Supergirl: Three Months Late, and Right on Time

I am reviewing Supergirl approximately three months after everybody else.  Which, as it turns out, may be the ideal way to review anything.

I am writing this during the Toronto International Film Festival, where every elevator contains a future Oscar winner, every lobby contains someone taking a meeting, and every second movie is apparently a masterpiece.  A triumph.  A revelation.  The performance of someone’s career.  The greatest TIFF ever!  By Tuesday, you begin to wonder whether cinema is suddenly entering a new Renaissance or whether everyone has simply had too much complimentary Prosecco.  The more people insist something is an instant hit, the more I suspect I’m being sold the hype instead of the movie.

I learned this lesson at TIFF last year.  I was sitting at the Shangri-La when Guillermo del Toro stepped out of the elevator and the room practically rose to its feet.  Applause. Adoration.  People around me were already declaring Frankenstein one of the great horror movies.  I remember thinking, did we watch the same movie?  To me, it was a CGI-soaked mess.  But that is TIFF.  Sometimes the ovation arrives before the opinion has had time to catch up.

Which brings me to Supergirl.

There were exactly two reasons I had no interest in seeing it.  Their names were James Gunn and Superman.  I liked Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1.  I really did.  It was strange, funny and had the audacity to make “Hooked on a Feeling” cool again.  But apparently every Gunn-era production now requires emotional baggage, a band of misfits and a playlist assembled by somebody’s unusually cool uncle.  It worked beautifully once.  Now I can practically hear the needle drop before the opening credits.

Then there was last year’s Superman, which I thought was a mess.  David Corenswet was good.  More than good, actually.  He has that Christopher Reeve quality Superman needs. Decent, square, heroic without looking as though he knows he is.  Unfortunately, the story did him no favours.  I have already complained about that movie at length. Please see last year’s review.  My blood pressure has only recently returned to normal.

So when the Supergirl trailers arrived, I was hardly counting down the days.  Actually, the advertising seemed determined to convince me not to go.  Bad lines. Bad footage.  Before it even opened, people had practically drawn a chalk outline around the body.  Another DC disaster.  And because the internet has the attention span of a fruit fly, the verdict was carved in stone and everyone moved on.  I did too.

Three months later, Supergirl was sitting on Crave.  Free.  No opening-weekend box-office autopsy.  No algorithm demanding that I LOVE IT or HATE IT immediately.  Just the movie.  What a novel way to watch one.  Once everyone stopped telling me what Supergirl was, I finally got to watch what it actually was, and I liked it…a lot.  Supergirl is fun.  Fun!  Remember fun?

Most of that comes down to Milly Alcock.  Her Kara Zor-El is not Superman with longer hair.  Thank God.  She drinks.  She parties.  She fights. She makes reckless decisions and seems generally unimpressed by the fact that the universe expects her to behave like a symbol.  But what really lands is Alcock’s delivery.  Kara moves through the world with this magnificent I-don’t-care swagger, but her eyes keep betraying her.  They twinkle with an almost childlike amusement, as though underneath all that attitude she is secretly delighted by her own ridiculous adventure.  At one point she sleeps in sunglasses.  Of course she does.  That tiny detail tells you more about this Supergirl than twelve minutes of solemn exposition ever could.

Alcock plays her like one of the guys without ever turning her into one of the guys.  She is not cool because the movie keeps stopping to announce, LOOK, A STRONG WOMAN.  She is cool because Kara has clearly never considered the possibility that she isn’t.  Even better, the story does not saddle her with the traditional female-hero trope of spending two hours wondering which handsome man might complete her.  She is helping another girl.  Two women get to have an adventure without a romantic subplot arriving every twenty minutes like an Uber nobody ordered.

Before anyone braces for two hours of corporate Girl Power, relax.  That is not what this is.  At its centre, Supergirl is about a damaged person trying to figure out where to put all the grief and power burdening her.  She happens to be a woman.  She also happens to be able to punch people through walls.  Sometimes progress is simply allowing a female character to be messy and occasionally obnoxious without making her responsible for representing womankind.

The movie itself feels as though someone tossed Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick and Star Wars into a blender.  The music has attitude.  The movie moves.  Kara’s universe feels like hers instead of a waiting room outside Superman’s office.  Speaking of Superman, even he works better here.  Corenswet gets to be decent and supportive without a screenplay constantly elbowing Superman out of his own movie.

DC, meanwhile, has become the Rodney Dangerfield of superhero movies.  It gets no respect.  Marvel can trip over the furniture and audiences assume there’s a post-credit explanation coming.  DC walks into the room and somebody starts measuring the coffin.

Supergirl deserved better than that.  Is it historic?  Please.  I’m at TIFF. I have already heard that word fourteen times since breakfast.  But watching Supergirl three months late may have done me a favour.  The irony is that I streamed it because I had decided it was not worth paying to see.  When it ended, I wished I had seen it in a theatre.  Maybe the first verdict is not always the right one.  Maybe, amid a festival where everyone is desperately trying to convince me I am watching the next big-screen event, the most pleasant surprise was a three-month-old superhero movie everyone had already forgotten.

Supergirl does not reinvent the superhero movie.  It does not need to.  Milly Alcock understands something the advertising apparently did not.  The most interesting thing about Supergirl is not the “Super.”

It’s the girl.