I hate to say it, but I think Greta Gerwig would have killed this movie. It could have been great. Instead, for reasons unbeknownst to everybody, we got Craig Gillespie, who sort of lacks a singular voice as a director and is utilized a bit more to plug into various different genres. He just seems to be able to make a broad film for audiences, whether it’s comedy, action, horror, or something else. He’s touched all of the genres, and now he’s coming for Supergirl. The problem is that he’s coming for James Gunn’s Supergirl. Because make no mistake, this is James Gunn’s world, and we’re just living in it. The DCU is really the James Gunn universe as he tries to creatively streamline an entire network of comic books, deciding who to cast where, who gets the next film, and which stories are the right ones to tell following the collapse of the Snyderverse. Gillespie was not the right director choice here. Not because he’s a bad director, but because he’s so used to morphing into whatever the project needs him to be that he tried to morph into James Gunn. There’s a lot of mimicry happening here instead of a unique vision that might have come from a more auteur-style director, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Supergirl doesn’t work.

I really wanted it to. I’m not one of those people who overly prejudges a movie unless it’s a direct sequel to something I already saw and didn’t like. I’ll be honest, it’s pretty hard to watch The Strangers: Chapter 3 after having seen The Strangers: Chapter 1 and The Strangers: Chapter 2 and keep a neutral opinion going in. But Supergirl is different from Superman, even if she did appear in that film for all of 60 seconds. I would not use that as a barometer heading in. I haven’t seen the Supergirl film from the 1980s. I’ve considered watching it, but it doesn’t have audio description, which is a bit of a problem for me, and I’m not 100% sure I would enjoy it. I didn’t see it ahead of my vision loss. Much like this summer with Masters of the Universe, which I also hadn’t seen from the ‘80s, I avoided going backward because I wasn’t sure how it would affect the film that does have audio description that is currently playing and that I’m actually reviewing. So basically, I went into Supergirl with Melissa Benoist being the only representation I had of the character from her CW Arrowverse version, and even that show I didn’t watch in its entirety. I’m just aware of her portrayal.

I think that’s kind of the point. We have certain heroes where the public has made it abundantly clear that we don’t need to keep seeing certain things repeated because we’ve seen that story told before. We’ve had so many different iterations of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man that we don’t always need to see Superman’s origin story. We don’t always need to see Batman’s parents murdered or Uncle Ben die for Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibility. We don’t need to see those characters done over and over in the exact same way. But perhaps with Supergirl, we do. I think that’s kind of where the messaging got lost, because James Gunn mistook Supergirl for being an A-list character when she’s really not. To be honest, very few heroes are. A-list heroes are the ones that even people who don’t read comic books and wouldn’t call themselves fans of the superhero genre across the board are still aware of and are more likely to be pulled into those franchises by name recognition alone. The B-list is somewhere James Gunn has comfortably worked before, with Guardians of the Galaxy clearly not being a household name before he made it one. The same can be said for other Marvel properties like Shang-Chi, Eternals, and Captain Marvel, and DC heroes like Supergirl, Green Arrow, and Booster Gold.

So call me surprised when the film opens up with the backstory and origin of not Kara, played here by Milly Alcock, our titular Supergirl, but Ruthye, who is not the lead of the film and kind of, sort of, Inigo Montoyas her way through the story, barging into rooms announcing that she’s there to seek vengeance for the death of her parents. And if you think that’s a spoiler, that is the opening scene of the film, because the opening scene is Ruthye’s backstory. We get to watch her watch her parents get murdered by Krem, the obligatory villain of the film, whose entire motivation I wasn’t really sure I understood. They try to explain it at one point, but it seems like he either wants to kill women or capture them for propagation purposes. It was really hard to figure out which one of those was true because he mostly just seems like a big bad guy who does mean things and everyone’s afraid of him. Certainly not an iconic villain. He feels a little like the villain from Thor: The Dark World. I know comic book fans are sitting there going, “I know who that is,” but a lot of people are going, “Damn, who was the villain in Thor: The Dark World?” And that’s kind of the point. I think the further we get away from Supergirl, people will remember Supergirl and Krypto being in the movie, but they’ll be like, “Who was the villain? It’s a guy, right? There was a guy. What was his name? I don’t know. What did he want? I’m not sure.” To make matters worse, they also use this film to introduce Lobo, a fan-favorite DC character and proof that Jason Momoa will absolutely not be playing Aquaman in James Gunn’s universe. He’s already recycled here as Lobo. To be honest, he’s probably an even better fit for Lobo than he was for Aquaman, although I can’t see a Lobo movie making a billion dollars worldwide like Aquaman did.

Supergirl goes to planets with certain colors of suns for certain reasons. Sometimes she needs to recharge. Sometimes she purposefully goes to planets where her powers don’t work as well so she can experience some semblance of normalcy, drink herself into a stupor, and other suns can have a negative effect on her. So you have to pay attention to the color of the sun. Probably one of the few reasons to watch Supergirl is to learn how that dynamic works because it presumably also works for Superman, and unless you want to go back and read all the comic books, this film at least gives you a short introduction into how the suns work. And yes, halfway through the movie, there is finally backstory for Kara, but so much has to happen to get us there. After we see Ruthye’s parents killed, we see her trying to recruit anyone to help her on her mission to kill a guy nobody wants to kill, and it isn’t until Krypto’s life is put in danger that Kara gives any kind of damn about moving the plot along and follows Ruthye on her journey to seek revenge while Kara is also trying to save her dog. So those coming here for a lot of Krypto time will also be sorely disappointed. And if you’re coming here for Superman time, if you’ve got the sweats for David Corenswet, you might also be disappointed. While he does appear, his screen time is extremely limited. He and Krypto are both only slightly more than cameos.

Ruthye and her drunk superhero new best friend are going to go through a series of bizarre space encounters that don’t make a whole lot of sense for the second feature-length film in this new DC universe. I had audio description, and it’s Deluxe, narrated primarily by Laura Post, with additional performers helping with translations. There were times when they would get to a planet that wasn’t Earth and identify other people as human, and I just felt like we hadn’t quite explained how humans were doing space travel well enough in Superman, and we certainly don’t in Supergirl. So I’m not 100% sure this is earned. It feels a little too random and a little too nonsensical without actually referencing anything about how these people got to where they are. I don’t know why, on an alien planet, there’s a human jazz singer. There’s also, and I’m not trying to start gender identity wars here, a strong focus on man and woman outside of just the human race. At one point, Kara and Ruthye run into another alien race, and the way they describe things is as if they were humans, but they’re not. It’s like every single planet seems to have the same two genders, and they function the exact same way they do on Earth. It’s kind of a boring thing that science fiction sometimes does when it’s not creative enough to think about the possibilities of what life could actually be like on other planets. I think that’s one of the reasons people love Ridley Scott’s Alien so much. Instead of giving us another biped who basically looks like us, it gave us a “holy shit, what is that?” Which is probably far more likely to be what we would find on another planet than someone we can shake hands with. Even the word “man” comes from human terminology, so why would entirely different species use the exact same terminology for their own gender identities? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the script wasn’t imaginative enough to explore any of this or explain any of it and just kind of hoped you wouldn’t pay attention.

So for the people at DC who think the Supergirl backlash is completely unwarranted, I think some of the backlash is a bit much, but I also clearly can tell that this script needed another pass, and it probably needed some restructuring. If all you’re doing is trying to appease one man named James Gunn, then he might not notice the little problems because this feels very much like Craig Gillespie presents James Gunn. If you’re the type of person who likes to have homage paid to you, then you might forgive it for its other trespasses. But those trespasses are against us, not James Gunn. We’re the ones who actually have to put up with the other sins of the film: the stuff that doesn’t work, the stuff that isn’t explained well enough, or the stuff that is too coincidental. I like Milly Alcock in the moments they give her where she’s not being overly obnoxious. It’s weird to introduce her as this hero who is intensely unlikable at the beginning and then expect us to grow to like her. I’ve been trying to think of other like-minded films where we really didn’t like the person at the beginning because they were impossible to relate to, and then, as the film progresses, they start showing emotion and empathy, grow up a little bit, and finally find the hero they’re supposed to be. Even somebody like Scott Lang in Ant-Man, while he starts off as a criminal, isn’t the kind of criminal who is scary or does despicable things. He’s somebody whose particular skill set is utilized by the film to thrust him into becoming Ant-Man.

The film doesn’t really utilize Kara’s alcoholism to thrust her into anything. The plot is sort of about her dealing with the loss of her family and realizing that the only things she has left are Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, a.k.a. Kal-El, her cousin, and her dog, Krypto. Other than that, it seems as though her entire world is gone. But it also just kind of seems like she wants to party all night and every day because she heard that song on the radio. I did like the actress playing Ruthye. I thought she was doing a nice job, but the performance sometimes feels very performative to me. I know she’s a younger actress, so I don’t want to get too critical, but sometimes you can really feel somebody acting, and it becomes less organic. I would say I felt a lot of acting coming out of this performance, but Ruthye is amusingly written and actually gets better lines than they give Kara. I would also argue Lobo is completely useless and did not need to be in the film at all. Removing him possibly would have given Kara more of an opportunity to step up sooner and in a bigger way, maybe even giving Ruthye more of an opportunity as well.

Often Kara gets in her own way. There’s a scene where Ruthye, who has announced her plans to kill the man who killed her parents, actually gets a shot to do it, and Kara stops her and says that it’s not worth the weight she’ll have to carry afterward. It’s a moment that would have paid off if we had seen that Kara was living with that same weight, that Kara had been in Ruthye’s position and went off and ripped someone’s head off because they were responsible for her parents’ deaths. But that’s not her backstory. So it’s weird for her to suddenly take such a stance when we hit a point in the film where, had she let Ruthye go through with it, lives would have been saved. Considering Ruthye was pretty clear about her intentions for an hour of the film, I think it’s a little odd for Kara to suddenly be surprised that she wants to take the opportunity she has said all along she was going to take. It’s also not supported by Kara spending the whole movie telling Ruthye that killing is bad and it’s going to weigh on her soul. Kara herself is immature. The film is about Supergirl growing up and realizing she can be the hero she’s supposed to be. She can be more like her cousin. She can be responsible.

I’m not sure anybody is going to give her that chance, because this film just doesn’t work. God, I wanted it to. I can see that there are bits and pieces here, and that possibly another pass on the screenplay or a different director might have been able to pull them all together, knowing what to push and pull in order to make the film more enjoyable, more coherent, more unique, and a better launching pad for this hero. Instead, it ended up being one of the bigger disappointments of the year and sort of a box-office catastrophe in a year full of box-office surprises and an enormous amount of money being spent at theaters. It’s pretty hard to say audiences weren’t ready for Supergirl when we’ve had multiple films crossing the billion-dollar mark. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now sitting as the highest-grossing domestic film of all time and one of the highest-grossing worldwide releases of all time. The Odyssey became Universal Pictures’ highest-grossing release of all time. Toy Story 5 crossed the billion-dollar threshold. Not to mention horror films like Obsession and Backrooms far overperforming against their meager budgets. It’s tough to look at Supergirl and say, “Well, it really had an uphill battle, didn’t it?” Not really. It’s a DC Comics property releasing the summer after Superman. If they had just managed to put the right puzzle pieces in place, there’s no reason Supergirl shouldn’t have made at least $500 million internationally.

It’s not because Milly Alcock isn’t a big star. David Corenswet was hardly a household name when he was cast as Superman. It’s not that she’s a bad actress. It’s how they utilize her. There was no rule dictating what this film had to be. It didn’t have to be a prequel to Superman or a sequel to Superman. They could have put this before, after, or even during Superman. They chose to do what they chose to do with it. This is the story they wanted to tell, but I can’t imagine why. I’m not sure why this feels like the introduction to Supergirl that had to happen, or the one we needed the most. I can’t help but wonder if stronger writers and a different director couldn’t have made a far superior film out of this material. I don’t think Gillespie is the kind of director who is going to fundamentally reshape something that isn’t working. I feel like he’s the guy you bring in, hand the script to, and say, “Go.” If the film isn’t already solid, I’m not convinced he’s going to fix or amplify it. He’s going to present it. So if the script isn’t working, the film won’t work. I hate the fact that I have to write a negative review about this film because some of the voices that have taken such a strong stance against it are not voices I particularly want to align myself with, but at the end of the day, it is about whether or not I would recommend a film.

Ultimately, that’s what Fresh and Rotten is. It’s a very binary system with no gray area. There’s no “there are some positives and some negatives” option. We’ve lost the gray area. So since this is not a recommend for me, sadly, I am slightly Rotten on Supergirl. There is a structure here that should have worked and could have worked, and it just doesn’t. Supergirl is disappointing because of what it could have been. It’s unfortunate that it never was.

Rotten: 5.8/10