Why I’m Not Interested In James Gunn’s Supergirl

I was going to do a BW Vs article responding to a couple of articles in Variety about the failures of the Gunnverse Supergirl movie and why Hollywood is failing superheroines. I felt I’d be leaning too close to the culture war by the end and I’m trying to push back in my own way. So I chose a different path: why don’t I want to see it?

Trailers, interviews, preview clips, and backstage video are all supposed to get you hyped to see a movie, to convince you to spend time and money watching the film they’re promoting. All those things convinced me to NOT watch Craig Gillespie and Ann Nogueira’s take on the Maid Of Might as envisioned by James Gunn. Apparently I’m not alone, as the movie is bombing like it was at a party with a free open bar…fitting given that this is based on a Tom King story about Kara going off to get drunk on her birthday by finding a red sun planet with a lower drinking age.

The reviews, including reviews by women like JesterBell and Snarky Jay, have further convinced me to avoid this. The occasional mid rating goes against the more vocal apathy or outright rage, even from people who attacked other reviewers who complained about it. Remember Angry Joe Vargas from the Channel Awesome days, before Mike Michaud ruined the project in the name of tighter controls and ticking off the creators not part of the main videos? He decided to go after members of the Friday Night Tights crew over their complaints about the movie’s promotional info and when they finally got to the theater…only to rage against the movie himself after seeing it. It’s not how I expected two corners of my internet experience to cross paths but there we are. Curious how alt.toys.transformers ends up being part of this. (I’m not against a transforming Supermobile in theory, Hasbro!)

That’s all I’m going to say about that or Milly Alcock’s comments. Some are out of context (though she hasn’t bothered to clarify), some were made to make the…particular social viewpoint website that interviewed her happy during Pride Month, and the rest is the usual nonsense from actors and actresses who care more about what they’re making and who they’re working with than the source material and it’s fans, both of whom are responsible for making the thing you’re being paid more money in an day than I’ve ever had in my bank account to work on. What I haven’t already gone over in past controversies doesn’t fit with this site’s mission.

Instead I’m going to go over all the information I’ve seen and heard about this movie and flat out tell you why I want nothing to do with it or the rest of Gunnverse. There’s a reason this is in the Death Of DC category, and tied to the reason I have that category in the first place.

Discount She-Ra

The Source Material

I’ll warn you when a spoiler is coming up because I hear the movie didn’t even adapt it right by altering the ending. Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow lost me right at the plot of the first issue: Kara goes to a planet where she can get drunk on her birthday and ignoring the Kents. That’s already not what I want to see, but that’s been an issue with Kara Zor-El since the New 52. That’s when we got an angry Supergirl because every female character was in the rage state from DC Vs Mortal Kombat. They also ruined Officer Montoya. We haven’t seen Supergirl depicted properly OUTSIDE of the comics since the early seasons of the CW show when it was still on CBS or the first DC Super Hero Girls by Shea Fontana. (Still theorizing Cartoon Network forced Lauren Faust to just redo My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic because she did a better job with Super Best Friends Forever by NOT making Kara more like Rainbow Dash. She’s more a Fluttershy.)

I’m not a fan of Tom King’s work. He seems to love “breaking the toys”, making characters have mental issues. This has given us a suicidal Mister Miracle, Batman dealing with daddy issues (unless that was a different writer but there was the whole “Batman needs his pain” nonsense that kept Bruce from marrying Selina), and Kara with trauma. I’ve already gone over how you could add trauma to Kara’s story without changing the character she was since her 1959 debut. Both King and Nogueira opted to break her and make her an emotional wreck and a drunken a-hole. Even then I’m told the movie did it wrong. Let me see if this spoiler thing works. Drag your mouse over and highlight it to see the spoiler for the comic and movie.

In the original comic, the character of Ruthye is out for revenge but Supergirl tries to talk her out of it. I haven’t read it for the same reason I want nothing to do with the movie, but one commentator claimed that Ruthye killed him and had to live with the results and another claimed he reformed or something. Doesn’t matter because in the movie Kara talks her out of a revenge killing…and then kills him herself, going full Zack Snyder with Kara and altering the message.

I also could have done this with the block editor but I need time figuring that thing out. Maybe during my week off in a couple of weeks. Anyway, whatever my issue with Tom King psychologically damaging every DC character he can (Heroes In Crisis, anyone?) he does at least try to offer some kind of fix for them by the end. This is probably why so many commentators believe this is a form of therapy for him for his days in the military or CIA or whatever he was part of, possibly both. The movie opted to not do that, so they took a story I was already not interested in because it was Kara too busy getting drunk to help someone until it would help Krypto and made it worse. We’ll come back to Krypto-In-Name-Only but first…

I’m not even sure we’re on the same book.

General James Gunn Nonsense

The Landry Walker and Eric Jones version up there would have been an improvement, and that comic was supposed to be comedic. (That Kara also inspired Herodude’s catch phrase if I ever get to do that bit in Jake & Leon again.) This will lead into my other reasons but I’ll try not to overlap too much. There are so many comparisons to Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, and while I haven’t see that movie, either, the clips do compare. We have Kara getting a snack that an alien pooped out, which is already gross. There’s other shots of potty humor literally and figuratively like Krypto peeing on a picture of Superman and Kara congratulating him for mostly getting it on the paper this time. That’s just Gunn’s style.

Gunn has messed up a lot of this universe and its timeline. One reason is keeping stuff he did for the Snyderverse canon to the Gunnverse despite being separate universes. He went so far as to retcon the ending of season one of Peacemaker so that it was part of his own continuity in season two, as well as his take on the Suicide Squad. He wants to keep characters played by his friends and family in the active universe, his own. Then he gives us Peacemaker and friends, one of whom is played by his WIFE, having an orgy and then claiming the reason James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn (which promotion campaign’s focus was on Gunn making it rather than Superman and friend) had to get to HBO Max early was so anyone who couldn’t make it to the theater would know what they needed to from that movie to watch this show. Those who suffered through it can’t figure out why. He prioritized his HBO series over his movie? We know which cast he cared more about.

The latest controversy I heard yesterday (when I’m writing this so something new might be out) comes from a tense fight scene in Supergirlish being undercut by a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” by Kelty Greye and KidMotel. It’s already becoming a meme online. Gillespie decided that this was one hill he didn’t want to die on and threw Gunn under the bus for that decision, when Gunn’s been claiming he didn’t have any influence beyond hiring Alcock as Kara. And yet his tastes in music and outdated Walkman players show up as well as the type of humor he did in Guardians Of The Galaxy that doesn’t sound like something Tom King would do. Gunn’s fingerprints are as much all over this movie as Michael Bay was for the Ninja Turtles movies he produced.

Speaking of things ruined by James Gunn…

The Gunnverse’s treatment of the DC Universe

Gunn has outright said he couldn’t connect to Superman until he found out Kal-El had a dog. That he gave to Kara. Who is supposed to have a pet cat, Streaky. And then he breed swapped Krypto to his dog and made him a spasmatic terror who clearly needs a dog trainer. Maybe Gunn is just a bad dog owner? That’s only one problem.

As mentioned before, Gunn has a style and loves getting jobs for friends and family, even if it means filming his wife in a mock orgy. (He’s getting mocked like crazy for that by the FNT crew.) Anything that’s amusing to him goes in…even if it ruins a longstanding character like Jor-El. I didn’t like when Smallville was trying to paint Clark’s biological father as a jerk, or when DC Comics gave us an alternate universe version that messed up Jon Kent. Gunn decided that having Jor-El send Kal-El to Earth to conquer it and form a harem to repopulate Kryptonian DNA was a great idea, but he’s the only one. Fans have tried to push the idea that it was a mistranslation or outright subterfuge by Luthor no matter what Mr. Terrific said. Gunn was convinced making Jor-El worse than General Zod was totally the way to go. So Supergirl doubled down on the thing fans hated in the first movie and confirmed that turning Earth into a Kryptonian baby farm was totally the plan from the start.

That and a lot of other decisions led to the fans hating his take on Superman, after already rejecting Creature Commandos (another show that played to the GOTG style) except for G.I. Robot. Peacemaker season two was the stuff of nightmares according to those foolish enough to watch the thing. Superman’s outfit, from the darker colors to the Kingdom Come “S”–and now I hear that Gunn cancelled a Kingdom Come animated adaptation, which feels like salt in the wound–was a negative discussion topic even I got into. Sure, he got the trunks back, but then they made fun of them. One of the clips from Supergirl has young Kara, just landed on Earth, talking about his wearing underwear outside his outfit and later (or sooner, depending on how you look at it) Ruthye makes the “why are you SuperGIRL and not SuperWOMAN” comment, which the CBS Supergirl show at least had a decent answer for. Not great, but acceptable. The correct answer is she started out as a teenager and didn’t feel the need to change it.

Remember, Gunn said he couldn’t relate to or understand Superman, which not only makes him the wrong choice to direct a Superman movie but since it extends to the rest of the DCU thus far he’s the wrong choice to make a second attempt at a shared movieverse. He took everything Zac Snyder did wrong and did the opposite of what he did right while doing his own flavor of wrong. The end result has been a DC “Cinematic Universe” nobody wanted, and I’m not hearing a lot of buzz around Not-Green Lanterns for also rejecting the comics and the fantastic in favor of a gritty pass the torch detective story that fails to understand Lantern lore at every possible step. One reviewer already says he knows by 2020s Hollywood history that it will end with Hal Jordan dying and John Stewart taking the ring despite that not being how it all works. He’s probably right, but we aren’t getting a proper adaptation, are we?

How appropriate for this discussion.

Finally, it just looks bad.

In addition to Gunn’s humor and Kara giving Star Lord vibes to someone who only knows the character from ads, clips, and his appearances in the Avengers movies, it suffers from a lot of other modern superhero problems. Heroes that don’t come off as heroic. Dark colors. Barely any sunlight. Crapping on comic tropes. Attractive actresses turned into unattractive women characters while the men are still allowed to be hot. I’ve seen challenges to Kara being the “girlboss feminist” though there’s a scene where Kara beats up a bunch of thugs without her powers, but history shows them show up more often than not. It just doesn’t look fun. I don’t like what I see, which is enough to send me away from this movie.

You know what doesn’t bother me besides Alcock falling for the same nonsense as every other actress being interviewed lately? A female superhero. First off, she’s hardly a superhero. Second of all, I’m one of the few people who liked the 80s movie. I have lists (plural) of heroines super and otherwise I grew up with and still enjoy. The first Wonder Woman did well in theaters because it didn’t do thing like having Diana sleep with her dead boyfriend while he was possessing some other still living dude’s body. People wanted a Black Widow movie and was disappointed by what we got, a pattern that continues in other works that are made from things geeks and nerds like by people who hate geeks and nerds. I’d love to see a good Supergirl movie, and this clearly isn’t it. Blaming her obscurity despite a past movie, a recent series, and the modern superhero gold rush starting with the then equally obscure Iron Man and ignoring Kara’s comic fan base is an even weaker argument.

I can’t speak for the world, but that’s my reasoning. My time is limited and my money even more so, and I’m wasting neither on this movie not because some reviewer told me it was bad but because he or she just confirmed what I saw was accurate to the end product. Marketing exists to tell you if this is a movie you want to see, and everything I see and hear about it tells me it isn’t. I’ll go back to good Supergirl stories and leave this one to its fate.