Supergirl review: planet-hopping fun

Supergirl was always cooler than her cousin. There, I said it. While the comic book timeline keeps shifting, with Kara’s changing origin(s) super-messy – sometimes older than Clark despite appearing younger for timey-wimey reasons, sometimes not (it’s complicated) – the basics from her 1959 debut in Action Comics #252 remain.

Kara Zor-El rocks up on Earth as a teenager, having been born on Argo City, a domed fragment of the long-doomed Krypton that was also fated to die. While Kal-El was an infant when his escape pod rocketed away from this cataclysm, she was raised in its radioactive shadow, watched her mother die and said goodbye to her father as Argo was consumed.

To her, the death of her parents and all their people is a lived reality. Clark just learned about it second-hand, in his Fortress of Solitude, as a distant history lesson.

Despite this, 50s Kara was as peppy as the Kansas-raised boy scout Clark/Superman, and largely unfazed by the tragedy (those were simpler times). More contemporary adaptations have rightly moved onto asking how a young woman, who may or may not be stronger than Kal-El, would actually be haunted by this horror.

And that’s the reality we roll with in the brand new big screen adaptation of Supergirl, launched faster than a speeding bullet into James Gunn’s rebooted DC cinematic universe.

Keeping it simple

While I think it’s extremely disappointing that Supergirl wasn’t assigned a woman director, with Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) in the hot seat, this new iteration gets one thing very right: the central casting.

Sydneysider Milly Alcock was robbed by the inexplicably alienating timeline jumps of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, recasting her Rhaenyra with Emma D’Arcy. Here, she finally gets her chance to shine in a role that’s only ever been front-and-centre on the big screen in Jeannot Szwarc’s unfairly maligned, Helen Slater-led 1984 outing.

Now, I’m an outlier from many of my colleagues in that I thought Gunn’s take on Superman threw far too much at the wall with very little sticking, delivering a muddle of franchise-rebooting characters and losing sight of the all-important Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) and Clark (David Corenswet) dynamic.

When Kara briefly showed up at the end, playing the Kryptonian as a drunken emo who called her cousin a bitch while her out-of-control super-powered pup, Krypto, tore his joint, Alcock easily stole the whole film.

Nifty writing, this microscopic moment established their fractious, if not entirely unloving, semi-estranged relationship, while underlining the Kryptonian chasm cracked wide open between them.

Supergirl smartly keeps things simple.

Watch the trailer

Bar-room brawl

With a screenplay by Ana Nogueira that loosely adapts the comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, this film sees Kara emotionally lost in space.

She’s pissed, in more ways than one. Kara prefers to ditch Earth, where the yellow sun lends her and her cousin their superpowers, in favour of red-sunned planets that drain her strength. That way, she can lose herself in the bottom of a bottle and a blood-letting bar-room brawl, just so she can feel something, anything.

She’s sinking boilermakers in a hive of scum and villainy on a distant, red-sunned planet, with Krypto by her side, when in strolls English actor Eve Ridley’s hilariously RP-pronouncing Ruthye. She’s about the same age Kara was when Krypton died, and has just witnessed the slaughter of her entire weapons-manufacturing (!!) family at the hands of a brigand named Krem, a snarling, face-studded Matthias Schoenaerts, who is very much not de la crème.

Though depowered, Kara feels obliged to step in when a burly hog-like barfly nabs Ruthye’s swanky sword, after the grieving girl enquires where she might find Krem and his crew. But Kara is determined to ditch Ruthye and her ill-advised vengeance quest as soon as possible. An intention that flies out the window when Krem and co show up.

In the argy-bargy that follows, Krypto’s shot with a poisoned arrow, necessitating a planet-hopping race to trace the brigand and the antidote he carries before Kara’s beloved pet carks it. Kara begrudgingly allows Ruthye to tag along, even though the younger woman is determined to notch up her first kill, despite Kara’s unusually wise counsel about not shouldering that guilt.

Personally, Kara’s super-bummed at being confronted with someone as wounded as she is when a Supergirl just wants to have fun. All the while, Clark’s leaving butt-hurt, straight-to-video messages, wondering when Kara might come home and settle down.

Star-trekking

Gung-ho fun, Supergirl takes a pinch of Gunn’s sookily good-humoured Guardians of the Galaxy and adds a dash of the original Star Wars’ galactic grime, far more successfully than the mediocre The Mandalorian and Grogu.

With all future-retro films leaning heavily on Blade Runner, Supergirl shows off richly detailed set dressing from Lee Sandales and overall bad vibes by production designer Neil Lamont, along with much better creature design, handsomely garbed by costumers Anna B Sheppard and Michael Mooney, with spliced-in location work that’s shot with an eye for the epic by Civil War cinematographer Rob Hardy.

It’s a goofy, good-looking movie, with Jimmy Boyle’s sound design popping, even if the now-obligatory needle drops accompanying composer Claudia Sarne’s synthy score never live up to the Blondie t-shirt Kara pairs with sunnies and frayed hem trench coat for most of the movie, before donning the iconic red, yellow and blue.

I still think Krypto would be more effective as a real dog, made to fly by CGI, rather than the cartoonish not-really-there menace of a mutt we get here, but Supergirl better establishes him as a stray, scooped up by Kara from the wreckage of her mother’s death, layering aching import into their trauma bond.

While there is plenty of grimness baked in, from kidnapped child brides to Kara’s big feelings, it’s never overbearing. Gillespie’s propulsive forward movement embraces our hero’s determination to keep on keeping on, with Supergirl at its best in its silliest moments.

Sure, the brilliant Schoenaerts is wasted in a peak-Marvel disposable baddie role that Nogueira appears to have sketched on a beer mat, as is former Aquaman Jason Momoa as ‘gar-chomping bounty hunter Lobo, an underbaked introduction. But Supergirl zips along strongly.

Of course, it winds up with a mess of badly choreographed CGI battles that are too frenetically chopped by editors Tatiana S Riegel and Fred Raskin to follow, and somehow the flight sequences aren’t as awe-inspiring as they were in 1984, but nevertheless, I grinned from start to finish.

And in the rare moments when Snyder-like slow-mos allowed us to properly see Alcock’s flying fists and high kicks connect, it proves her casting is top-notch. Which is why it’s unduly annoying that her cornball cousin gets the last word in her movie. Bitch, please.

Supergirl is in Australian cinemas now.

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