I’m going to take a stab here at guessing why the movie Supergirl seems to have tanked, based solely on my reaction to last summer’s wonderful blockbuster Superman.
That film was a delightful callback to all of the things that made The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves a baby-boomer childhood favorite and Superman with Christopher Reeve a monster hit in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Clark Kent/Superman and his supporting cast checked all of the boxes for people who may have been disappointed by the darker tone of the Superman movies of the last 10 years or so.
Especially entertaining was the play of the superdog Krypton, who stole every scene he was in, and he was in a lot of scenes.
The light-hearted romp ended with a jarring scene in which Supergirl arrives to pick up Krypto, who turns out to be her pet, not Superman’s.
She’s obviously drunk.
For two hours director James Gunn had set a jolly tone that, again, nostalgically recaptured all of the magic of Superman from earlier incarnations, only to smack us in the face with the nihilistic darkness of the more recent films. What the heck?
“I’m not interested in a movie about Supergirl the lush,” I said to Mary as we exited the theater.
The trailers that appeared, as the film’s release date neared, told a more interesting story. Here is a woman who, like Superman, grew up on the planet Krypton, which was destroyed by some cataclysm and left only a handful of survivors, and she takes the loss of her home planet, and all her friends and family, a lot harder than her famous cousin.
Something happens to shake her out of her dysphoria — it looked like maybe Krypto is kidnapped — and she embarks on a rescue mission that appears to heal her soul, and there’s a hint that she is a more admirable character by the end of the film.
Here’s my theory. The scene in Superman was such a buzzkill for the millions, who do not pay as close attention as lifetime comic-book fans, that when Supergirl arrived in the theaters, they remembered the drunk scene and took a pass.
I am sure that, whenever I get around to watching it, I will find Supergirl is a lot better movie than I expected. But the film has been in theaters for a month and I haven’t gone out of my way to see it. Just sayin’.
