SUPERGIRL is a fairly straight forward modern super hero movie, and I think a pretty good one, though (to quote the great philosopher Dalton) opinions vary. It follows SUPERMAN in James Gunn’s new Detective Comics Comics movie universe, but it’s directed by Craig Gillespie (FRIGHT NIGHT remake) and written by Ana Nogueira (an actress and playwright).

I, TONYA put Gillespie on the map, or at least is the credit people always put after his name, but I think what qualified him for this was CRUELLA, a movie I watched way after the fact and didn’t review but thought was a surprisingly stylish and clever version of the Misunderstood I.P. Villainess subgenre. Here he brings similar sensibilities to the sturdy foundation of the 2021 mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. Like THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU this is a pretty humble, self-contained space western, specifically a space TRUE GRIT, though moreso in the comic (since it’s narrated by an adult version of the precocious young protagonist). After Ruthye (Eve Ridley) loses her entire family to scumbag brigands she goes to a saloon and offers a sword made by her late father (Ferdinand Kingsley, DRACULA UNTOLD) to whoever will help her track down his killer, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts, BLACK BOOK, RUST AND BONE, THE DROP, THE OLD GUARD). Kara Zor-El, street name Supergirl (Milly Alcock, UNTITLED TAKASHI MIIKE FILM) is there, and not interested, but drunkenly helps the girl not get robbed, so the next morning Krem steals her ship and shoots her flying dog Krypto with a poison dart. That’s how Supergirl and Ruthye end up traveling together on a space Greyhound. Supergirl needs to find Krem in three moonfalls to get the antidote to save Krypto; Ruthye tags along because she wants to kill Krem.

Obviously this Supergirl is pretty different from the Helen Slater version, and possibly the cinematic super hero who does the most vomiting. I’m not really sure who else is in the running. This story begins while she’s on a solo pub crawl to mark her 23rd birthday. Since her powers come from our yellow sun, she likes visiting planets with red ones in order to feel the effects of whiskey. Different planets and a poisoning or two cause her to lose and gain her powers throughout her various scraps in the movie. She can fight pretty good without them – normal person fight pretty good, not god-like. But man, if somebody’s messing with her and she gets to that sweet yellow sunlight, they better look out. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s your ass.

As we learn in a few flashbacks, Supergirl had it a little rougher than her older cousin of steel, who she calls Clark (David Corenswet, PEARL). She was born and raised on Argo, a chunk of Krypton that was separated and protected with a force field, until Kryptonite radiation slowly killed her mom (Emily Beecham, GUY RICHIE’S THE COVENANT) and most of the rest of her civilization, and then her dad (David Krumholtz, BATTLE FOR TERRA) sent her reluctantly to Earth. (With Krypto, at least.) She has clearly adjusted well in the sense that she speaks casual English and enjoys our music and fashion (including cool sunglasses, but mostly for hangover protection). But Clark worries about her spending so much time off planet getting wasted. Yeah, he’s a nerd, and she should be allowed to have some fun, and be a mess for a while. I love that she sleeps in her cluttered spaceship, like she lives in a van or an RV. But if this becomes her life and not her vacation he’s right to worry.

Movie Krem is pretty different from comic Krem, who’s just a guy with a red beard. Here he’s sicko Schoenarts with a grid of facial piercings. His brigands are traffickers, they steal girls for the proliferation of an all male race, whatever that means. There’s some unmistakable FURY ROAD influence in the rescuing of “the brides,” the occasional shades of Junkie XL in Claudia Sarne (THE BOOK OF ELI, TRIPLE 9)’s score, and a beautiful moment that I think is Supergirl’s version of Furiosa dropping to her knees after she realizes the Green Place is gone. (Supergirl’s is in space, where no one can hear you primal scream.)

The super-powered action is definitely in the Gunn tradition – needle drops, speed ramping, mayhem staged just out of sight while something else is happening. It’s not always as visually coherent as I’d like, so I understand some criticisms of it. Certainly not the best version of this sort of thing we’ve seen, but also not the kind that just washes over me. I was invested. I enjoyed it. (Fight coordinator: former JCVD stunt double Trayan Milenov-Troy. Stunt coordinator: Florian Robin, Luke Skywalker double in THE LAST JEDI.)

There’s a guest appearance by Lobo (Jason Momoa, ROAD TO PALOMA), ludicrous immortal biker bounty hunter, kind of DC’s equivalent to Deadpool, a comedic character who enjoys killing, calls people “bastiches,” smokes cigars like he thinks you’re gonna be impressed by that, wears King Diamond makeup. I can understand why the uninitiated would wonder what the fuck is up with him, but I get a kick out of seeing the character’s stupid swagger directly translated to the screen. It’s like he came through a portal from a 1998 New Line Cinema movie we never knew existed, and I think he visits us the right amount of time: less than a main character, more than a clearly-filmed-a-bunch-of-separate-shots-in-a-day-or-two-Mickey-Rourke-VOD-movie style cameo. And I like how when Supergirl sees him she’s just like ah, shit, that’s Lobo, and doesn’t want to engage at all. She knows he’s gonna fuck up the situation, but also I think she just finds him annoying. He is literally a creep at the bar she hopes doesn’t notice her sitting there.

The comic is very fantasy (swords and brigands and stuff) + space opera (interstellar bus full of different aliens), and since the movie leans a little more into the second one, and has some pop music, everybody compares it to GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. Not a bad thing, in my opinion. A difference from that or Gunn’s SUPERMAN is that it’s not very joke oriented. I found lots of humor just in Supergirl’s personality and exasperated reactions to her adventures, and the tone certainly seems closer to Gunn than to Zack Snyder, but especially after MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE I appreciate a movie that doesn’t feel full of cracks and winks and fake outs. And I find something appealing about it dealing with some dark and sad material inside a colorful and cartoony world without feeling like that in itself is supposed to be subversive or, you know, twisted or whatever. Something Lobo would be into. No, it feels sincere to me. Supergirl knows that yes, some horrible stuff happens to some of us, and we try to act tough and cynical about it but it hurts us and we need to face it sooner or later and maybe we can try to do it together.

I love the arc of the Supergirl suit. She wears a Blondie t-shirt for much of the movie, her stylish trenchcoat standing in for the cape, and she looks great. Before Ruthye knows anything about her she spots the blue and red suit as just one of the things piled on the floor of her ship, and it definitely piques her interest. She clocks that it’s something important. Much later in a time of trouble the kid brings it to her, saying she thought it would help, and Supergirl says that it’s just a suit, it doesn’t do anything. She says it with sadness and a touch of oh, you sweet naive little thing. But it kind of does do something: it reminds her of the aspirations she does share with her cousin, if not the optimism. And the ideals her parents tried to instill in her. So when she puts it on it means something.

In fact, that makes it feel very different to me from that old comic book movie thing where they hold off giving them the traditional comic book costume ‘cause they’re kind of embarrassed of it. Here there’s a novelty to seeing her fly around in her civilian clothes. She looks cool, she has personality, I dig it, I don’t yearn for her to switch to the blue and red. But then when she finally does it’s like – man, look at her. It’s Supergirl.

I have heard reference to people hating the movie, a few of them maybe for opinionated comic book reasons, and though I haven’t looked into it I’m guessing in some cases it’s for the choice that Supergirl makes at the end. It goes against what Superman would do and what she teaches Ruthye to do, and I think if I felt like I was supposed to go, “Oh, ha ha, that’s what you get for fucking with Supergirl, ‘cause this isn’t your grandmother’s Supergirl!” then it would bother me too. But I really do like it because I think it’s more complicated than that. I think that while Supergirl really has had a coming-of-age type experience in this movie she’s still less over it than she’s letting on. She’s not endorsing a cynical world view as much as punishing herself, claiming a martyr status, taking on the burden she didn’t want for Ruthye. She knows how to advise Ruthye when she’s in big sister or cool auntie mode, but she doesn’t give the same care to herself. Does she know that what she did made Lobo smile? Maybe that would give her pause. She has more healing to do, and we want that for her.

Maybe that would happen in another movie, maybe in our imagination. It seems that this one’s not doing great, most people seem to like it less than me, and it’s only DC movie #2 at a time when the people who have been declaring comic book movies dead for 25 years have more of a point than usual. I hope that doesn’t derail Gunn’s plans, but I’d also like to get away from this tendency to discuss comic book movies mostly in terms of what they set up for next time, the tv-recap-ification of cinema. I really like SUPERMAN and SUPERGIRL on their own, whatever else happens. SUPERMAN is definitely the better movie, but also the more unwieldy one. I like SUPERGIRL’s relative simplicity, its small personal stakes, that it’s so much centered on just spending a few days with these two characters, technically a quest but in the end it feels more like a consequential summer vacation. They were both dealing with heavy shit alone, they get stuck together just when they needed it, they bonded and learned from each other. There is also flying and punching, but it was the other part that made a strong impression on me, and that’s to the movie’s credit. I’m good just hanging out with Supergirl. She’s fun.