Supergirl (1984) – Review

It was in the year 1984 that we saw Supergirl’s first appearance outside the pages of DC comics, which was pretty sad considering her cousin Superman had been appearing in serials, cartoons, television shows and movies dating as far back as the 1940s. Yet it wasn’t until the Christopher Reeve movies started to show diminishing returns that anyone thought to bring this comic book character to life. Now, female superheroes as a genre didn’t have much of history outside of comic books, the Linda Carter Wonder Woman series being the only notable one at the time, but with Superman III only pulling in about $60 million dollars (as opposed to the first two movies both easily clearing the $100 million dollar mark), Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided to branch out their Superman franchise and give the Girl of Steel her shot.

The movie opens in the magnificent Kryptonian community of Argo City, which kind of looks like a crystal hippie commune lit by orbiting stadium lights. Inside, we are introduced to young Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) and her mentor Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), the genius mind behind the creation of Argo City. We find Zaltar playing around with a small orb called the Omegahedron, which he “borrowed” from the city guardians so that he could create a bizarre facsimile of a tree. Kara admonishes him for doing this because the Omegahedron is the device that provides power and air to the city, which one must admit is fairly irresponsible and leads one to ask, “How can a person just get a hold of a device that is solely responsible keeping the people of Argo City alive?” Well, for starters the entire city is made up of a series of rooms with no walls, so apparently, security is not an issue, and this comes from the fact that Argo City is viewed as a community of perfect harmony. That residents of Argo City all walk around looking as if they are in some kind of drug-induced state of ecstasy explains how such an important device could be borrowed without anyone noticing.

Argo City is brought to you by the makers of Quaaludes.

While Zaltar is discussing explorations into outer space with Kara’s mother (Mia Farrow), we see Kara herself screwing around with the Omegahedron, and with it, she brings to life a large dragonfly that quickly proceeds to fly around erratically until eventually puncturing a hole in the city’s exterior wall as if it was made of Saran Wrap. This causes a vacuum breach and the Omegahedron is sucked out into space, thus dooming the inhabitants of Argo City to a slow and painful death. Zaltar states that as this is all his fault — which it really is — he will venture off into space after the missing device, in a small craft that he will pilot through something called the binary chute: “a pathway from Innerspace to outer space.” But before he has a chance to explain his plan, Kara hops in the spacecraft and takes off in it herself.

Note: According to Zaltar, Argo City is located in “Innerspace” which is apparently a pocket of trans-dimensional space and not inside Martin Short.

In Superman: The Movie, baby Kal-El was placed in a spacecraft so that he would survive the destruction of Krypton, while in this movie we have Kara Zor-El stealing a spacecraft to flee the world she herself doomed. This is a very key difference in plot and character development between the films. Sure, her plan isn’t to abandon her people to a horrible death, a fate that she would be completely responsible for, but to retrieve the Omegahedron and return it to Argo City — regardless of her noble motives, though, this is a less than heroic way to introduce our main character. In the comics, Argo City was a surviving fragment of Krypton, and Kara’s parents sent her to Earth when the city was doomed by a meteor shower. One can understand the filmmakers not wanting to use that premise, as it’s pretty much the same origin story as Superman’s, but having her accidentally dooming the city seems to be a rather odd direction to go. Things get even stranger when she arrives on Earth – popping out of a lake in full Supergirl regalia – where she proceeds to fly around as if she doesn’t have a care in the world.

“I have a vague notion that I should be doing something important, but nevermind, time for more flying”

The Salkind Superman movies are guilty of giving Kryptonians bizarre powers – in Superman II we saw that General Zod suddenly had finger-pointing powers of levitation, and Superman himself gets that wonderful “kiss of forgetfulness” power – and in this movie, the first thing Supergirl does is pick a flower and make it bloom with her heat vision. But her most startling power is her ability to morph from her Supergirl persona to her secret identity of Linda Lee as if by magic. There is no running into a phone booth to change here, not even a quick Wonder Woman costume spin change, but instead she just calmly walks through the woods as her Supergirl costume slowly shifts into Earth attire and her hair changes from blonde to brunette. This is basically magic and not any kind of superpower, and it’s this change in to her secret identity that brings forth my biggest issue with this film, and that would be “Why in the hell does she bother with a secret identity at all?” Does going undercover at a local high school somehow aid her in the search for the Omegahedron? The answer to that is decidedly not.

Your people are dying, you colossal idiot!

Before leaving Argo City she heard her mother state that within a few days, “Our lights will grow dim and the very air we breathe, so thin.” And yet we see Supergirl’s first action on Earth – aside from flying around and looking at horses – is to enroll in Midvale all-girls school, as if she has all the time in the world. And how does she spend her time there?  Well her amazing powers are used to save her new friend Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy), younger sister to Lois Lane, from some bullies during a field hockey game, and later she thwarts those same bullies when they try to scald the other girls in the school showers — talk about “With great power comes moderate responsibility!” And does any of this bring her closer to finding the Omegahedron? If we look at the origin of Superman, he arrived on Earth and was found and raised by the Kents, but he had no outlying mission other than to eventually become one of the world’s greatest heroes, and it’s his persona of Superman that’s actually his secret identity, Clark Kent is who he really is and the guy in blue tights was created to keep his loved ones safe. This is not the case here with Supergirl in this movie, as there is no reason for her to take on a second identity – other than to maybe pad the run-time – as she should be spending every waking hour searching for the Omegahedron. The filmmakers don’t seem to have a clue as to what to do with her character, they clearly don’t want her to be a carbon copy of Superman, but then they saddle her with a mild-mannered identity that serves no purpose to the story that they’re trying to tell, and because she is a female, they bizarrely thought the best introduction of a “Supergirl” would be to have her first encounter with people of Earth to be with a couple of would-be rapists.

How dumb do you have to be to attempt to rape a girl in a Superman costume?

If we were to assume that these would-be rapists thought that this was just a young woman in a Halloween costume that would be one thing, but she lifts the first asshat up by his chin and throws him through a fence, and yet his partner still proceeds with the attempted rape – he doesn’t even let the fact that she melts his knife with her heat vision phase him – and thus the audience is left wondering, “Who in the hell wrote this thing?” Of course, idiot rapists aren’t this movie’s number one threat to Supergirl – that’s just a threat to good taste – because the real “big baddie” is a power-hungry witch named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who while picnicking with her warlock friend Nigel (Peter Cook) has the Omegahedron literally fall into her lap, or to be more accurate, into her cheese fondue. The one positive thing I can say about the Supergirl movie is that it looks like Peter O’Toole and Faye Dunaway had a lot of fun with their roles, especially Dunaway with the high camp aspect of her character.

Don’t screw with Faye Dunaway.

Coming up with a proper villain wasn’t all that easy for the Salkinds, for at this point in history the character of Supergirl didn’t have much of a rogues gallery of her own – even today the likes of Silver Banshee and Bizzaro-Girl are not known outside of the most avid comic book readers – but this movie doesn’t bother to use anything from the DC canon. Instead, we get a witch who lives in an abandoned carnival, a location that screams for the Scooby Gang to investigate, and the conflict between Supergirl and Selena seems to stem more from the fact that they have the hots for the same guy, and not because Selena is in possession of the item that is required to save Supergirl’s people.

Note: The love interest is played by Hart Bochner, who played the idiot Ellis in Die Hard.

I must say it’s a shame that writers insisted on pitting a female superhero against a female supervillain, as if Supergirl would be no match for the likes of Lex Luthor or Brainiac, which is why I was pleasantly surprised that the latest Wonder Woman movie had her up against Ares the God of War, and not her more notable female antagonists like Cheetah and Circe. That Selena here is a practitioner in the dark arts does make her a credible threat, as magic is one of Superman’s key weaknesses – right up there with Kryptonite – but this element of the comic book was never really addressed in the movies, and Supergirl counters most of Selena’s spells without much effort, so not much drama to be found there. The film’s key threat to our hero is when Selena manages to conjure up supernatural beings of “darkness and shadow,” but this had me questioning how the Omegahedron works, and how exactly is Selena able to use it? We are told it is the power source that keeps Argo City alive so how exactly does that translate to working black magic and summoning dark forces?

Filmmaking Tip #28 – The biggest tip-off to your effect budget being on the smallish side is when you include an “invisible monster” in your movie because if you’re not Forbidden Planet, it’s just sad.

Aside from two confrontations with mystical monsters, we don’t get much in the way of cool Supergirl action; she beats up the aforementioned rapists, saves Lucy from a nasty hit during that field hockey game, thwarts the evil bullies’ shower scheme, saves Selena’s boy toy from a magically animated bulldozer, and later rescues him from Selena-controlled bumper cars. None of this is particularly impressive, and during all of these events you can’t help but ask the question, “Why and the hell are you worrying about all this shit when everyone back in Argo City is about to die?” We count at least three different night scenes before the third act, and at least a couple of more days must go by after Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone and takes over Midvale – don’t ask me how an amateur occultist even knows about the Phantom Zone – so if we go by Supergirl’s mother’s statement as fact, that they only had few days left before “Our lights will grow dim and the very air we breathe, so thin,“ then this means by the time Supergirl eventually defeats Selena, all of her people back in Argo City would be long dead.

But hey, at least she was able to conquer sixth-dimensional geometry.

This movie is supposed to take place in the same universe as the Christopher Reeve movies, and Reeve himself was originally set to appear in Supergirl but he wisely bowed out at the last minute, yet references to his character come across as rather odd, and they raise some rather interesting questions.

• At the beginning of the film Kara and Zaltar discuss her cousin living on Earth, but exactly how they know of his surviving Krypton’s destruction is never addressed.
• Kara pops out of her trans-dimensional craft suddenly wearing the Supergirl costume. Did this little space pod have some kind of costume-manufacturing device inside it?
• To enroll in the Midvale all-girl school, Kara adopts the persona of Linda Lee, forging a reference letter from her cousin Clark Kent, but how would a person from Argo City even know what a school reference letter was, let alone how to forge one?
• And again how are the people in Argo City keeping tabs on Kal-El? Does Zaltar have some magical viewer that allows them all to watch the adventures of Superman?
• The Phantom Zone that Supergirl is banished to is very different from what we saw in the first two Superman movies. We do see her briefly in what I call the “Queen Album Cover” where we saw General Zod and his flunkies trapped within in the previous films, but then we see her next on some desert alien landscape. If this big barren world is the Phantom Zone, why before did we only see the three Kryptonian criminals with their faces mashed up against it like a pane of glass?

The limbo-like Phantom Zone from the comics.

The Queen album cover Phantom Zone from Superman: The Movie

The wasteland Phantom Zone from Supergirl.

This was actress Helen Slater’s first movie role – an after-school special being her only other credit before this film – and she does remarkably well as the naïve young Supergirl, which considering the fact that she is facing off against the legendary Faye Dunaway is pretty damn impressive. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers didn’t quite have a handle on the character that they wanted her to depict. Is she here to save the world from an evil witch or to find her city’s lost power source and save her people? The script’s waffling of motivations keeps her character from being even remotely sympathetic, which Slater is certainly trying her best to pull off, and this is the key reason for the film doing so poorly at the box office and why we never got a sequel.

Is she a Superhero or a bloody Disney Princess?

Director Jeannot Szwarc was mostly known for his television work and feature films like Jaws 2 and Somewhere in Time, which didn’t quite prepare him for the big superhero fantasy genre. Thus particular superhero movie ended up being a muddled mess, one that just so happens to contain a couple of fun performances.

If Szwarc had been given a decent budget and a script that made even a lick of sense, this could have spawned another franchise, but instead, we got a movie that meandered for a little over two hours and then abruptly ended. Supergirl isn’t the worst superhero movie out there, but it is certainly guilty of wasting potential and is only worth checking out for nostalgic reasons.

“Supergirl, will you stop screwing around and just find that damn Omegahedron!”