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Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Supergirl
I was excited for this. On paper it seemed good. Alcock was great as Supergirl in her two minutes of screentime in Superman (a movie I saw three times in theaters). I like Gillespie as a director from I, Tonya, Cruella, and Dumb Money. Ive heard the comic book it’s based on is acclaimed.
Unfortunately this isn’t very good. There was some parts of Gunn’s plans with DC that made me unsure of everything. I was of the thought that even if his DC universe ends up being a mess then we at least get a good Superman movie this century. Which happened so I’m set. But I think this shows that everyone who was skeptical of Gunn being in charge was right to be worried.
The biggest issue is the script. Which is odd since Gunn said he was going to make sure the scripts for the films were as good as possible before going into production. Not just to avoid what happened with Snyder, but also to avoid the later pitfalls of Marvel. You do not get that sense at all. It feels like a rough draft. So much of the dialogue is, not only bad and unnatural, but repeats things that we’ve already seen and know.
The second biggest issue is how this is copying Gunn’s style and is doing a poor job doing it. The action sequences here are so poorly framed that you don’t know what’s going on, and they’re choppily edited on top of that. The music choices are awful, not just the 20th century rock that Gunn is known for, but alien bars in different galaxies are apparently playing American Standards and Bossa Nova (?). Theres a really bad needle drop at the end, which is a cover of an already bad song. Theres no reason for any of the music, in Guardians there was always an emotional reason for it. I was thinking if she’s some sort of party girl why not have her listen to EDM, and have the film filled with A.G Cook, Charli XCX, Gesaffelstein, and Slayyyter to give it its own sonic identity.
None of the characters feel like they earn their emotional arc. Which is the best thing Gunn does as a writer. I don’t know why he didn’t re-write this himself. And the visuals and especially the visual effects, mostly fall flat. There’s some good stuff when everything is practical. But when it’s mostly CG/Green Screen/Void, it looks bad. Much like Superman but that at least had a great screenplay to carry it.
I feel like there is a good movie in here somewhere, I don’t know how much of that is just the source material which I want to read now. But it’s bogged down by all of its faults.
Just to addendum this:
I read Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow. I’m not a big comic reader, although I have read more comics than most of the gen pop. I thought this was bad.
I think the idea of doing True Grit with Supergirl is an interesting concept, it’s just not executed very well in either the comic or the movie. If anything I prefer the movie since I found the comic to be meandering and boring. There’s also an unnecessary amount of narration. Most of it is just exposition or explaining what we’re already seeing on the page as images. My eyes eventually glazed over these text boxes as I focused on the images and the dialogue which was enough to communicate the story as the format is intended to do. It’s like I was reading Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing without any of the philosophical depth.
I thought the main little girl was annoying and uninteresting, which translated to the film. And the comic abandons the Krypto storyline which the film at least tries to keep alive.
Yeah, I still think it’s an interesting concept that the movie probably could have done better. But this source material was not good.