Supergirl: Comic Distress, Frontier Justice, and a New Direction for Superhero Movies – Discuss with Spoilers | film

CAmes Gunn’s Superman was the defining moment in DC’s latest cinematic reboot. However, its follow-up may ultimately be just as revealing, not least because it offers the first real indication of the kind of universe Gunn intends to build once the novelty of the Man of Steel’s return wears off. Will each DCU chapter be restricted to the type of world-saving scene we remember from older Zack Snyder films? Or is there room for smaller, stranger stories that take place in the same shared reality?

With Supergirl, the answer appears to be yes. Craig Gillespie’s film heads in some unexpectedly far-flung directions, makes a particularly bold change from its source material, Tom King and Billie Evely’s iconic comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and quietly suggests that DC’s greatest strength may not lie solely in trying to one-up Marvel’s Marvel Supergirl. Here’s the lowdown for those who’ve watched it – and don’t forget to let us know your thoughts in the comments on how this will impact Gunn’s wider world.

This is not Superman with longer hair

Gunn’s Superman gave us an optimistic Kal-El who (despite his parents’ best efforts) actually subscribes to the basic tenets of Kryptonian morality: protecting the weak, keeping the bad guys at bay, and trying to leave the universe in a better state than you find it. His cousin couldn’t be more different, and now we know why. While Supes arrived on Earth as an infant, seeing his superpowers under the yellow sun as a gift to be used in the service of humanity, Kara Zor-El spent her early years in the outer Kryptonian city of Argo, watching everyone around her slowly being poisoned by Kryptonite radiation. Maybe that’s why she spends most of her time traveling to red solar planets just to get drunk.

Either way, Kara doesn’t act like a superhero at all. When orphan Ruthie Mary Knoll asks for her help to avenge her family’s murder at the hands of nefarious bandit leader Cream of the Yellow Hills, Kara continues drinking. Only when her beloved pet Krypto is poisoned by an arrow from Karim’s personal arsenal – and a villain steals her ship – does she set out after him in search of the antidote.

There’s a whole wide world out there

Which brings us to the film’s expanded sense of scale. Whereas the previous DC Extended Universe primarily saw aliens posing an occasional threat to Earth from mysterious places beyond, Supergirl imagines a functioning intergalactic society populated by sentient species, both human and non-human. As you travel from planet to planet, there’s a sense that this DC universe has more in common with Star Wars or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy than Man of Steel or Justice League, with their isolated alien incursions and quasi-biblical visitors from the heavens. There’s a definite space Western feel to the proceedings, even if the improbably structured cosmic bus station that Kara uses to travel between worlds is difficult to reconcile with the lawless frontier. Mos Eisley has certainly never had anything this efficient.

Not quite a Saturday morning cartoon

Once Supergirl reaches Bilquis, it becomes clear that this isn’t just a chase among colorful stars. The older DC movies may have pushed Cream and the Bandits to dominate the galaxy. In this case they kidnap young women from isolated border settlements and kill anyone who stands in their way. There are shades of Mad Max: Fury Road and Unforgiven here, in the solid sense that this is a world where technology may have advanced at the speed of light, but gender equality still travels by horse and cart.

This is also where the film begins to question whether someone with Kara’s powers can continue to pretend that the suffering around her is none of her business. Obtaining the antidote to cure Krypto and restore her ship may be her first priority, but when the universe is this dark and twisted, Supergirl begins to realize that looking the other way is just another way to choose a side.

Change from page

In the original comic book, Kara convinces Ruthie that killing Karim will not mend her broken spirit, or bring back her family, and eventually imprisons him in the Ghost Zone. In the movie, Supergirl herself executes a terrible space pirate. This marks a fundamental shift from the moral stance of the eight-issue miniseries, which is that revenge does not provide lasting peace, to a perspective that is more ambiguous in tone. Perhaps Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira simply decided that Cara’s journey from nihilistic party girl to cape-wearing cosmic saint was a bit too chic in print, and Nogueira’s comments certainly point in that direction. This certainly seemed like fair borderline justice to me, even if Superman wasn’t a huge fan. What do you think?

Different powers under different sun

As in the comic book, Kara loses her powers under a red sun, regains them in a yellow glow and experiences something resembling kryptonite poisoning when the light turns green. It’s a clever way to break up her journey across the galaxy, but it also stores issues for the future of Gunn’s DC universe. We’ve already seen how easy interplanetary travel is in this version of reality, so what’s stopping all those red-sun aliens from traveling to Earth and taking over? As far as we know, our home planet only has a few superhumans to defend it, including two Kryptonians. Regardless of Zod or Doomsday, it would presumably only take a saloon full of low-level villains to decide they quite like the look of Earth and trouble could be about to happen.

Not every DC movie has to end with an apocalypse

By the time the movie ends, all Kara has really done is take down a nasty, despicable alien guy and help a sad girl back from the brink. On the grand scale of things, this isn’t Crisis on Infinite Earths. But perhaps this is part of a broader trend toward lower-stakes drama in blockbusters?

The most recent Star Wars films, The Mandalorian and Grogu, were criticized because no planets were destroyed, there were no surprising revelations about the secret parentage of any of the main characters, and the fate of the entire galaxy was not forever hanging by a thread. Supergirl feels like the DC equivalent. Kara doesn’t spend her time fighting alien invasions, and the film never needs to inflate its story into yet another cosmic emergency, simply because it has access to a galaxy full of inhabited planets. This is a new direction for superhero films, which have often eschewed the more idiosyncratic, self-contained comic book stories that flourished in print in favor of bigger, louder exercises in blockbuster franchise table-spinning.

It remains to be seen whether audiences — and critics — are ready for the kind of smaller, weirder superhero story that relies on character, texture, and tone rather than apocalyptic spectacle. The film’s mixed reception suggests no such thing. But if comic book movies are to survive as a medium, at some point there will be a need for a twisty little frontier tale of grief and redemption amid the multiple reality-shattering piles. If superhero movies truly are the new Westerns, they can’t all be in the afternoon slot. Some will need to have True Grit in the head.