Released: November 1984
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Rated PG
Run Time: 125 Minutes
Distributor: Tri-Star/Warner Bros.
Genre: Action/Fantasy
Cast:
Faye Dunaway: Selena
Helen Slater: Kara Zor-El/Supergirl
Hart Bochner: Ethan
Mia Farrow: Alura
Simon Ward: Zor-El
Peter O’Toole: Zaltar
Mar McClure: Jimmie Olsen
Peter Cook: Nigel
In the pantheon of DC superheroes, Superman reigns supreme as the original and most iconic superhero ever created. As the last survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, Kal-El a.k.a Superman, was sent to Earth by his father Jor-El. Over the years, DC comics has provided Superman not just with enemies like General Zod, Brainiac and Darkseid, but also with allies like Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and various other superheroes. One of those other superheroes was none other than Kara Zor-El, better known as Supergirl. She first appeared in 1959 as Superman’s cousin. The character has since become an important part of DC’s line-up of superheroes, in part because it shows that Superman wasn’t the only member of his family to survive Krypton’s destruction. Giving Superman someone that he can actually relate to gives the character a whole new dimension. Kara Zor-El has appeared in many stories in the DC universe over the past 60 years, both in print and in film. While the character can be seen in the most recent Supergirl tv series and several animated films, she had a bit of a rocky start in the films due to the 1984 live-action film starring Helen Slater.
Supergirl opens in the lost Kryptonian city of Argo as young Kara Zor-El is talking to Zaltar where he shows her the Omegahedron, a spherical object that powers the city. After using the Omegahedron to make a creature, the creature tears through a nearby window that sucks the Omegahedron through it. Using his magic wand(as it can only be described), Zaltar seals the breach, but is confronted by Zor-El, Kara’s father. Wanting to retrieve the Omegahedron, Kara steals a ship and takes off after the object. On Earth, a witch, Selena finds the sphere and decides to keep it for herself so she can rule the world. Oh, boy. The story here is pretty much non-existent aside from what I just described. The plot is so all over the place, you can scarcely figure out what’s going on. So, Kara shows up on Earth with the intent on saving her people from certain death, but she enrolls in a nearby school, despite the fact that she’s obviously smarter than everybody there. So much for urgency, I guess. The film’s villain, Selena is intent on dominating the world by…hypnotizing a local park worker. Right. There is no overall plot thread that should be tying all this shit together. Instead, what we’ve got is a bunch of random scenes that are just that….random. The story is an incoherent wreck. I like the fact that we get to see surviving Kryptonians, but after Kara leaves, we never see them again.
I have to give credit where it’s due. The casting in the film is really good. You’ve got legendary actors like Peter O’Toole and Faye Dunaway just hamming it up and Mark McClure returns as photographer Jimmie Olsen. The surprise here is Helen Slater as Supergirl. Even though Peter O’Toole and Faye Dunaway seem to know that they are in a bad movie, Helen plays it as straight as she can. This was the actor’s first movie and while her performance wasn’t revolutionary, it was very earnest and endearing in many ways. Peter O’Toole was a legend in the film industry before he died. I think he knew what kind of movie he was going to be in when he took on the project, so it looks like he’s having a blast. Faye Dunaway is something else here. I don’t hate her performance. In fact, I thought it was very entertaining. Faye plays the character so over-the-top that if the character had a mustache, she’d be twirling it with glee.
Let’s talk about the visual effects. I’ll be honest: There’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s happening here, visually. There is a scene in which a shadow demon is attacking the school that Kara’s attending, and the practical effects there are pretty decent. There’s a moment in which Kara grabs a light pole, charges it with lightening and beats the demon back with it. The effect is cheesy for sure, but it’s still pretty entertaining. The sequence that takes place in the Phantom Zone is actually pretty. We’ve never really seen what the Phantom Zone looks like until this movie, and it’s strange, but it still has an interesting look about it. The final confrontation at Selena’s castle is pretty nifty too. However, it’s all for nothing because the direction in this movie is really bad.
While I think that there is good stuff in this film, especially the music score by the late Jerry Goldsmith, I’m afraid that the bad stuff outweighs the good. While I enjoyed the performances from O’Toole and Dunaway, their talents are wasted here. There was also no reason for Kara to attend school on Earth, especially since the lives of her family and people were clearly at stake, but the film throws that out the window. Kara attending school almost killed the movie outright. It was slow, plodding and didn’t really go anywhere. I get that Helen’s character was a “fish-out-of-water” kind of character, so some of that was to be expected, but the school moments ground the movie to a halt. While some of the set designs were pretty cool, the costumes for the citizens of Argo City were terrible. Supergirl’s outfit was really the only good costume, and they got it right…except for the fact that she somehow has it when she gets to Earth. No explanation is given for how she gets that outfit. While I said that some of the visual effects were interesting, they weren’t very good. You have some very obvious blue-screen effects happening, especially in the last battle where Supergirl is being tortured by the demon. It’s awful. That being said, it’s still better than having the same shot of Supergirl flying at the screen over and over again. Not only that, the film ends pretty abruptly.
Personally, I would place Supergirl in the “so bad, it’s good” category. It is an objectively bad film. But it’s a film that did put forth some effort despite its low budget of $35,000,000. It’s very obvious. So…who do we blame for this mess? Is it the actors? No. Is it the director? Yes. What about the Salkinds, the producers? Yes. I don’t know how this movie got the green light. Jeannot is not the worst director in the world, but he wasn’t the right person to direct this film. If you’re going to do a film about a female superhero, I think you need a woman to direct it. I felt a slight undercurrent of misogyny in this film. The way that women are portrayed in this film isn’t particularly flattering, especially the teenagers. The character of Kara Zor-El is supposed to be a teenager, so that would have given teenage girls a superhero that they could identify with, but this movie completely butchers it and opts to rely on tired cliches, stereotypes, and sexism.
1984’s Supergirl was so poorly received that some people thought that it was partially responsible for Kara Zor-El being killed off in the comics in 1985 with the Crisis on Infinite Earths story-line. While there have been several Supergirls in the comics afterwards, Kara Zor-El wouldn’t return as Superman’s cousin until 2004. When your movie is bad enough to get a superhero killed in the comics, you really screwed up and Jeannot Szwarc screwed up big time. This is the kind of movie that would’ve killed a director’s career. Between Jaws 2 and this, Jeannot hasn’t directed a memorable movie since. In fact, he’s been relegated to TV shows. Is Supergirl worth checking out? I think it is, if only to see what kind of train-wreck it is, but it’s not entirely disposable. Helen Slater was perfect as Kara Zor-El and some of the effects and action sequences were okay.
My Final Recommendation: I sentence Jeannot Swarz and writer David Odell to the Phantom Zone for 5 years to think about what they’ve done. 5/10.