Meh.
I have a big dilemma about this movie.
On the one hand, I want -- with every fiber of my being -- to support movies focused on female superheroes. We don't need that corrective as much as we once did, but we still need it. As many female superheroes as there are, it's still comparatively rare that they are front and center in their own movie.
On the other hand, I hated James Gunn's Superman. And even though this movie is not directed by Gunn, it comes from the same universe that Gunn imagined, and it has the same stupid super dog that I hated so much in Superman.
And how is this conflict going to be resolved?
I don't know yet.
It would be very unlike me to let one of the more prominent releases of the summer season go completely unwatched. I might skip it in theaters, but by the end of the year, I'd want to have seen it in order to rank it with my other movies from the year -- even if I expected not to like it.
But I've become a bit more selective with my viewings in recent years. That's not to say I avoid watching garbage. In fact, I kind of like watching garbage. Instead, I'm more likely to want to deliver a message to a movie by not watching it, even if no one hears that message but me. The most prominent examples are movies that involve potentially positive portrayals of Trump, from The Apprentice (which I still haven't watched) to Melania (which I may watch before the end of the year).
The question is, is Supergirl, just by association with Superman, worthy of such a message?
I don't know yet.
One issue I have with it? Milly Alcock, though it's nothing about her personally. (Though I do think the scowl seems a bit exaggerated.)
No, it's that I feel like they cast a promising actress as Supergirl, Sasha Calle, only three years ago, and they've already chucked her in the bin and replaced her with someone else. I guess I liked 2023's The Flash a lot more than most people, because that was the final gasp of that iteration of the DC Cinematic Universe. Now under Gunn's new regime, it's Alcock, and Alcock comes with an advanced bias from me because I didn't like the way this world was introduced in Superman.
It's not like I didn't have a dilemma regarding Superman as well. That one I also wanted to support for political reasons, because of the flap involving Gunn's likening of Superman to an immigrant. But I just disliked the actual movie too much to actually go there.
I haven't actually heard anything yet about how this movie has been received, in part because I rarely seek out that sort of information. It usually trickles down to me, but it hasn't yet in this case.
I suppose I want the movie to be good. I mean, I want every movie to be good. If the new DC Universe were salvageable for me, that would be the best possible outcome. There are going to be a lot more of these movies.
But just from the few images I've seen, there's a lot of Gunn in this movie. A lot of off-earth stuff that just doesn't really work for me, even though I generally like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. And the funny thing is, I really like one Gunn movie for DC, that being The Suicide Squad.
So why not Superman? It's too much to get into now. There are too many reasons. It's just bad.
But I may have to give Craig Gillespie the chance to right this ship. Just maybe not in the cinemas, and not on opening weekend, in any case.
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