I find the contrast between Superman and Supergirl, as characters, to be absolutely fascinating. While the history of DC Comics is obviously full of vast and varied interpretations of every one of its characters, the core versions of these two super-cousins present a dynamic contrast, one that directly harkens back to the philosophical questions of nature versus nurture.
Superman is a character who never knew his homeworld of Krypton, sent away from it as an infant, escaping its subsequent doom in the process. Conversely, Supergirl is a character who knew her homeworld; in many iterations, she is a teenager by the time Krypton explodes, just narrowly escaping. These stories often include parallel dimensions or time dilation of one form or another, meaning that when Supergirl arrives on Earth, she is physically younger than the now-adult Superman, but is actually older than him, with memories of their homeworld that he will never have.
This tends to make Superman’s connection to Krypton a much purer one. He doesn’t have the actual baggage of grieving the world he once knew, with Krypton instead just serving an idyllic ideal within his mind. Meanwhile, Supergirl remembers her family, remembers her home, and is severely affected by the loss of it. I thought all of this was pretty well adapted to film in James Gunn’s Superman, which really leaned into the Superman elements of this, and even hinted heavily at the Supergirl elements in her brief inclusion in the film.
As such, I was interested to see how this would be further explored in the new film, Supergirl, but was incredibly underwhelmed by the film’s biggest reveals about Supergirl’s actual canonical backstory in this DC Universe. And as it turns out, many of the changes made here have to do with preserving the twist of Superman.
Supergirl's origins were changed for the worse to fit into the DC Universe
Midway through Superman, after having reiterated the character’s infatuation with the homeworld he never knew and his birth parents, it is revealed that the final message those parents sent him to Earth with was not the hopeful call to heroism that Superman had long believed it to be, but in fact a mandate to conquer Earth and the whole of the human race. It turns Superman’s whole backstory on its head and challenges this cinematic iteration of Superman on a foundational level. However, it also immediately raises the question: why would Supergirl not have warned Superman about this, if she knew his parents back on Krypton?
Supergirl answers that question, sort of, by attempting to have its cake and eat it too. In a lengthy flashback sequence in the film, audiences are shown that Supergirl was not actually born on Krypton, but instead on the separate city of Argo. Supergirl’s father, Zor-El, invented a force field device to keep him, his family, and his city safe in the lead-up to Krpyton’s destruction. Thus, even after Superman was shot off toward Earth and Krypton was destroyed, Argo persevered as a satellite of sorts. It was here, on this chunk of Krypton, that Supergirl was subsequently born and raised to adolescence, before the city became infested with kryptonite poisoning, which resulted in her father shooting her off to follow in Superman’s footsteps on Earth.
This is all weird and convoluted in a number of ways. The film makes reference to Supergirl being older than Superman, like in the comics, but this backstory doesn’t seem to support that at all? Why is everyone else dying from kryptonite poisoning by the time Supergirl is shot off, but she is unaffected entirely? Why would Zor-El opt to follow Jor-El’s actions to-the-T, if he hates the guy and thinks he’s a lunatic? All of these are ancillary concerns to my biggest gripe with this change: it muddies what should be the crystal-clear juxtaposition between these characters. Now, there’s all these asterisks to the differences between Supergirl and Superman. I found both Milly Alcock and David Corensweat to be great in their respective roles here, but the context of their actual relationship just feels so needlessly bogged down in contrivances and convoluted exposition.
I have to imagine that a large part of Gunn’s reasoning for these changes has to do with attempting to preserve that twist from Superman without implementing Supergirl as compliant in keeping the secret. But I don’t even think it does that very effectively. Zor-El speaks in this movie about how off-the-rails his brother Jor-El is, and I kind of have a hard time buying that he would have sent Supergirl off to Earth without at least giving her a heads up about what Superman’s parents were like. If Supergirl’s origin of being an adolescent when Superman was initially sent off and Krypton exploded was preserved, that could’ve led to some juicy, emotionally-driven conversations between Supergirl and Superman that further illustrates the differences in their beliefs, rather than the more one-note discourse they seem to have in Supergirl, as it currently stands.
Ultimately, it just seems like a lot of legwork was put into retrofitting Supergirl’s origins in order to make them align more with the larger narrative requirements of the ever-expanding DCU, and it comes at a substantial cost to both Supergirl as a film and Supergirl as a character.
Supergirl is playing now in theaters. Read our review here.
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