When Superman hit theaters last summer as the first in a new line of DC comic book movies overseen by James Gunn, it was more than just another franchise reset. It was a return to the comic book character’s brighter, lighter, more uplifting, and family-friendly roots after more than a decade mired in Zack Snyder’s grimdark vision of a brooding, murderous, alien god. It wasn’t a great movie, exactly, but it was fun and frequently charming—a movie designed for kids, not just sullen adults.
So it’s rather baffling that Supergirl, the first follow-up to that film, takes the opposite tack. It’s dark, depressive, and dull. Supergirl is such a thoroughly grim and charmless picture that it almost plays like an in-universe rebuke to its predecessor’s light-heartedness. It’s a downer of a movie in nearly every way.
When we first meet the titular Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she’s a sad, lonely, drunk who spends her days hungover and her nights drinking heavily with her dog. She’s taken off to a planet with a red sun, which removes her powers and makes her vulnerable like an ordinary human, so that she can feel the effects of booze. She abuses it to avoid her real feelings of anger and abandonment stemming from deep childhood trauma and a sense of parental abandonment that the film slowly reveals.
If that isn’t bright and cheery enough, she quickly gets caught up in a young girl’s quest to find the Brigands—leather-and-spikes-wearing space raiders who murdered the girl’s mother, father, and brother in front of her, in one of the movie’s two (!) separate on-screen family massacres. It turns out that the Brigands are essentially an intergalactic rape and sex trafficking gang who make a practice of abducting, imprisoning, and sexually assaulting young women, whom they call brides, to perpetuate their all-male society.
Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella), the movie is tinged with the sort of Heavy Metal-esque trippy pulp weirdness that Gunn is known for, but it comes across as forced and tonally at odds with its hero. The whole thing plays like a fourth-rate Mad Max ripoff, but without the pedal-to-the-metal action sequences or the single-minded vengeful fury. It’s not fun. It’s barely even righteous. It’s just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled.
I honestly struggle to imagine how this concept passed the pitch phase, much less made it into full-on movie form. It’s truly baffling. We’re reimagining the DC Comics universe, starting with a brightly colored, aww-shucks Superman reboot that signals an end to the grave solemnity of the previous era—so let’s make Supergirl a dark, violent, depressing story about a sad drunk dealing with deep familial trauma while fighting a ruthless rape gang. This will be great for little kids!
What the actual fu—nevermind. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the reasoning, somehow this movie did get made. And at times it even seems almost aware of its own conceptual catastrophe.
Throughout the film, David Corenswet’s Superman makes a handful of trying-to-be-sunny cameo appearances, including a flashback scene in which he presents Kara with her red, yellow, and blue Supergirl costume. It’s sort of cheesy looking, and he admits as much. “I know it’s pretty colorful,” he says. “But that’s just so everyone knows we’re good.” Supergirl’s punishing levels of bleakness, darkness, and hopelessness are a pretty good sign it’s not.
