Having not been a fan of the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow mini-series there was a chance I wouldn’t bother seeing the adaptation at the cinema. But, as a huge Supergirl fan, that was never very likely. I mean, I enjoyed the 1984 Helen Slater film, it was daft fun!
As for this year’s model, I like it.
The film benefits from being set over just a few days rather than several months, and we get the story in under two hours, meaning Supergirl isn’t having an extended period light years from a suffering Krypto while we worry in real time.
The comic’s excruciating narration from Ruthye, the young girl who wants Supergirl to help her gain revenge on the killer of her father – here, her whole family – is entirely absent. That’s a good decision because any version of that would have sent people to sleep. Actress Eve Ridley is given a less faffy version of Ruthye’s mannered speech patterns, and does a good job. As a humanoid space alien, Ruthye does, of course, sound British, generally posh but with the occasional flat vowel…it turns out Ridley hails from Sunderland, six miles from my own home town of Seaham.
Villain Krem of the Yellow Hills, a handsome fella as drawn by Bilquis Evely, is here a more alien-looking guy with loads of facial piercings. And as camp as Christmas. I don’t know if it was the choice of director Craig Gillespie or actor Matthias Schoenberg but the character is ridiculous, prancing around the scenery like a cosmic Child Catcher.
David Corenswet’s performance as Superman is hobbled by Ana Nogueira’s script; he’s fine in a scene at Clark’s apartment with Kara, but a flashback to him meeting his cousin for the first time is awful. Superman greets his fellow orphan like she’s dropped in for a fun weekend rather than as the only other human survivor of his lost world. I did enjoy his reaction to Krypto, though.
While I still rankle at the idea of Krypto as Kara’s pet rather than Clark’s, a flashback to their first meeting, at the funeral procession for radiation-struck mother Alura, is touching. I loved all the Argo City scenes, production designer Neil Lamont has done a superb job bringing us awe-inspiring Kryptonian architecture. And the minimal elegance of the costumes by Anna B Sheppard and Michael Mooney is refreshing. All the outfits are pale until we see Alura’s funeral gown, a gorgeous pop of red, bedecked with embroidered leaves design. I did slightly miss the peculiar outfit Ruthye wears on the page, but the film leans heavily into a Western aesthetic nodding to the comic’s True Grit influences, and Ridley looks comfortable in her leather jacket. Plus, the performances by David Krumholtz as Zor-El and Emily Beecham as Alura are nicely considered – the ‘Be good’ speech from the dying Alura is lovely.
Krypto is as cute as ever, and even though he’s computer animated, the scene with him suffering after being pierced by Krem’s poison arrow is upsetting. Knowing something of this nature was coming up 15-20 minutes in – thank you Google Gemini – I warned my other half, Steve, so he could pop out for coffee and sweets, and thank goodness I did, it was horrible. Given how many people are, like Steve, triggered by cruelty to animals, I’m amazed the British Board of Film Classification doesn’t have a suitable warning in their pre-film guidance message; yes, Krypto isn’t played by a real animal actor, but the moment, and the on-screen emotions, feel authentic.
I know mini-series writer Tom King originally wanted Lobo to be in the Woman of Tomorrow book as Kara’s co-star, but is that really a reason to shoehorn him into the film? Jason Mamoa is fine as the space bounty hunter/genocidal maniac but there’s no real role for him here, he just shows up occasionally for bants. As I watched I guessed he’d be carrying out a particular act towards the end of the film, but nope, he doesn’t, and the film is the worse for it. What’s more, his space hog is a bit rubbish, like a Blue Peter Tracy Island version of the real thing.
As for Millie Alcock, she’s excellent. Her cameo in last year’s Superman film told us what to expect so the shell of cynicism isn’t a surprise. And in context, as Kara’s story unfolds, the personality makes sense. She presents as a cranky teenage girl, but as the film progresses we see her empathy – everything she does after meeting Ruthye is about saving her dog, and protecting the young girl’s future – she doesn’t want her poisoned by an act of vengeance.
Still, Kara herself doesn’t have to execute Krem at the emotional climax of the film. This is where Lobo should have come in, putting the pirate down in return for a few coins proffered by Ruthye at some point in the earlier bar scene. Or the trafficked young girls, who kill one of Krem’s men with some kind of blaster, could have exacted mutual revenge.
But no, the killing blows come from Kara, contradicting her earlier insistence to Ruthye that fatal vengeance isn’t the way to go. The implication is that somehow the act gets Kara out of her fug, making her ready to dump the space motorhome and try making a life for herself on Earth. Instead, Krem is dealt with in as unsatisfactory a manner as happened in the comic’s final moments, which was a rare example of King and Evely not being on the same page. King says he intended old lady Ruthye to deliver a satisfying bash with her walking stick to Krem, sorrowful after hundreds of years in the Phantom Zone, but Evely’s silhouetted storytelling, with blood apparently spurting from Krem’s head and a couple of panels of twitching before he comes to a dead stop, is, to be kind, ambiguous. The editors should have sorted that out before it ever made it into print.
I suppose I should be glad the comic’s scene in which Kara takes Ruthye to a stoning is excised…
I was delighted this Kara isn’t defined by trauma. The film sheds a layer of tragedy by dumping the origin revamp King gave us so that, as in the original comics origin, Supergirl was born on Argo years after Krypton’s demise – she doesn’t see both Krypton and Argo die. She’s suffered a lot but she’s not ‘living her life in pain’. There is a moment in the film in which Kara flies into space and lets out a silent scream, but it’s brief, it’s earned, and she’s straight back planetside to fight the good fight. This is not a Supergirl who wallows, taking up a foetal position in the sun. Even the opening scenes of Kara celebrating her 23rd birthday by getting drunk under a red sun make more sense – a cosmic pub crawl helps with survivor’s guilt – because it’s not comics Supergirl, who had long since accepted the affections of Earth, it’s a different character. I didn’t even mind the occasional cussing.
The effects and stunt work are good, the music decent – though I’d rather have had a full-score rather than one punctuated by pop music – and the direction effective. I’d hoped that rather than embrace and deepen the slightly brattish take on Kara seen in Superman, it would take her on a journey, make her more like the classic comics heroine. And – the rather big bump in the road of killing a murderer aside – it does. I can’t wait to see what big-screen Supergirl does next.
Too Dangerous For a Girl 2 
Milly Alcock plays Supergirl. Millie Gibson played a Companion of the 15th Doctor on Doctor Who.
I wasn’t a fan of Kara killing Krem. Very cold-blooded and unnecessary. The writer for the film said she made the change to preserve Ruythe’s innocence and that the time jump in the comics wouldn’t work for the film. This is Kara’s story and having Lobo or a random nobody kill him would have felt like a cop out. They mention in the film that Krem has the strength of 1000 men so I’m not sure what type of prison (does the Phantom Zone exist in this version of the DCU?) would be able to hold him but they could have made something up.
I find it interesting that both Supergirl and Hawkgirl are murderers in this DCU and I wonder if the reveal of that knowledge will bring them into conflict with Superman.
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Thanks for the comments, including that correction, honestly! I don’t know why they made Krem super-strong (I remembered 200 men, probably wrongly!). It sounds like the film writer also got the impression from the comic that Ruthye got all fatal on that last page. Whatever the case, the film isn’t the comic, no one had to kill Krem, certainly not Supergirl after all her no-killing talk. As she did kill him, she should have ended the film feeling a little darker than she did.
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I liked Milly Alcock, but didn’t care for the film thanks to the ending. The lessons of Man of Steel have still not been learned.
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Hawkgirl dropping that guy to his death was my only big issue with the “Superman” film. It felt unnecessary. – Brian
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Absolutely. Superman shouldn’t work with people who think that’s OK.
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Anj here.
Agree with much of what you say here. I think removing some of the worst parts of the source material (ruthye’s talk, stoning, crying in the sun) elevated this. I think the ‘be kind and good’ core of Supergirl in the movie was wonderful, especially coming from her parents who bring up Jor-El’s worse lesson he is sending with Kal.
But that killing at the end is akin to Superman killing Zod in ‘Man of Steel’. There are a million ways to end this without that happening.
All that said, I liked it more than I thought that I would and a lot of that is because of Alcock’s performance and that core. I didn’t mind Krem’s prancing … felt like a Tim Roth character in a Tarantino movie.
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It makes sense we’d have different reactions, I’m not a Tarantino fan! Great observation, either way.
I just don’t get why filmmakers are so into heroes killing bad guys. Shouldn’t they be someone to emulate?
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Oh, yeah, the whole reveal that Jor-El actually wanted his son to conquer humanity was the only significant thing that I really disliked about last year’s Superman movie. So, I was glad that Supergirl had that moment when Krypton is falling apart where Zor-El calls out the stupidity of baby Kal being sent to Earth to become a “god” and how later on the dying Alura tells young Kara to be good person.
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I thought that this was the most frustrating sort of not very good movie: an otherwise competent production held back by a poor script.
It felt more like a collection of scenes than an actual narrative to me, which is why Kara murdering Krem at the end barely mattered. I had neither a sense of Krem as a character beyond ‘Bad Guy’, nor did Kara have any sort of arc that mattered. MAN OF STEEL was worse in that regard, since it came out of nowhere in a story that had been otherwise progressing.
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I didn’t find it too choppy, I just wanted her to get the blooming antidote!
I was reading somewhere that there was some controversy about a song played towards the end, I looked it up, and I’ve never heard of it (The Middle) – I can’t imagine why it would be controversial.
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Yeah. It seemed fine to me, but a lot of people seem to have hated it.
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I found it very watchable, but yes was slightly baffled by that last choice. I did think Lobo was going to zoom in to do the deed and that must be the reason he was in the film. It didn’t mar the film too much for me, because goodness knows I’ve had to watch everyone from Batman to Spider-man kill their enemy at the end of a film down the years, though I did think we were getting past that. As has been commented, it did a good job of avoiding the less tasteful elements of Woman of Tomorrow, and I’m imagining that they might not have wanted to produce a film that borrowed as much from True Grit as the comic did.
It would have been great if they’d let Eve Ridley play Ruthye with a Sunderland accent.
Stu
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‘I am Ruthye, proud daughter of an unemployed miner, from the Planet Mackem…’
Reckon we’ll have to crowdfund that one!
And yep re: Lobo, as Anj writes over at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary: ‘I wonder if in earlier versions Lobo kills Krem. At one point, Lobo asks if there is a bounty on Krem’s head. Was that because in another version Lobo kills Krem to gain that bounty? Why would Lobo stick around that Brigand fight after killing his bounty?’
You and Anj make perfect sense.
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People are saying Supergirl had a poor script, and I just don’t see that. I think the script is largely pretty solid (although a little threadbare in regard to the smaller characters, like victims of the brigands’ trafficking or the individual brigands themselves). To me, it falls down more on the action scenes. The fight with the Sklarians is great, but both the brigand fights seem less clear on what’s happening, and who it’s happening to.
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That’s very fair, the last two fights were just the usual spinning camera and kicks. As with any Super-film and most comics, we simply don’t see enough of the different powers, or creativity with those that we see again and again.
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my favorite laugh came from Kara’s mother commenting on her brother in law’s ludicrous idea that his ‘sweet little boy’ will become a world conqueror. :-p
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It is a rather outrageous idea. I hope the film folk never mention it again.
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My girlfriend and I saw Supergirl yesterday and we both liked it. I put together a review of it on my own blog. Anyway, I agreed with a lot of what you had to say here.
I was thinking of picking up Supergirl: The Woman of Tomorrow to see how it compared to the movie, but after reading your comments about it, then again, maybe I won’t, after all. Well, if I ever get a real urge to check it out, at least it’s available in that cheaper digest-sized Compact Comics edition.
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The Compact is a good deal, give it a crack, you may enjoy it more than expected. There is some good stuff in there.
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