Rating: ★★★★ (4.0/5)
Last year, Superman came out with David Corenswet dawning the red, yellow, and blue and it may be the best iteration of Superman since Christopher Reeve put on the suit.
I’m happy to report that Milly Alcock has totally kept that streak alive as comes to the House of El.
I’ve been excited for this movie since I found out that they were making it and I have to say that it didn’t let me down at all. I even went out and picked up the Woman of Tomorrow novel so I could better understand what this story was going to do or how it was going to play out. I wanted to know what kind of Supergirl we were going to get.
Its so easy for comics to take a female version of the male hero and just dumb them down into pretty art with not much of their own identity. I often think that’s what a lot of readers actually want and it’s kind of a shame. Based on some of the reviews of this movie and some of the random social media nonsense, I think it’s what a lot of basement trolls were hoping for.
What I saw watching this movie was a reluctant hero who isn’t so sure that she wants to save anybody because she’s too busy trying to save herself. We find Supergirl in a really rough mental place, just trying to deal with the fact that there is no home for her. She’s not ready to accept Earth as home, she’s not sure she can even relate to Kal-El, and the only comfort she can find is in the dog, Krypto, that she found while attending her mother’s funeral. This girl has lived a hard life.
Luckily, in walks a girl that needs some help and our Supergirl can’t help but be there for her when she’s being mistreated by a bunch of wild aliens in a bar. She doens’t want to be the hero but she also can’t let a bunch of idiots take advantage of this young girl. Our story really only takes off when the same bad guy, Krem of the Yellow Hills, hurts Supergirl’s dog. The one thing she has left from the world that died around her.
Man, this movie was a lot. I know a lot of people have complained about the pacing of the story and how several elements from the book were handled but I don’t know that I agree with any of them. There’s no rule that says adaptations should be word for word how the book was written. We’ve seen plenty of adaptations that took the book as inspiration and went their own way. I think the only thing that really could be said is that the movie took too much from the book to just throw away major points from it. Maybe if fewer elements had been used, people wouldn’t have been so saucy about it.
Regardless of any of that, Milly Alcock is pitch perfect casting. There’s a moment in the movie where she has seen enough and done enough and dealt with enough and she flies into space. For a brief moment in the silence she lets out a massive scream, that of course we can’t hear because space. That broke me. I felt it. She was so tired of fighting and had nothing left to do but also couldn’t show anyone else how weak she felt in that moment. Not gonna lie, that’s the moment I teared up.
I’m so excited for the future of this character. I know this movie is set to lose WB a boat load of money, but I hope they don’t give up on her. She’s an incredible hero and played by an incredible actress.
I want more adventures like this. Well done.