Directed By Craig Gillespie

Starring – Milly Alcock, David Corenswet, Jason Momoa

The Plot – Kara Zor-El (Alcock), aka Supergirl, joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home.

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, adult language, and smoking.

Supergirl | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

As the secondary feature length installment to James Gunn’s newly revamped D.C universe, there’s a glaring dip in entertaining quality that keeps Supergirl from soaring to the heights of last summer’s predecessor, but even despite its mounting flaws, there’s still enough beneficial aspects to keep it from being anywhere near the quality of D.C’s past life of films, beginning with the decorated performances between Milly Alcock and Jason Momoa, who each command so much palpable personality and compelling screen presence to the air of their respective portrayals. While seemingly everyone in the public eye prematurely lashed out against Alcock, unfairly calling out everything from her beauty to her lack of physique, Milly vividly and emotionally unleashes an evidential transformation towards Kara that initially sees her the immature alcoholic that was teased throughout Superman, while eventually steering seamlessly into the born-to-be superhero that she was destined to become, and while Milly’s impact is deduced a bit by try-hard comedic material that fails to feel clever or spontaneous, there’s a stoic resiliency and attitude to her candid approach that will allow little girls everywhere to immerse themselves fantastically in her suit of armor, justifying the extent of her casting with a lot of heavy lifting that brings out the humanity of this character in ways that were previously unfulfilled in the 80’s Supergirl movie. As for Momoa’s grittily grungy turn as Lobo, Jason not only nearly hijacks this movie by injecting eccentric personality and edginess to a movie practically begging for it, but also maintains enough mystique in the air of his questionable morality to play towards an accommodating movie of his own that I now look forward to, and while Momoa’s take on Aquaman is now just a faded memory in the annals of cinematic history, the rampant energy and sleaziness that he brings to Lobo feels more synthetically natural than his previous portrayal, and the movie receives a boost of infectious adrenaline during the few times throughout the movie where he makes his presence unceremoniously felt. Aside from the performances, Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira make the consciously enticing decision to appraise nearly the entirety of this movie on interstellar planets away from Earth, evoking an indulging opportunity to sample a rich variety of cultures and languages, the likes of which submit some pretty gruesomely gnarly creature designs to appreciate endlessly. Aside from the digestible world-building that gives us a grander scope than Superman, the meaningful decision to elicit practicality in the confines of both the set designs and a majority of the creatures, inscribes a detail of tangibility that effortlessly silences disbelief to the visuals of what we’re experiencing, especially once the script starts to tap into some of the cultural depths that give us a deeper sense of motivational understanding to the occasionally cryptic actions. To be completely honest, the production does still enact quite a bit of C.G.I in everything from landscape backdrops to even one such creature voiced by Seth Rogen, but it never feels like enough of an overpowering influence to truly compromise the air of immersion for the audience, instead bringing these fantastically foreign lands to life with the kind of commitment to craft that shows a deep appreciation for the comics, particularly the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow strip, from which the screenplay is adapted from. Lastly, while much of the film’s technical components leave slightly more to be desired in conveying the artistry of the presentation, the score from Claudia Sarne is honestly quite impeccable in its instrumental orchestration, particularly in her versatile articulation of these vast cultures and planets, with everything from scratchy synth to distorting guitars branding infectious underlining among them. Surprisingly, while Sarne has scored over twenty projects in a career spanning over twenty years, this is her first experience with superheroes, and considering James Gunn has always been a director who values music almost above all else in his movies, Sarne’s sensibilities towards distinguishing a particular tone feels right at home along the depths of another space rock opera, inviting tastes of terror, tragedy, and triumph with compositions that feel anything other than obvious or on-the-nose.

NEGATIVES

Despite my preconceived fears from trailers that did little to expand any enticement to the film, I wanted to like Supergirl even more than Superman, purely on the representation of female characters at the forefront of these stories, but unfortunately Gillespie’s film is a mess in a lot of uniquely inferior ways, but especially within one of the most horrendously ugly presentations that I’ve seen in quite sometime. Considering I saw this movie in XD, on one of the biggest screens conceivable, it made the interpretation of the imagery all the more corrosively bare and lifeless on the biggest spectacle, courtesy of strange lighting, decaying cinematography, and sloppy camera placements, the likes of which made it difficult to remain focused or detectable of what transpired visually. This is especially the case during some artificially hollow action sequences, where the abrasiveness of the C.G effects elicited in hurled bodies isn’t quite as bad as intrusively unrelenting editing techniques marring a sequence of its transparency, but also environment articulation that makes these moments and a majority of the film feel like it was shot in the dark, an unfortunate aspect made all the more surreal with Woman of Tomorrow being among the most colorfully radiant and bombastically beautiful comics ever put to print. Because the film utilizes action so much throughout Kara’s journey, it crafts limitless headache-inducing opportunities as a means of fleshing out her strength and power, and while the use of wide angle lenses could help fight back against some of these unforeseen difficulties so obviously out of the range of focus, Gillespie instead maintains energetic emphasis on the air of his direction, and it unearths one of the most visually abhorrent experiences that I’ve had since Thor: The Dark World. In addition to the overall presentation, the script is also a soulless shell of derivativity, where the film’s apparent sampling of other, better movies before it keeps it from ever finding a unique voice of its own to cater to its limitless fandom. Aside from the predictability and exposition-heavy dialogue dumps littered throughout, Nogueira thankfully doesn’t enact an origins story, at least not in structure, but transitions so frequently and abruptly to a past arc involving the desecration of Krypton and her surmising friendship with Krypto, that it compromises the intention as much as five times throughout a 103-minute duration, leading to not only pacing that grinds to a screeching halt, but also an unforeseen unearned emotionality that directly compromises the silly campiness of the overly comedic tone at the movie’s forefront narrative. On that subject, the individual gags are so uncompromisingly unfunny and straining that they emit these painfully distracting gaps of silence whenever they don’t effectively land, and considering the most unusual of these come during the moments when Kara’s life is threatened (An aspect that happens far too often to maintain her supernatural powers), it wipes away any semblance of suspense or accidental tension that the film manages to amount for itself, offering the most unflattering material to indulge and invest in the means of an arc that is anything but Kara’s. The script is also half of the blame for the movie’s cruel joke of an antagonist, with the other half going to Matthias Shoenearts’ bland cartoon of a portrayal. To be fair, the character could’ve possibly worked if the film was even remotely interested in fleshing out a single scene with him away from Kara’s influence, but he disappears as quickly as he arrives to a scene’s integrity, keeping us from ever establishing a sense of purpose or powerful prominence against a protagonist who is so superiorly stronger than him that the movie should be over in five minutes, however the script has to go out of its way to constantly keep Kara weaker to balance their power dynamic, and considering Shoernearts attempts to rise to the occasion with the manifestation of Epstein Island in live form, it doesn’t come close to elevating anything incapable to overcome about this conflict, and while you can say anything you want about the villains of the former D.C.E.U, they never had an antagonist this dull or unthreatening. Finally, there isn’t quite a post-credit scene in the traditional sense, as Gillespie instead tacks it onto the film’s ending, and while I would normally commend a movie for refusing to waste audience’s time with a throwaway scene that represents the barebones of importance, as a majority of superhero post-credit sequences do, here it just feels like two endings stacked back-to-back with one another, resolving matters on such an anticlimactic look of teasing what’s to come. Perhaps this is the single most obvious proof of Gunn’s reluctance to make Supergirl the second film of this franchise, as thoroughly documented, with very little intrigue to hook an audience into the next installment, but even as the exclamation point to Kara’s narrative journey, there’s an action unloaded here during the final moments that makes it feel like she’s running from her grief, instead of confronting it head on, choosing instead to ride alongside someone else’s journey rather than establishing a unique life of her own.

OVERALL
Supergirl might not be the sky-high spectacle that D.C enthusiasts were clamoring for on the heels of last year’s Superman, but its imperfect inconsistencies conjures a mildly enjoyable and frustratingly forgettable space opera that values world-building above all else, requiring the herculean efforts of Milly Alcock and Jason Momoa to inject some semblance of energy to a toothlessly tumultuous affair of unregistering action and arbitrary antagonists.

My Grade: 5.6 or C-