking all three, but the challenge for this new cinematic universe may be 2027 when three new projects come out, all of them part of this shared universe, but none with a screenplay by writer/director James Gunn. Gunn’s idiosyncratic style works very well in a comic book movie, and as the creative guy behind all things DC right now, he does have approval rights, but it remains to be seen if this new cinematic universe can craft a distinct identity for itself, especially if the plan is to actually have different components have their own distinctive feel, unlike how many MCU movies feel interchangable.
The first of these attempts is the new Supergirl movie, and while it hasn’t been doing too good critically or financially from the looks of things as I type this, the movie does have its defenders, and my girlfriend will go to anything with Krypto in it now.
Based on a recent comic mini-series from writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely (who gets a planet named after her in the movie), the basic story is that Supergirl/Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) is essentially traveling around the universe with her dog Krypto, mostly so she can get drunk under red suns and occasionally go back to Earth where her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet) is, and Kara is fundamentally not interested in being like Clark, someone she seems to see primarily as something of a huge dork. There’s a good reason for Kara’s differing attitude, but that comes out as the movie progresses. Instead, Kara just wants to party and forget, flying over to yellow suns to get over hangovers and play a little catch with Krypto in the vacuum of space.
However, when Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) murders the family of young Ruthye (Eve Ridley), Ruthye takes it up on herself to track Krem down to enact revenge. Kreme is the leader of the Brigands, space pirates who specialize in, among other things, human trafficking, and Krem manages to steal Kara’s spaceship and poison Krypto with a toxin that only he carries the antidote for. Kara now basically has two missions: get the antidote for Krypto, and if possible, prevent Ruthye from killing someone. That leads to couple of different planets under different colored suns that do different things to Kryptonians and the occasional run-in with homicidal bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa), but if there’s someone that needs bringing down, it’s Krem and the Brigands. Now, if Kara can get and stay sober long enough to do it, that might actually work.
I come to this review, and the movie has a lot of bad press. Let’s get some things out of the way then: it is nowhere near the worst movie ever made. I don’t think it deserves that level of hate. True, Alcock has said some things in her press run that maybe she shouldn’t have, and it’s always hard for female-led superhero movies that aren’t the first Wonder Woman. But it’s not an awful or even a bad movie. Alcock does a great job with her role, and Momoa is playing the DC character that he was born to inhabit. I didn’t even think the script was all that bad. It hit the right notes where it had to. There were a few moments where I wasn’t sure what was going on right away because of how the story worked that may have been due to the script or the direction, but overall, the script is fine. There’s a couple wild story elements, like a character voiced by an uncredited Seth Rogen, and I’m guessing a lot of that came from Ana Nogueira’s script. I’ve seen it said the movie works better if you view it as a smaller character drama instead of the usual superhero epic, and I can see that. In my mind, the movie had to do one thing: establish that Supergirl is not just a female version of Superman, and the movie did just that.
No, the biggest problems were Krem as the main villain and the direction by the generally capable Craig Gillespie. In the source material, Krem works in part because he’s barely in it. He’s not the point of the story, and that means here, he’s a generic supervillain character with some eccentric behaviors that don’t exactly make him memorable or even enjoyable. He’s just kinda there. With the direction, there were moments where I thought the camera should have lingered more. This is a rushed movie, and while many have complained it’s boring, it does seem odd that my antidote to that is a longer movie, but one that could hold the proper dramatic beats a little longer to let them have an audience impact would have helped. At the least, better action sequences would have been nice. I watched last year’s Superman more than once, and even surprised myself when it went on my “best of” list for last year. I don’t expect to do either of those things with Supergirl, but I don’t regret seeing it, and for the record, my girlfriend, not a DC Comics fan, enjoyed it noticeably more than I did.
Grade: C+
0 Comments