Of course I had to go see the new Supergirl movie — I had to run the projector. It was OK for a superhero movie.
Don’t be fooled by my title. There was no cannibalism in this movie.
Oh look, a transcript below the fold.
I know what you’re thinking — Myers hates movies, now he’s going to crap on another recent movie showing at his local theater. I am aware that I have a reputation. But I’m going to surprise you a little bit, I’m going to give the new Supergirl movie my qualified approval.
How could this be? I pulled a trick on myself. Before going to the theater, I watched the 1984 Supergirl movie, which I’d almost forgotten, and it was so godawful bad that the new movie was a masterpiece in comparison. Actually, I wasn’t able to watch the whole 1984 thing, and I gave up about a third of the way through.
If you’ve managed to erase the movie from your memory, this is the one where Supergirl is a naive klutz who manages to blow a hole in the dome protecting her kryptonian city, loses a magical orb that powers the city, steals a space ship, and flies to Earth, where the orb has fallen. It has been picked up by a witch, a real magical witch, played by Faye Dunaway, and Supergirl has to fumble her way to recovering it. I don’t know if she did, because I bailed out early.
There were little things that annoyed me: The actor playing Supergirl was a graceless klutz, who couldn’t even pull off the fake flying we expect of Super-movies, and she was a wide-eyed naive Stupidgirl through the first part of the movie. On the plus side, though…Faye Dunaway’s cheekbones.
OK, so the 1984 movie primed me to be more tolerant. Another factor, though, is that I don’t consider comic book superhero movies to be science fiction at all, especially if they don’t bother to try and insert sciencey nonsense in their stories.
What they are is mythology, which puts them in a whole ‘nother category. Comic book superheroes belong in a pantheon of gods and demigods, they aren’t limited by earthly material constraints. They act like squabbling mortals, but they have a diverse set of powers that make them different from humans, but still, they can act in morality plays and strive with one another and be interesting. Watch them to see a demonstration of human values under extraordinary circumstances, and don’t get hung up on the details of how their powers work. They just are.
Supergirl does that. She flies off to alien planets, but there’s nothing about how faster-than-light travel works — it just does, and we don’t worry about it to keep the story moving along. Similarly, we’re told she gets her power from the rays of the yellow sun, and it’s just a given property. We don’t get bogged down in invented details, like that Kryptonian cells contain kitrinoplasts (from the Greek for “yellow”) that absorb yellow wavelengths to generate extra power — that would be stupid and add nothing to the story.
If some screenwriter steals “kitrinoplast” and puts it in a DC movie, I will simultaneously hate you and hunt you down for royalties.
In case you’re concerned that a notorious atheist is giving a pass to pagan, polytheistic religions, don’t worry, I still detest the Abrahamic religions, which have erased the narrative richness of the old gods and replaced it with this abstraction lacking all personality and being nothing but an absolute living in a universe with nobody to talk to. Those gods are just boring. Also, I kind of like that the king of the pantheon in DC movies is Superman, whose defining personality trait is kindness. He is far better than Jahweh.
That’s one of the things I liked about Supergirl. She’s got personality, and she’s not a saccharine dweeb like the 1984 Supergirl. She’s got issues. She does stupid things, and she is sometimes self-destructive and angry. But the driving conflict in the movie is that a bad guy poisoned her dog, and she’s going to do everything she can to get the antidote. I liked that. She’s a person with a relatable personality I want to learn more about.
Another feature I appreciated is that the big bad villain of the movie (not played by Faye Dunawaye) was simply a brutal killer, not, as so often happens in these kinds of movies, a cosmic threat who was going to destroy Earth, or the Galaxy. Rather than an over-hyped nemesis, the bad guy in this movie was a dog-poisoning thug who kidnapped women and carried them off to his homeworld as breeding stock. He was more of an Andrew Tate than a universe-scale threat. That’s good. That’s relatable. I appreciate a movie in which a woman kicks an Andrew Tate down.
Now I said I liked the movie, but had some reservations, and this is a big one — a failing of the entire genre. In comic-book-superhero movies, no matter how grand or how petty the villain is, the problem will be resolved with a fist-fight. The writers seem incapable of coming up with a satisfying resolution that is anything other than a knock-down drag out brawl between the protagonist and antagonist. Every time, the movie ends with the bad guy defeated by punching.
This is a major factor in my own personal superhero fatigue. You know how it will end: no matter how intricate the threat and no matter how powerful the enemy, it will end in a personal confrontation in which the hero will finish off the problem with a knockout punch. It is an expected feature of every one of these movies, an inclusion of lots of fight choreography.
Supergirl has multiple extensive brawls with large mobs of bad people/aliens. They’re well done, and if you like watching boxing or UFC, you will be entertained. But do they advance the story? Not so much.
So, overall, the movie has all the failings of the superhero genre, but it also has hints of something better: A central character with some depth and complexity, who shows some growth over the course of the plot, with a relatable conflict, and there’s a promise of further development, if the box office is big enough. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s not a great movie, and it’s entertaining enough, but it does star a woman, and I can already see the misogyny rising in response.
Until next week! I am scheduled to run the projector for the new Minions movie. I am pleased to see children being introduced to cosmic horror, nihilism, and the awareness of the futility of their pitiful, meaningless lives. It also features Cthulhu!
“it does star a woman, and I can already see the misogyny rising in response.” I remember something about every action having an equal and opposite reaction because SCIENCE, or something like that.
II don’t think we should underestimate the box office power of women who want to see other women – ordinary or godlike – centered in stories on screens. The free publicity from douchebros can only help in that regard. I’ll likely go see it with my sister, girlfriend(s) and/or niece(s). We may even bring along some members of the (non-patriarchal) Penis-American persuasion!
Well, to be fair, it is a comic book, and punching the bad guys is kind of the way “everything” in them has always been resolved. For me… what bugs me more is, well, I went through a bit of a, “Super hero book” thing a while back. It was an interesting bag. There are the classics – H.E.R.O., Just Cause, etc. Classic, “A group of people with powers end up getting together to help police crime, especially crime from other people with powers.” H.E.R.O. had a semi-interesting twist, in that a meteor came too close to Earth, and had some weird stuff on it, exploded, forming a band of fragments around the planet, and every so often a mass of those would fall into the atmosphere, bringing with it some sort of organism, which, depending on the state of mind, and unique biology, of those exposed to it, as it fell, would either give them some random power, like X-Men, or turn dark, and give them a darker power, along with a craving for chaos and destruction. A few annoy the heck out of me, both because of the choices they had the heroes make (in one case the main hero had a broken ability, which let them have limited capacity to clone other people’s abilities, but it was killing her. In the end she opted not to be cured, when given the option, which kind of bugged me), but the premise behind it was interesting, involved some time travel, changed events because of it, including the death of a mentor, due to this, and all because of one simple fact – neither the hero, nor the villain, had all the facts, and while the villain chose horrible solutions to a problem he perceived, which in the original timeline ended in global disaster, he wasn’t actually wrong about the problem (that, so long as the percentage of people that had powers was very low, the rest of humanity would fear them, instead of learning to trust them, in this case, which had led to global governments banning the use of such abilities, and some actively hunting them out of fear). The problem was, his “solution” would have killed 50% of the population, and he utterly failed to account for the fact that almost another full half, after that, would react to the death of loved ones around them by acts of suicide, or the like. In the end, the solution was to do “almost” what he had planned, but in a way that didn’t kill every person on the planet that was genetically unable to gain powers.
Then you get the interesting anti-hero, or accidental anti-hero ones. The bad guy ends up saving the city, a-la Megamind, sort of thing, in the former case, or the second case, “Don’t Tell Mom I am a Supervillain”, something isn’t quite right with her powers, which are showing up earlier than they should, in a world in which the villains, and the heroes, have a sort of truce – don’t harm each other’s kids, and if you do villain stuff, keep it to your own spaces, and we will only go after you when you cross the line and harm normal people, more or less. She tries to show off, by grabbing something from the school science fair, which she realizes was something made by a villain, gets “caught at it” by another student, who placed it there as a trap, with the same stupid idea, and everything just goes down hill from there.
In a similar vein is you get, and this one I am both a fan of, but annoyed to no end by – Cape High. It has a very interesting premise – both the villains and the heroes, decided, at some point, that literally killing each other over stuff was not useful, so they end of forming a sort of system in which hero halls form, to “police” the bad guys, but its all staged behind a TV show, movies, etc. Everyone gets what they want, mostly. The real bad guys get prison, the not quite so bad guys get recognition, and money, etc., for “being” bad guys, the heroes get to be heroes, and, with the exception of when someone really does go off the rails, and both the heroes, and sometimes the villains (though never publicly, or without some story about how they helped the heroes for their own selfish ends), put a stop to anyone who is a real problem. Its a fun little series, made far more annoying by the fact that the author is almost certainly religious, one of the big heroes is a stars and stripes wearing “America” coded hero, who is also a preacher, and even one of the atheist members of one of the halls, who can read minds, “has to admit that some people he has scanned have touched something divine”, what ever the F that means…. Its brought up enough times to frustrate me, because, frankly, it was absolutely unnecessary.
Though, it is far and away less stupid, and can be mostly ignored, than the one series which dropped one huge stinking idiocy into the story, for no apparent reason, in the form of, “Oh, and it turns out that scientists figured out that suns are all just giant reactors, and not as old as everyone believed them to be!” Sigh… Of course, its not hard to, after that point, figure out that the reason was that they planned to explain a lot of the heroes luck at being in just the right place, at the right time, and having the right powers, as somehow, “God put them there!”, even if they never came right out and said it, instead of semi-cleverly implying it.
Note: In almost all of these, being “comic book heroes”, even if in long form, with no pictures, there are a lot of fist fights, of one sort or another. Though, its not “always” the solution, it is a lot of the time.
The most important consideration in movies like this one:
https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/1678713
Also tells you if there are spiders or if Krypto bites someone’s balls.
A site to consult before watching Good Boy or Arthur the King too.
Regarding your concern about the superhero oeuvre being played to death, The Onion commented on that exact point: Supergirl is about a hero who must single-handedly save the world “after the catastrophic collapse of interest in the genre.”
#3: Wow, that site is amazingly detailed.
I was disappointed. There are no spiders in the movie.
PZ @ 5
Spiders are in the Marvel Universe.
So the bad guy tries to kill her dog? Shades of John Wick.
kitrinos (cognate with our “citrus” and derived ultimately from the Latin citrinus – lemony) would be the modern Greek word for yellow.
Usually it’s Classical Greek that gets used for scientific names, so they’d probably be xanthoplasts instead.
I have a rule about movies: if the dog dies, I’m out.
This is non-negotiable.
I kind of like the idea of Supergirl as Puck or Athena.
feralboy12 @9
I am Legend destroyed me. Had nightmares about me and my dog after that. Yipes!
‘Supergirl’ Movie Criticized for Script, Poor Visual Effects
I like “kitrinoplast”!!!
From what I’ve seen, a lot of people (men) are criticizing the movie because “Supergirl doesn’t smile enough.” !!!
How . . . misogynistic.
(Just google that phrase if you really want more.)
For what values of “a lot of people (men)” is your claim applicable, ahcuah?
Because you are the first person I’ve read claiming that, and I’ve read reviews and reactions.
Sure. <clickety-click>
I just did, and Google quoth:
— Mind you, that is Google. I am not posting that because I think it’s veridical, but because you said I should, should I want more. Clearly, it is AI output.
I am looking forward to seeing Supergirl. One cavet to you observation “problem will be resolved with a fist-fight” I can offer one counter example in the 2025 Superhero Movie “Thunderbolts*” the conflict in the end was resolved not by a fist fight but by what I can best describe as a group hug.
… no matter how grand or how petty the villain is, the problem will be resolved with a fist-fight.
Which brings us to George Lucas’s (arguably) worst movie, Willow, in which the two primary combatants, a pair of witches, exhaust their spells and counter-spells (mostly blasts of energy from their hands), and have at each other like any other two old women in clumsy fisticuffs.
Hollywood is quite Trumpian in that, however bad they get, there’s always something worse.
I’m always more amused by thinking about the repercussions of superpowers than I am by anything the writers seem to want to do with it. For instance, I’m fine with a story that doesn’t bother to explain how unassisted humanoid flight works… but I kind of want to know what else it implies. Does she have to fly “lying down” for instance? Can she swim as fast as she flies? If she can, somehow, move air out of the way to fly that fast without mussing her hair, can she manipulate the air in other ways? Not to mention the implications of someone who can, apparently, move quite considerably faster than the speed of light being involved in a fistfight. The difficulty would be in remembering to slow down enough not to cause nuclear fusion in the air every time you threw a punch… https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ But if you could magically move faster than the speed of light without fusing the atmosphere, then you could literally be standing somewhere else by the time the photons from your original location got around to telling your opponent where you used to be. Which seems like it would be a considerable advantage in a fistfight… if you could keep track of where you were yourself. How do you navigate when you’re flying around faster than the light you’re using to see where things are? I don’t mean these as nitpicks. I don’t expect writers to explain these things; I’m just more interested in the answers than I am in most superhero movies.
Maybe the next super -‘hero’ film should be about a morally grey character like in The Blacklist. Someone who solves problems by cunning instead of punch-out fights.
Sort of the opposite of Deadpool.
The villain could be a super-trumpian character, for realism.
[related]
devnll, IIRC Charlie Stross suggested that the post WW2 era moved from the “uber-competent” protagonist pulp archetype to the “super-powered” hero was a contingent historical reaction to the geopolitical trauma of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War.
So they featured heroes Doc Savage and Dick Tracy or Tarzan or Phantom, and criminal polymath villains like Fantômas and Fu Manchu.
No superpowers, just peak human performance.
Thus the transition late-Industrial belief that an exceptional individual could master all scientific knowledge and control their environment through sheer willpower, peak physical training, and mechanical tools kinda failed to be puissant enough to compete with total war, industrialized state bureaucracies, and the atomic bomb.
The contingency? It helped that the USA co-opted the comics industry for propaganda at that time.
Captain America, then Superman went to Germany and sure biffed those Nazis!
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers%27_War_Board
—
I think there is merit to that.
Hulk SMASH puny (insert thing here)! Sometimes it even solved a problem. I liked The Hulk better before he got himself under control.
John Morales #20
An exception to that rule would be Batman. He’s an “uber-competent” pulp archetype in a world of “super-powered” heroes and, apparently, has the means and ability to kill those demi-gods should it come to that.
Oh yes. And the Joker, technically. But they are exceptions.