Panel Vision - Supergirl (1984)

So, it seems that CBS’ Supergirl has been a pretty major hit, scoring nearly 13 million viewers with its pilot episode making it the most watched superhero premiere of the modern era.  More than that the show has found a major following, gaining almost universally positive reviews from critics and a blossoming online fan base.  None of this is really shocking but it’s certainly a nice precedent to have and flies in the face of all conventional wisdom surrounding the superhero genre, the Superman franchise, and Supergirl in particular.  

For years now we’ve heard from the executives at DC and Marvel that people don’t want female superhero properties but now, we have Supergirl.  WB/DC have been shaking in their boots over Superman being too powerful or light to the point that they let Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan turn him into a drab and joyless husk to get beaten down by Batman in between murdering his enemies, but now we have Supergirl, light, super powered, optimistic, massively popular.  For nearly 30 years the very idea of Supergirl was considered to be a tainted and irredeemable brand, now; bigger than ever.  That last one though is a bit of an earned concern because, now having watched 1984’s Supergirl, I can tell you that it’s the worst superhero film ever made. 

On the off chance you think I’m exaggerating on this films flaws let me say that I actually tend to cut superhero films a lot of slack.  There are plenty of adaptations that I regard as abysmal like Fantastic Four (pick a version) or Batman & Robin that I can still find something to enjoy within the final film.  Supergirl ‘84 may also have a few merits but trust me when I say that its flaws bury any redeeming qualities in a bottomless hole of failure from which there is no escape but I’ll save that for later in the review.  The first major oddity around the film is how much it throws out the Supergirl mythos, in that it jettisons most of the elements of her origin save for a handful of plot points that somehow made it into the final draft.  At this point in the comics Supergirl had only ever had one origin, she was Superman’s cousin whose home of Argo City had survived Krypton’s destruction only to fall pray to kryptonite poisoning. 

That same origin is kind of here in the film only it’s been weirdly translated, now Argo City is some kind of escape vessel created by the scientist Zaltar, played by Peter O’Toole.  Zaltar has crafted the city using basically magic, seriously he has a literal wand that he can use to create trees and dragon flies and things and something called the Omegahedron that can grant life to his random creations and none of this is explained, simply mentioned in passing in the vein hope that you’ll follow along.  Eventually the Omegahedron gets knocked out of the city and onto Earth somehow, again it’s never really explained, and Kara is sent to go and retrieve it while Zaltar is imprisoned to the phantom zone for the crime of dooming his entire society because he wanted to make more trees that day. 

From there the movie doesn’t really have a plot so much as it has a series of quasi-connected conflicts that in no way add up to a greater whole.  The Omegahedron, which seems to be on par with one of the Infinity Stones in terms of universe altering powers, is discovered by a witch, because in the Supergirl universe witches are just a thing that exists.  Seriously, a huge chunk of the film is dedicated to Selena the power hungry witch and her friend/slave Bianca screwing around with magic in the weird, abandoned amusement park in which they, for some reason, live.  Incidentally Selena and Bianca are clearly an attempt to recreate the Luthor/Ottis dynamic from Superman even though that was always the worst part of any Superman movie.  They also both look like they were rejected from Hocus Pocus auditions.  There’s even a warlock character Selena was dating for his magic who also works as a mathematics teacher because apparently, in this world, witches and warlocks exist all around us and really love not using their powers for personal gain but rather taking up teaching positions. 

The whole movie is like this too; things that happen in the plot are just bluntly stated as brute fact with no explanations or development, as if you’re the weird one for wondering about them.  For instance, upon arriving on Earth Supergirl decides to join an all girl’s school even though she only has a few days to find the Omegahedron before her home and everyone she knows are destroyed forever.  While there, the film basically just changes genres into a whacky college comedy that happens to star Supergirl except that the requisite bully characters at the school are insane and only appear for two terrifying scenes.  First they show up playing lacross and trying to injure Supergirl’s roommate so badly that she’ll be forced into the hospital and then, when Supergirl stops them, they try to scald her and several other girls with boiling water.  These bullies are never dealt with by the way, Supergirl just foils their evil plan to commit bodily harm and they scamper off to probably plot more murders once Supergirl is gone. 

The closest thing to an actual plot the movie has is when Selena decides to use the godlike powers of the Omegahedron to make a dopey, stoner groundskeeper at Supergirl’s school fall in love with her.  This basically forces Supergirl and Selena into a battle of wits over the groundskeeper, so presumably Supergirl would’ve been happy to just live forever as a fake human at her all girl’s school had the plot not come to her.  The stuff with Supergirl “fighting” Selena is really weird too, mainly because the choreography and FX work is pretty abysmal.  The film actually looks great with a ton of top notch FX but they never find anything useful to do with them except for a crippling overreliance on trippy interdimensional portal scenes that might’ve been going for 2001: A Space Odyssey but come off far more Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  The choreography is the real problem though, especially because the script cannot come up with anything cool for Supergirl to fight.  The best example of this is an extended, mid-film “Action scene” where Selena sends an invisible monster after Supergirl and it plays like the worst cross between Forbidden Planet and Neverending Story. 

Eventually, thing sort of collapse into a third act.  They say Selena has been getting a better handle on the Omegahedron’s powers over the course of the film but there’s really no indication her powers have actually changed, mainly because they never explain what her powers actually are, but regardless around the 90 minute mark she decides to stop screwing around and just take over the small Wisconsin town in which the film takes place.  Incidentally I do mean that things “collapse” into the third act as it’s not like the plot threads come together or anything, events just sort of fall into each other to facilitate a big magic duel between Supergirl and Selena.  It’s another poorly choreographed fight scene that completely squanders Supergirl’s abilities and the film’s impressive effects capabilities though space Satan does show up for the end of it, giving it a direct connection to the Lex Luthor “Quest for the Black Ring” story arc from Action Comics a few years back. 

So far I’ve mainly focused on why Supergirl ’84 is weird and broken and pretty much just crazy but I haven’t gotten into why it’s so terrible, thankfully that can be summed up with one word: pacing.  This is one of the worst paced films ever made.  Every scene is shot so lazily, edited with so little energy, arranged into such a tedious slog that even though it’s only about 2 hours long it feels like it goes on for 1000 hours.  Every problem I mentioned above would be infinitely less annoying if any scene felt like it moved at all but every action takes 5X as long as it should and nothing interesting ever happens.  For instance, there’s one part where Supergirl flies into the sky with a lamp post so it can get hit by lightning and fry the invisible monster, now that’s a stupid scene but it might’ve worked if it happened at a reasonable speed but she spends upwards of 12 minutes on this action.  We see every step of her grabbing the pole, flying into the sky, collecting the lightning, and returning to the ground to zap the monster.  It’s like in Birdemic or Manos where the film inflicts hours and hours of tedious padding only here everything feels like padding. 

That’s why this is the worst superhero film you’ll ever sit through, because every other one at least moved at a decent pace.  Even the worst superhero films, stuff like The Spirit or Green Lantern actually moved, things happened in a pretty orderly fashion, events occurred and quickly too. Watching Supergirl ’84 is an absolutely deadening experience and a good example of how much bad pacing can absolutely kill even the craziest of films.  Remember, this is a movie whose climax is Supergirl fighting space Satan and they found a way to make that incredibly dull, if not for the pacing this movie would probably be remember as one of those terrible but weirdly compelling superhero films like Superman 4: Quest for Peace or Batman & Robin.  I in no way recommend this movie, even if you’re a fan of bad films or superhero films, it truly is the worst. 


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