Melissa Benoist Is Doing Fine, Everyone

Supergirl

starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa

directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl; I, Tonya; Cruella)

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IT'S BEEN OUT LONG ENOUGH, YOU EITHER ALREADY GOT SPOILED ON IT OR WON'T CARE. EITHER WAY, YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED

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Did I want to go see Supergirl? Come on, I'm a heterosexual man, what interest could I possibly have in a superhero movie starring a girl? And this one is practically a dare, it's got "super" and "girl" right in the the title. It would be less of a provocation if it was just called I Bet You Won't, You Little Bitch. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take that? As confused as I am by the idea of a woman who doesn't need rescuing by or guidance from a man, I was obligated to go pay money for a ticket and sit through the experience of viewing to confirm my pre-existing completely rational hate for this film.

Ha, I'm just kidding, everyone knows the online dipshits who review bomb every movie that has a female lead don't actually go out and see the movies they so loudly (allowing ALL CAPS to count as "loudness") decry as anathema to something something birth rates something something testosterone levels, etc.

Me, of course I made a special effort (leaving my house, buying a ticket, meeting up with people I like, seeing a move I either like or dislike, discussing it afterward) to take in Supergirl. Like most of the rest of the woke mob, just about everything I do is about virtue signaling. Movies are about escapism, sure, but sometimes they're also about escapism-ing from little things like patriarchy, am I right? It's an effort to spend my money on things that everyone objectively knows without experiencing them are "bad" (a Star War with a girl, a Greek myth film with a black lady in it) so that I will be seen by... someone (TBD) to have done the "right thing." It's the exact same kind of smug contrarian satisfaction people like me revel in. Like if you see trash on the ground in public near a trash can, what is the point of picking it up and putting it in if no one is around to witness you doing it? Sometimes I'll stand there for like ten minutes waiting for a quorum of citizens to be in eye-sight. Think of this review like that. If you're reading this, I've been waiting a week-plus for you to see me. Your validation is both implied and appreciated.

I trudged along to do my self-deputized civic duty, with my partner and one of my adult children, stiff-backed in a reclining theater chair and ready to do my totally passive part in the fight against whatever coherence-free agglomeration of points of view drive review-bombers and the rump remnant still inexplicably active on Twitter.

Imagine the conflicting emotions when I'm out there, trying to bring down centuries of misogyny and oppression by buying a movie ticket and sitting completely still in the dark for two hours after enduring 40 minutes of advertising about a range of things from Milk Duds to a local home re-piping service, and I find myself entertained at certain points. A complication and a distraction, neither of which are going to win me any kind external value from any kind of online crowd on any sort of social media, 98% of whom are probably bots.

Ah, but then I remembered I'm not active on any kind of social media. If you really are looking for a constant, clean hit of pure dopamine, just exist in this world and have it wash over you every now and again that you've been too lazy, contrarian or pre-emptively overwhelmed to be a Very Online Guy. It's the same feeling of relief you get as waking up from a bad dream you're sure was real at the time. Except, OK, the circumstances of the dream do follow you around in real life in all spaces, public and private, but you're just not hooked up enough to let it hurt you in the squishiest places.

Even here, though, I'm seven paragraphs in and I've only talked about the online discourse, with no mention of the actual film at all. You can call it hypocrisy if you want, I call it reliable content generation in volume.

Is it true I see all the woman-led superhero films that reflexively get derided by a very small, but determinedly unfuckable minority of online dudes and their robot friends before release? Yes, but please understand that I also went to see The Flash, so it's less a gender-specific political statement than a sign of terminal completism on my part. Far more an act of compulsion than defiance, but as long as it looks like defiance because it accidentally aligns with my politics, well, not every good thing we do is the heaviest of lifts.

Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl was introduced in a sort of epilogue scene at the end of Superman last year, and James Gunn's new effort to make DC movies into a thing picks that up directly. This movie is a re-telling of the acclaimed "Woman of Tomorrow" storyline that ran in the Supergirl comic book earlier this decade. This is always a good move, to pull from a fleshed-out and well-received narrative, though it doesn't always come out (see the two major swings taken so far at the "Dark Phoenix" X-Men storyline, yikes).

The criticism has been that the setting is grim and dull, the color palette is beige and gray, the story is dark and dour (people trafficking)... I do definitely agree that it feels like a tonal and aesthetic step backward (chronologically, not necessarily artistically) after the explicitly intentional decision to make Superman optimistic and brightly colored to the point of being, dare I say it, frickin' goofy. But Superman paid off and did well even in a dimming market for theatrical-run superhero films. I do agree that this film is kind of sludgy in bits, which in context makes some of the decisions feel retread, recycled, past sell-by. Films can look however the filmmaker can pull it off, of course, but this was asking for trouble.

And though this isn't a James Gunn film, it absolutely has his Guardians of the Galaxy fingerprints on it as some of the thematic overlap in its planet-hopping setting amongst space scoundrels and its reliance on a pop-music soundtrack to add propulsion and layers to both interstitials and action set-pieces. Not poorly done, but it does feel like a copy of a thing, with just a slight degradation in clarity and resolution.

That said, the central relationship between Milly Alcock's Supergirl and Eve Ridley's Ruthye feels rooted, a well-realized vehicle linking the character development in the A-plot with the interspersed telling of the Supergirl origin story.

Jason Momoa's Lobo doesn't need to be there, that's all fan-service, as fun as the character is (inherently I mean, not necessarily in this application). And of course this story has to clear the same hurdle as every other Krytponian superhero story, like why don't they just smash all the bad guys in Act 1, Scene 2? Making her jaunt to red-sun planets intentional is smart, setting us up for a payoff we see coming when she's powered up and fully unleashed in the dénouement, but they doubled down a little too hard with a whole "green sun" section that stepped on the momentum of the narrative. It's not dissimilar to the section of The Mandalorian and Grogu where "Pedro Pascal's" character gets incapacitated, giving the sidekick time to shine, but as much as I like Eve Ridley, she's no Baby Yoda. Plus all they really gave her to do was wait in a cave and get captured. It's even less inspiring than it sounds.

Overall I've been struggling with movies of this type and intent, like the B-tier characters in a shared narrative. The mass appeal of Superman and Spider-Man and Batman and a team-up Avengers movie are apparent and will draw the biggest budgets, the most advertising money, the easiest amount of cultural awareness and cachet that will all justify (at least in intention) a theatrical release in the movies-as-a-second-screen-on-our-phones era. We're a lot of years and a lot of filmed frames-per-second removed from 2008 when B-tier Iron Man came out and was accidentally really good. Then Thor came along in 2011 and gave us the mistaken impression that we should expect automatic success from comic book movies regardless of the prominence of main character. Since then Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and all the sad fuckers in Sony's Spider-Man intellectual property stable (except Venom, those movies did OK) re-set the expectations levels to pre-2008 calibration, though studios seem a little slow to recognize this.

Colored by the anti-buzz, I surprisingly genuinely liked it, but there's no denying, though the rhetoric around female-led films is still poisonous and embarrassing, this movie lost a shit-ton of money. That's certainly not Milly Alcock's fault, it's more a lesson of: make these movies with smaller budgets, but don't try to make it look like it had a larger one. Otherwise you set yourself up for a kicking on an Ant-Man sort of scale. Which can be way bigger than it sounds.