Watched: 07/19/2025
Format: HBO Max
Viewing: Unknown
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
With Superman 2025 out, it occurs to me it's been a while since I revisited some Super-Media - and I cannot tell you the last time I actually watched Supergirl (1984) from start to finish - ie: I always give up somewhere in the middle.
I always feel bad saying this, but the movie is a mess. And there's no one place to point the blame, but the culprit is neither Helen Slater nor Faye Dunaway. I don't know that you can even blame director Jeannot Szwarc, as this was the fourth Superman movie by the Salkinds, and he knew he was a hired gun. So, yeah, as with all things going wrong with the Super-movies from this era, I blame the Salkinds. But, without them, there would be no Superman: The Movie and Superman II. And likely without those movies, no Batman '89. And if none of that, then what...?
If you read the old blog, you might have read the first time I actually finished the movie (in 2009!). I mean, I remember being a teen and being *very* aware of Helen Slater as Supergirl, so I'd seen chunks of the movie. But... at some point after the first hour, things get kinda goofy with a love spell on a gardener dude of surprising depth, there's flying bumper cars, and an invisible monster (let's be honest, the Salkinds didn't want to pay for the monster).
Clearly Supergirl is a patchwork of what worked in Superman: The Movie - on a budget, a pretty surprising amount of stuff from the Supergirl comics, and a whole mess of random stuff they just kinda did. Like possessed construction equipment.
They repeat the idea of celebrity casting around an unknown, with Peter O'Toole, Mia Farrow, Dunaway... and I don't know how famous Peter Cook was in the US, Simon Ward or Brenda Vaccaro. But they all get seen on the poster as our universe of stars.
She has her original secret ID of Linda Lee, she has Argo City and living parents. And then there's Omegahedrons, witches, and all sorts of stuff.
On this viewing, I really enjoyed Faye Dunaway. Like, I get she's camping it up but she's not without menace as she gets a taste for power, power that she's always craved. And Brenda Vaccaro is funny in a way I didn't appreciate as a younger person.
But... magic is hard (see: Wonder Woman 1984). In the wrong story-telling hands, magic is just flipitty-dippity nonsense and makes narrative drama fall apart. If magic means anything can happen, it's a slippery slope to nothing mattering. And you can almost hear the producers saying to themselves "it's a comic! Anything can happen!" which is true, but plus, your audience is not wow'd, they're pushed further and further from suspension of disbelief.
Once you're allowing anything to happen without any emotional core to the story, you have a problem. And, weirdly, the script never gives Supergirl any intellectual or emotional depth to provide that core - that's given to our villains, but Supergirl exists as a sort of ethereal big-eyed faerie who is looking for her tchotchke. And it's not like there's not deep stakes at hand - we just never feel them.
Again - not Slater's fault. She can't help that she has terrific eyes, and was in her first gig, delivering the meager lines given to her. In another movie, this version of Kara is great. The folks who think she did anything less than the assignment don't get how movies work.
Anyway, Slater's Super connection is pretty solid. She went on to appear on Smallville as Lara in a flashback, and as Kara's adoptive mother on the long-running Supergirl TV show. She's written a story for a Supergirl comic. Clearly she embraces her place in the Super-mythos, and we salute her.
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